Find Your Teachers

Thought of the day: GO FIND YOUR TEACHERS.

Dearest dear ones -

I was lucky enough to spend the day yesterday at the Emerging Women conference in San Francisco with my friend here, Brené Brown. I love Brene as a friend, because she is kind and honest and loyal and funny. But I also need her as a teacher.

What Brene has to teach me, through her books and talks on vulnerability and courage, is of vital and mind-altering importance to my life. I need what she is teaching. When I was growing up, I never learned how to have to the kind of emotionally honest (sometimes terribly frightening) conversations with myself and others that Brene teaches us to engage in.

The fact that I never learned all those skills as a child is not the fault of my parents; they never learned all those skills from their parents, either. My parents taught me literally everything they knew, but people cannot teach you what they do not know. People cannot give you what they themselves never had.

We all have gaps in our comprehenion of the world and we all have holes within ourselves, because we were all raised by people who had gaps in their comprehension, and holes in themselves, too. This is a story as old as time. Whether you came from a dysfunctional family or a (fairly!) functional one, you simply didn't get all that you needed. Nobody did.

This is why we all need great teachers.

There is a time in your life to mourn and grieve what you were not given as a child — and maybe even to compare yourself to other people you perceive as having been luckier than you. There is a time to process your pain, perhaps in a professional therapeutic setting, about how you wish life could have been, and what it cost you not to get what you needed. And then there comes a time in your life when you must stop mourning, and you must take accountability for going out there in the world and filling in your own gaps.

You must find your teachers.

I sit at the feet of so many wise people who have information that I do not have. Brene Brown is one of them. Also: Pema Chodron, Rob Bell, Iyanla Vanzant, the psychoanalists Adam Phillips and Pilar Jennings, the poets Walt Whitman, Mary Oliver and David Whyte, the late Richard from Texas, Ticht Nhat Hanh, Jack Kornfield, the long-dead mystics Rumi and Hafiz, and a few of my wisest personal friends whom you've never heard of — these are just a few of the faculty members of my university.  They can be yours, too...and there are more of them out there.

I say to my teachers (whether I ever meet them in person or not, and most of them I have not met): "Teach me. Walk me through this. Show me how you do that. Rub a little of your grace off on me. Give me exercises, and I will do them. Explain to me how it is. Reveal to me what you have learned. Show me how to fill in the parts of myself that I am missing."

It is my job to contiune being a student forever, because I am still figuring out how to live in this life, in this body, in this community of humans, at this moment in history.  I'm still working out the glitches in my own software, and still trying to grow.

It's your job to be a student, too — because the alternative is so dreadful. The alternative is to never stop saying, "Oh well, I didn't get what I needed in life," and to just surrender into self-pity and stagnation, and to never go looking for what you need. And that would be a great shame, because what you need can still be found. You have a human mind that is incredibly elastic, and still capable of learning and healing.

Go looking, then.

It's out there, you guys. Find your teachers, and learn from them. They are accessible and available. It's not too late.

ONWARD,
LG