Anxiety under authority: the teacher problem.

The guru (the teacher) is one subject about which I thought I had very little to say. I've always had a problem with authority figures and I think of myself as being resistant to guidance -- sort of.  I don't follow too well, not even on the dance floor.  My mode of learning is more uneasy assimilation from odd and differing sources than adherence to a system, theory, idea, person, animal, whatever.  At least that's the way I see myself.

And here I am, in Buenos Aires, spending the months of July and August.  With my husband.  Studying Spanish with the gifted teacher Martha Berman.  And I'm feeling sad that my home yoga studio in Brooklyn is closing and my relationship with both my yoga teachers (Jonathan Fitzgordon and Marissa Nielsen Pincus) will be strained, interrupted or disturbed in some way.  And I'm over 60 and that's an advanced age, perhaps, to be so involved with teachers, especially for someone who balks at external discipline. 

And I think back to some of the wonderful, nurturing and inspiring teachers I've had in my life:  from high school English teacher Jesse Troupe, who not only got those of us in advanced classes to stretch ourselves but also took over the senior remedial reading class and got half of those students to apply for college, to my university and grad school art professors Clare V. Dorst and Vincent Longo.  All of them were able to give something individual to me as a student and they're all part of my thought and reaction patterns.

I still believe that the real learning takes place through assimilation and it's the mixing of forces and elements (internal and external) that make up the process of learning.  When I frame my daily yoga process on my laughably inadequate travel mat and soar into my handstands, that seem so much more fraught at home I think about my teachers.  And I hear Marthas voice in my dreams sometimes, correcting my Spanish.  And I think about the process of teaching and learning.

I'll never be a disciple and wouldn't want to be.  But I see a lot of stuff that's not just me when I look myself in the eye.

Drawing from DayBooks.

Comments

[Andrea]

Lovely, Sharon!