Who are your unexpected teachers?
Susan Grandfield • 1 April 2021
(and what treasure do they have for you?)
Who have been your teachers?
You might notice your mind taking you back to school and recalling the slightly eccentric maths teacher, the strict French teacher or the good looking art teacher (perhaps just me!) you had years ago. Or perhaps your piano teacher, football coach, dance teacher or driving instructor comes to mind.
They have all taught you something, for sure. But what about all the other teachers in your life?
The many, many other people who have offered you the opportunity to learn something new or see things from a different perspective. Whether you took that opportunity and gained that new perspective is a different matter but the point is they appeared in your life at a time when there was something new for you to discover.
Treasure.
That’s what was yours to discover - the treasure, the gold, the gifts of life that have the potential to transform or change the course of your life.
Treasure comes in so many different forms and mostly not in a big wooden chest with a large bass padlock! Sometimes the treasure is subtle. So subtle that you miss it if you are not looking for it but it is no less powerful than the big bars of gold.
I would like to suggest to you that the treasure that means the most and has the most transformative effect is the treasure that we miss or that we catch a glimpse of and then disregard. That treasure often comes from the most surprising sources.
Everyone can teach us something about ourselves.
How people respond to us, how people behaviour around us, what people expect of us and how we feel around them are all offers of wonderful treasure.
In my experience, the people who we find most frustrating or who irritate us are often our best teachers! They are mirroring back to us something that we can learn about ourselves.
Here are some examples you may recognise in yourself:
- Someone who is opinionated and always needs to have the last word in an argument may be mirroring back your need to be heard more.
- Someone who sees the worst case scenario and brings a pessimistic tone to a conversation may be mirroring back your fears about the future.
- Someone who wants to be the leader and makes plans on everyone’s behalf may be mirroring back your desire to step up more and take control.
- Someone who sits quietly and doesn’t engage with the group may be mirroring back your longing for solitude.
Do any of these resonate?
Can you identify your own version of these?
Choose someone in your life that you have a difficult relationship with or who has ways of being that rub you up the wrong way and bring to mind what it is that irritates you or frustrates you about them. Now turn that around and look at yourself through that lens. When do you do that? How does that show up in your behaviour or thinking?
At first you might not notice it (or accept it!) but if you are willing to see it, it is highly likely that the thing you see in someone else is something that is present in you as well and THAT
is the treasure. They have been your teacher. They have mirrored back to you in such a beautiful way something that you may not have seen in yourself. It is not always easy to accept but all you need to do right now is take this first step to see that there is treasure there for you.
Noticing that has allowed me to be more accepting of others and to allow them to be exactly as they are. I used to want people to be different so that I would feel better around them but I realise that would mean I miss out on so much wonderful treasure. So now, I am grateful and appreciative of them and understand why they are in my life.
They are all my teachers.
What do you need help with?
Part 4 - the way forward In this final part of the series, we are looking at the way forward. What does this awakening mean and how do we stay on the path that we’ve started to walk down?
This is an invitation to be curious about the freedom that comes from finally letting go of the need to fit in, to embrace how you see the world and how you want to approach life and the ripple effect that can have on the lives of those around you. It is all about self-acceptance and allowing.
The struggle of an idealist in a world of pessimists, pragmatists and realists is that at times it can feel very lonely, like we’re sitting on the edge of the crowd not being invited into the conversation. Everyone is looking in one direction and when we point out that there is another direction they could look in we feel dismissed, not heard and ridiculed for romantic notions about the world. But it doesn't have to feel that way.
Idealist: “Someone who believes that very good things can be achieved, often when this does not seem likely to others”. Rather than hiding away, agreeing with others, making myself wrong for holding a more hopeful view of the world or criticising myself for being naïve I backed myself and stood behind my beliefs.
We are under the misapprehension that we need to push ourselves outside our comfort zone if we really want to experience life and be successful. But that is not true. Finding our way back to our comfort zone is a vital part of experiencing life with more ease, enjoyment and freedom.
The reality of life is that we forget and fall into the predictable traps of the ego and its susceptibility to the outside world but that finding our way back to inner peace and stability comes from remembering that our experience is created from the inside.
We are incredibly talented at creating fictitious stories about ourselves and going through life without editing them, updating them or realising we can actually re-write them. Discovering how quickly life can change when you start to pay attention to your stories.
We begin this adventure of a lifetime as wide open, expansive, creative, loving, curious and innately wise little beings full of possibility, potential and optimism. But through our experience of interacting with others and the world around us we, unconsciously, wrap ourselves up in patterns of behaving and thinking which serve to protect us from the perceived risk of following that childlike energy. Now is the time to "unwrap" those protective layers and reconnect with who we really are.
Experimenting is fundamentally about trying things out and not being attached to a particular outcome. It is about giving things a go and learning from whatever happens. There is a real freedom in approaching things with an experimental mindset and I believe it can be brought to all aspects of our lives.
Like me, are you also someone who tends to plan moments of bliss rather than allow them to happen?
Ridiculous as that may sound, I realise that when I am in my familiar environment doing familiar and routine activities I tend to plan for moments of bliss or joy to happen sometime in the future, when all of the things I need to do have been done. I am discovering the possibility of experiencing moments of bliss at any time and without the preplanning.
