Teaching with Bravery

          Over lunch three ninth-graders were discussing a hypothetical:  If you could live in any time and meet any one person who has ever lived, whom would you choose to meet?  Emma answered quickly, “The Buddha.”  Dave thought a moment, then smiled and said, “Louis Armstrong.”  William was pensive at first, and then said softly, “I’d like to meet my mother.” 

          Perhaps, like me, you find each of these answers surprising and touching in different ways, and you can probably identify with each of them on some level.  We all have a longing to know something profound and compassionate, something creative and beautiful, and above all something authentic in our lives.  There is tenderness in this longing.  It carries a hint of delight, but also one of sadness.  Longing feels like our heart pulling us to reconnect.  We yearn to come home to something we have known but do not feel is complete and present in our lives now.  If we didn’t know it somewhere within us, we wouldn’t long for it.  We long because we have a heart.  

          This kind of longing is very different from the wants and cravings that run through our heads on the daily.  Our minds constantly generate all kinds of desires for things outside of ourselves.  We imagine and project that the next thing—the next cup of coffee, the next lover, the next app, the next affirmation, the next job well done—will be the one that satisfies us, but the wanting goes on and on.  It ebbs and flows, but is ultimately insatiable.  This wanting is really a proxy for our deeper longing to feel content within our own being.  We would like to be at home in our lives.

          It’s like hearing the echo of our own humanity.  Deep down we know ourselves to be whole, not broken.  We know ourselves to be alive, not numb.  Yet somehow, wandering the roads of life, we have become disconnected from something fundamental.  Our wish to return to it pulses within us. 

          In the Shambhala tradition, that fundamental aliveness is known as basic goodness. It is the natural, innate wisdom of all people. It’s called basic goodness because it is the base, the foundation of our experience.  In spite of all our confusion, goodness is the undaunted core of our humanity.  Teachers often have an intuitive sense of this natural goodness.  We can see it manifest in our students in the moments when their light shines through, expressive and unobstructed.  In a student’s simple, unplanned smile or in a child’s spontaneous stroke of yellow paint, we see little hints of their unadorned humanity.  When a shy student raises her hand we might see a flash of that simple tenderness just before we call on her. 

          Our appreciation of those moments reveals our own basic goodness.  There is a spark of total joy when we release our personal agenda and open to others.  When we hear, see or touch our world, feeling its textures directly, we find our own heart in a moment.  We are reconnecting with the primal openness that is the base of our humanity.  It is completely nonconceptual, and cannot be fully described with words.  It’s also completely ordinary. The simple feeling of life in each moment—the sudden coolness of a glass of ice water on a summer day, the whiteness of a cloud, the swatch of red color we see where the billboard paper is torn away—contains a fullness, a freshness.  You can see this experience in the face of a young child when he looks at his world, seeing a flower or a tree, perhaps for the very first time.  We may no longer experience the world in that fresh and pure way, yet the capacity is still within us.  We could call it the innocence principle.  Whether we are young or old, it is our nature as human beings. 

          The vision of basic goodness represents a profound shift. It prioritizes humanity ahead of outcomes, policies, money, or theory. Recently my friend Nikki told me a story of her experience as a nurse.  She does home-care with children who are dependent on life-sustaining apparatuses and who can’t communicate.  Nikki said it was clear to her that although the children were unresponsive, they were aware.  She began to practice speaking to them and relating to them directly.  It felt essential to her to put their humanity first.  Many of the other nurses, she said, assumed the children were unaware, and would only relate to the machines—checking their settings, making adjustments, and then checking their smartphones before leaving.  The response of the parents to Nikki’s way of being with their children was dramatic.  They called her an angel, and felt incredible gratitude to her for honoring their children as human beings.  Before we are teachers, we are human beings.  Before we are students or parents, successes or failures, we are human beings. Simple as this truth may be, the symptoms in our culture indicate that as a society we’ve lost track of something essential.  We have underestimated and downgraded what it means to be human.  Now is the time to restore humanity to the center of our lives and our culture.