holding space while falling apart
on teaching the map while i'm still finding my way
i just finished teaching a weekend of self inquiry at omega institute while navigating one of the deepest depressions of my life.
the irony was not lost on me.
for three days, i stood in front of a room asking people to turn toward themselves while quietly wondering how much of myself i could bear to be with.
somewhere in the back of my mind, that old phrase kept circling:
those who can’t do, teach.
i used to hear it as an accusation.
this weekend, i started to wonder if there was another way to understand it.
maybe we don’t always teach from the other side of something.
maybe sometimes we teach from inside it.
~
in the days leading up to the retreat, i kept wondering whether it was appropriate to hold space for others while struggling so profoundly to hold myself.
there is a particular mythology we have built around teachers, therapists, facilitators, healers, coaches ~ the people who stand at the front of rooms and talk about being human.
we want them to have arrived somewhere.
we want the person teaching us about grief to have finished grieving. the person teaching us about the body to always feel at home inside theirs. the person teaching self-inquiry to have found some final, stable self.
and maybe, secretly, the people standing at the front of the room want that too.
because it would be much easier to teach from the other side.
this is what i went through.
this is what i learned.
here is the map.
but what happens when you are still inside the territory?
what happens when you wake up, put your feet on the floor, and have to practice the very thing you will be speaking about three hours later?
i thought about canceling.
not because i believed depression made me incapable of facilitating, but because i was afraid there was something dishonest about it.
who am i to guide people toward themselves when i am struggling to locate myself?
who am i to speak about listening to the body when mine feels impossibly heavy?
who am i to speak about shame when i feel crippled by it?
who am i to talk about relationship, choice, awareness, curiosity, when some mornings the most sophisticated practice available to me is getting out of bed?
and then i arrived at omega.
