Learning the Language of Awareness

When we met earlier in the day, the first day of the week-long supervision visit, Margarita's eyes glistened as she told me how glad she was that we were working together this week as part of her Teaching Practicum. In our opening conversations she ventured, "I've always been interested in awareness and I really want to learn more about it during this week." Margarita had read my faculty biosketch in the catalog of university where she is a master's degree student and I am an Associate Professor. Along with the fact that she knew I taught Vipassana meditation at the university and in the community, she had found in the catalog that reflectivity was my specialization. I have been working with awareness in education since 1978. Phrases like Only awareness is educable, The mind teaches the brain, and You are your own best resource, coined by Caleb Gattegno in the early 70's, had shed a new light on the landscape of classrooms where I attempted to teach students another language. In fact, those three phrases remained persistent koans for the next ten years of my teaching career.

In 1986, I sat my first silent seven-day Vipassana retreat, and a new path -- the path of mindfulness as taught in the Theravada Buddhist tradition -- showed me another way to work on the development of awareness. The word Vipassana is a word in Pali, one of the languages spoken at the time of the Buddha, which means "to see things clearly." My teacher, Joseph Goldstein, quoted his teacher, Munindra-ji who had said, "If you want to understand the mind, sit down and watch it" and in the watching will come the ability to see things as they are, to accept things as they are, and from that place of understanding and acceptance, to respond in a way that serves and does not harm oneself or others.

Since that first retreat, daily sittings and numerous silent retreats from a weekend to six weeks" duration, as well as a recent two-year training in teaching the Dharma, have extended the depth and breadth of my practice. But in essence, it is still about just sitting down and watching the mind, as Munindra-ji so aptly said. And this level of investigation has, over time, spilled over into daily life so that awareness guides my being in the world and allows me to see and understand the multiple phenomena that occur on a daily basis on and off the cushion.

The train glides over the tracks, rounding a curve and jostling the passengers from side to side. Margarita's long curly hair streams down her back and across her face as she glances over her lesson plan for tonight's class. Although she is taller, younger and seemingly stronger than I am, I sense a palpable fragile quality about her. As is usual at the beginning of a supervision visit, I wonder how to best work with this teacher who is also a graduate student in a Master of Arts in Teaching program. What will be an effective and useful approach to Margarita that will create the circumstances of learning for her both as a human being and as a teacher?

"Remember when you told me this morning that you were interested in working on awareness?" I ask.

Margarita looks up. "Oh, yes. It's something I really want to integrate more into my teaching. I think it will benefit my students greatly."

"Then tell me about your experience with awareness in your life. Is there anything in particular that has helped you develop awareness up to this point?"

"Well, just as you said that, I saw in my mind's eye the day my father was shot and killed by a convicted man. I was only five years old at the time. My mother threw herself down on the kitchen floor, screaming and crying. From that day on, I knew I had to be aware of what Mami was feeling. I needed to know when to take care of her so that she would be able to take care of me. She suffered terribly over his death -- it seems like her grief lasted my whole childhood. Even now, my family still does not talk of that day. No one will talk about why the man shot my father or how it was that my father also shot and killed the convicted man."

I feel a lump in my throat and the impulse to hold the little girl who does not understand what is happening in her world, but I don't know Margarita very well, so I just sit still and breathe. Margarita shifts in her seat and brushes her hair back off of her face, a gesture that I come to know as a signature of her mind lost in thought. Her eyes have a far-off look as she stares blankly at the empty seats across the aisle in this German train. Then she continues.

"That day was the beginning of a visceral awareness of the violence that surrounded us in the countryside of Colombia. It was necessary to listen very carefully for any movements in the trees or bushes, to get out of the line of fire in case there was a guerrilla attack. In many ways I feel guilty for not staying in my country and trying to do something to stop the violence that cripples our society and harms children mentally and physically from an early age. But I am just so grateful to be here in Germany where I feel safe. Here I know no one will harm me."

The magnitude of her suffering pierces my heart and mind. No graduate student has ever responded so directly and ardently to my getting-to-know-you questions. As the train approaches the next station and begins to slow down, I search for something to say that will let Margarita know that I have connected to her suffering. But the doors of the train suddenly open and Margarita stands up to exit at this stop. I follow her out into the dark night.

As I sit in Margarita's classes during the next five days of intensive supervision, she faces many situations in her classroom where she senses something is not quite right in relation to her teaching, the students or the curriculum, and then she seems to label it as dangerous in her mind. Then she feels fear in relation to what she has labeled as dangerous. The conditioning of her life history has quite understandably worn a pathway to fear of being out of control and then to an inability to know how to respond.

An example of her mind at work, as described above, happens in one of her classes on the first day of the supervision visit. Herr Kruger, a seventy-year-old man who is passionate about learning Spanish, still gets stuck on verb tenses when he speaks, even though he has tested into an upper-intermediate Spanish class. He says things like "I didn't go to Spain tomorrow because my wife shouldn't buy the tickets." His fractured grammar and relatively aggressive adult learning style -- i.e., let me tell you how I want to learn Spanish -- get Margarita rattled. She pauses in class, her eyes darting. She keeps talking both in Spanish and in German in order to stay in control of Herr Kruger and the whole class. The energy in the room drops. Everyone stares at the open pages in their books. It seems as though the minute hand on the large clock over the blackboard plods along at a painstakingly slow pace.

At the end of class, Margarita walks toward me at the back of the classroom and says, "OK, it wasn't the worst lesson of my teaching career, but it was close. And now I'm not sure I want you here. I felt so terrified. It was all out of my control and I knew it but I couldn't stop talking, I just couldn't change it even though I knew how badly it was going. I froze up inside, I just froze." She holds her eyes off to the left to avoid my gaze. A slight wince is held around her mouth and between her teeth.

I wonder how to reach her to communicate the compassion I feel for her fear and suffering. "Yes, it was a painful two hours for you and for the students," I say quietly, measuring my words. "And there were some great moments too within the pain. We can look at it all together and talk about where to go next."

When she hears the word "together," her eyes snap back and lock into mine. I see a ray of hope there, a moment of awareness that she can face the darkness with someone else and it may not be so difficult.

So, during the next four days, we sit for hours at a time in hot cafes, in cold classrooms, in student cafeterias, in the breakfast room at my hotel, and we talk. I show her the notes I have taken during her classes. In these classroom observation notes, I have recorded what I see her doing and what I see her students doing and how they respond to one another in the left-hand column. And in the right-hand column, I put a lot of questions like "What do you think the twenty-somethings were whispering about? When do they stay engaged? When do they space out?" There are also evaluative comments like "This part went really well -- lots of energy and enthusiasm. I could see learning happening." And then there are suggestions like, "You might try X technique in situations like this -- ask me if you want to know more."

Margarita pores over these notes like an avid reader with the latest best seller. She can't get enough of the mirror being held before her where she feels another has accepted her in all her naked truth. In this mirror, she can begin to see more clearly herself, her students, and the situations in her classroom. Reading the notes, reflecting on her work, she can take a step back and not immediately label situations as dangerous and fearful. She slowly learns not to identify so readily with her successes and failures. She can begin to investigate, to look beneath her actions for the reasons that drive them, and to look more closely at her students and their learning. The process we undertake is not unlike what I explained earlier as the process of Vipassana meditation, only it is undertaken together in dialogue in the midst of the working world. Through the notes, through looking at the mirror, and through supportive, reflective dialogue about her students, their learning and her teaching, Margarita can begin to see things as they are, to accept them as they are, and from that place of clearer understanding and acceptance, to respond in a way that serves and does not harm herself or others.

At the end of the week, we sit across the table from one another in a small German restaurant, feeling shelter from the cold November wind outside. All of the other customers leave at about two o'clock and the waitress gives us permission to stay at the table and work for another hour or two.

We go through the formal evaluation of the week, assessing Margarita's strengths and areas for improvement. Margarita writes her version and I write mine. Then we each read our sections out loud to one another. Margarita reads first. She wants to begin with the areas for improvement. Amidst pedagogical, technical and professional assessments, Margarita also includes goals that are personal and spiritual. "I need to continue to explore and understand the nature of my fears in order to allow my own strength to develop and grow," she affirms. Similarly, in the areas for improvement, she observes, "I need to learn to balance involvement and detachment" and "I seek to learn how to take care of myself in order to take care of the students and their learning."

When we get to the strengths part, Margarita has listed only three, in comparison to the fourteen areas for improvement she has listed. But they are three very fundamental strengths for a teacher. The first one has to do with her commitment to teaching and learning, the second with her knowledge of the subject matter. She lists the final strength this way, "I am a self-aware individual who strives to develop this capacity further."

As I listen to her verbalize these intentions, I feel that our week of work has been well spent. We have connected to mindfulness and awareness, to wisdom and compassion, in everyday life.