Do you know who your life teachers are? You know some of them certainly. Think of the people within your life, often in quite close contact with you, whom you have developed an animosity towards.
These are some of your life teachers. Would like to extend them a thanks, in the same way you might thank a childhood classroom teacher that taught you some important lesson or another?
Your life teachers have given you a far more important lesson that any classroom teacher has. The difference is that you may have internalized, at some point, the lesson of a classroom teacher, where you very likely have not internalized the lessons your life teachers have attempted to provide.
Let me clarify what I mean when I refer to life teachers. These are sources that, through word and deed, have pushed you to come to recognize your authentic self. To put it another way, they have tried to move you from ego control and identification to the pure consciousness that you actually are.
They are trying to wake you up. But they aren’t doing it consciously…
Most life teachers are not making an intentional effort to bring you around to your pure self. They are, in most cases, just as non conscious as you are. So they are operating from an unconscious agreement to help you.
All life teachers, essentially, teach the same lesson. It is the lesson of the reed in the storm.
I heard spiritualist Deepak Chopra explain this. A mighty oak tree stands rigid in a storm, but if the storm is particularly violent or enough storms come along the mighty oak will eventually crack, and break.
The wispy reed appears much less mighty than the oak, but it remains intact during the storms that ultimately break apart the oak. Why? The reed is flexible. It sways in the turmoil of the storms — it moves with the violence of the storms instead of standing rigidly firm — and the reed’s willingness to go with the flow allows it to survive each storm that comes along.
Your life teachers provide the storms. Sometimes the storms they bring are tsunamis. Most people will incessantly push against the force of these storms. This is ego response, and is unconsciousness. Some people will, eventually, learn to sway with the storms — perhaps they are broken first by the storms before they learn to sway, perhaps not.
It doesn’t matter either way.
Being broken by the storm is acceptable, sometimes even necessary, to remind the reed that it is a reed and not an oak, and that this is not just okay — it is ideal.
You may not be able to thank your life teachers directly — the lessons they teach may yet feel too painful — but if you’re able to recognize that they have, in fact, helped to move you towards enlightenment then consciousness within you is certainly emerging.
