Care and Feeding
of the Teacher
Self-care is essential for a long and happy physical life, and it’s equally vital for a long, happy, successful Pagan teaching career. Strong ethics and boundaries provide a great foundation for self-care, but there are a lot of additional things teachers can do—and in some cases should do—to keep themselves physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy while they are teaching. I have been teaching on and off for two decades, and whenever I have slacked off in any of the areas on the self-care list below, it has had a negative impact on my efficacy as a teacher. Do as I say and not as I do (did). Teacher, heal thyself!
I’ve divided the information below into long-term self-care—the preventive stuff you can do to try to keep yourself healthy and ward off problems—and short-term self-care—some ideas for how to recover from more acute situations where you need help now and the long-term stuff will take too long. If you follow the ideas in the long-term care, you should be able to significantly reduce the chances you’ll end up in one of those acute situations, but, as we all know, the universe doesn’t always follow our carefully laid plans.
Long-Term Self-Care
Find and Stick to Your Core
Your core is your purpose—your true will—and whatever connects you to it. Your core drives and fuels everything you do, to one extent or another, and it influences your will to teach and your teaching philosophy. It might or might not be tied to your spirituality, but for many Pagans the two seem to be intertwined, if not one and the same.
When you’re busy teaching, working, doing the laundry, raising a family—just plain living—it’s easy to lose touch with your core and forget why you’re doing all this stuff in the first place. But your core is what nourishes you and makes everything else possible, so you need to reconnect to it regularly to stay in harmony with your purpose.
It’s important to take time out from the daily grind to discover what reconnects you to your core. It might be that you need to spend more time by water or in nature. You might reconnect through meditation, physical activity, talking to loved ones, or music. The mechanism is different for everyone, so you’ll need to discover it for yourself. And there might be more than one way for you to do it. Almost all of the methods above work for me.
Once you know what helps you find your core, make time to do it as regularly as you need to in order to keep in touch with your will. This might feel selfish, since you’re taking precious time away from something else, but in fact it’s not. You will function better and be happier if you are connected, and that will have a positive impact on the other areas of your life. You should not think of this as optional or unimportant. It is probably one of the most important things you can do.
Once you are connected, examine or re-examine why you started teaching. Look at how (or if) teaching is related to your true will. Remembering why you do this important work and how it supports your true will can help inspire you to be a great teacher and help you find the motivation to kick exhaustion, burnout, and a host of other problems.
Nurture Your Personal Practice
If you’re teaching Paganism, chances are you are (gasp!) a Pagan, which means you have some path or tradition or ritual that you follow to express and experience your Paganism. It’s very easy to neglect your own personal practice when you’re helping others find theirs; it seems like there is never enough time for both. But you need to make time. Keeping in tune with your own spirituality and keeping up on what’s going on in the community make you a stronger, more effective teacher.
I asked several of my interviewees if they had been taught to teach. T. Thorn Coyle discussed her various teachers but ended her statement with this: “Above all, though, daily spiritual practice is my teacher.”
Your personal practice also provides you with the space to continue making your own spiritual discoveries and communing with your gods. You are not expecting your students to be static, and neither should you be. Being open to spirit makes teaching from your core easier and more rewarding, and it can help keep you on track too. Christopher Penczak commented:
Really be open to the service of teaching, be open to guidance. Be able to work with spirit as you teach. That’s the most important thing to me.
In addition, your spirituality nourishes you, and you need that nourishment to help others find their way. Plus, if your gods are anything like mine and you ignore them for too long, or if you act all hypocritical by teaching others Paganism but neglecting the gods yourself, they’ll give you a cosmic boot to the head to get your attention. (As a result of my considerable experience on the receiving end of the divine boot to the head, I can attest that the gods really, really don’t like hypocrisy.) A boot to the head from the gods is no laughing matter, so I encourage you to keep up your spiritual practice, even if it’s just to avoid divine heel marks on your forehead.
Get a Change of Scenery
As I’ve mentioned already, we all get wound up in our daily lives and stuck in ruts. As spiritual people and teachers, however, it’s important that we break free sometimes from the day-to-day so we can meet new people, get new information, or simply look at our lives from a different perspective. If we are not dynamic and constantly seeking new information and experiences, we become static—and boring—people and teachers. And we’re much less likely to have these new experiences and insights if we rush like rats through a maze in the same pattern every single day. It’s sometimes said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results. When I feel like I’ve gotten myself stuck in a cycle of sameness, I know I need a change of scenery to rejuvenate and find inspiration.
For me, physically getting away from the places I see every day—my office, my home, my neighborhood—and going somewhere, anywhere else, whether it be in my own city or far away, is essential for sticking to my core and keeping the teaching spark alive. There is absolutely nothing like travel—even inexpensive, short-term travel—to reset your clock, so to speak; to give you time to take a breath and think about the world a little differently. Recently I saved up some money and took a solo trip to Crete. Wandering among the ruins of Knossos and Gournia and climbing down into the Dictaean Cave—places of power with a long spiritual history—reconnected me to the earth and the gods. And traveling around the island, talking to complete strangers and trying to speak a little Greek, gave me a peek at a lifestyle very different from own, which in turn gave me insight into my own world. A trip to Crete is expensive and probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing, but I have found that I can get similar benefits from simply leaving the city and going anywhere that is different enough from the places I see every day to allow me time and space to pause and reflect.
If travel isn’t your thing, you don’t need to go somewhere to get a change of scenery. Taking a class or volunteering with people you don’t know can also give you a fresh perspective. The skills you learn and the people you meet can help you look at your life in a different way. The idea is to break your usual pattern, not spend a lot of money. And if the class or volunteer work is related to something you love, then you’re feeding your core too.
I encourage you to do these things for yourself—this chapter is about care and feeding of the teacher, after all, and I want to emphasize that self-care without the thought of your students is essential—but you can also do something to get a change of pace with your students. Just make sure you’re also doing solo work. In Washington State, the Aquarian Tabernacle Church holds an event each year called the Spring Mysteries, where they re-create the rites of Demeter and Persephone that were held at Eleusis in Greece. As part of the event, the organizers build shrines to the Greek gods. Three or four times my husband and I have gone with our students to help build shrines and experience the mysteries together. The process of planning, getting the materials for the shrines, decorating, and then experiencing the space we helped create in ritual not only gave each of us individual insights and fresh ways to look at our personal spirituality, but it also gave us some rich shared experiences to bond us as a group.
Find a Mentor
Everyone needs support, especially new teachers. When you go to formal teacher school and learn how to teach elementary or secondary students, you student teach for at least a semester with a trained, experienced teacher. It shouldn’t be any different for Pagan teachers, but it usually is. If you can’t turn to your own teacher for support, or if you didn’t have one, consider finding people in the community who can mentor you and answer questions, or who you can “shadow” by watching or participating in their class to learn how they teach. Don’t be afraid to ask for this kind of help. Your students will benefit from you sticking your neck out to get answers. Melanie Henry commented:
Ideally you have someone at whose feet you can sit for a while to model, so you can sort of student teach. At the very least, have someone you can ask questions of, and don’t be embarrassed. I started out by being embarrassed when I had questions. Please ask your questions of somebody, because nobody knows everything, especially when you first get started. It’s okay not to know everything. The more I do, the less I realize I know.
You don’t have to meet your mentor in person, either. Online will do in a pinch.
Take on a Physical Practice
One of the things I highly recommend, both for self-care and for keeping connected to your core, is taking on a physical spiritual practice such as tai chi, yoga, or sacred dance. I have been doing tai chi for about fifteen years and dance on and off longer than that. Both practices greatly enhance my understanding of energy and how it moves through and with the body and how the physical and spiritual worlds connect. There’s something about picking up my tai chi sword, moving it through the air, and feeling the energetic connection between the tip and my dantien (the energy center behind and slightly below the navel) that makes it seem like my world is in harmony. Or maybe I’m just happier when I’m holding a weapon. Anyway, I’m not alone in this opinion. T. Thorn Coyle appears to derive a great deal of her spirituality from physical practice. I asked her where her teaching comes from:
My teaching is informed by my practice, the way my mind and heart put things together, my understanding from the Gurdjieff Work, Sufism, Buddhism, and mysticism. It also is informed by my own guides and the particular syncretism of my path, which includes emphasis on the body and physical health and engagement.
If the spiritual benefits aren’t enough, physical practice is also therapeutic and great exercise. Both of these make me feel better, which in turn helps me with everything else I do, including teaching. I feel so strongly about physical practice that I make my students choose and do a physical practice too (and they do, with a lot of grumbling and eye rolling).
Get a Life
It’s very easy to get wrapped up in teaching and allow friendships and your social life to slip away. But friends are essential to your mental health. Having fun and laughing with friends is one of the strongest antidotes I have ever found to burnout and other teacher problems. As I said before, you shouldn’t be relying on your students for social or emotional support. There are cases in which they might help you—especially if you are more or less peers or you were friends before you became teacher and student—but you really need a group of non-student peers who can support you, help you problem-solve, and make you get out of the house and do something frivolous and fun, just for yourself. It’s important to have hobbies and interests that are your own and separate from your students too. This helps you retain your sense of personal identity and keeps you engaged with the world outside of teaching.
Don’t Beat Yourself Up
Teachers can be their own worst critics. We know how important teaching is for our students and our community, and we want to do it well, so we are very hard on ourselves when we mess up. But teachers who are self-flagellating over a mistake aren’t focused on what they need to be focused on: their students.
It’s important that you treat yourself with the same compassion you show your students, or you’re not going to last long as a teacher. You will make lots of mistakes, and you won’t have the time or energy to beat yourself up over every single one. Besides, while you’re wasting time doing that, you’re missing out on everything else that’s going on in your class, both good and bad.
Anne Marie Forrester commented: “Be kind to yourself. It’s not always going to go perfectly.” Don’t invest the mistake with more power by dwelling on it. Own it, apologize if necessary, learn from it, and move on.
There is an easy cure for beating-yourself-up syndrome, but it’s not a pleasant one: simply make a really huge mistake and survive it. Making a mistake and realizing that the world isn’t going to end as a result gives you a much healthier perspective. As Pete “Pathfinder” Davis pointed out, “You know, we learn best from blisters and scars.”
Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously
As I’ve said, teaching is sacred work. But that doesn’t mean that it always has to be serious work. Allow yourself to find joy and humor in your situation, your students, and even your mistakes. We all know that “with great power comes great responsibility,” but don’t think that because you’re a teacher and you’re in charge that you have to be serious and authoritative and suppress your natural personality. One of the great things about teachers is how diverse they are. They come from different backgrounds, different perspectives; each has something unique to offer. Don’t stuff everything that makes you different to fit some sort of ideal you hold in your head of what a perfect teacher should be. Christopher Penczak told me how he learned not to take himself too seriously:
In an effort to illustrate not taking yourself too seriously, in one class healing ritual, I accidently set my long hair on fire…. I wasn’t hurt. It went out, and I don’t think anybody really noticed, but hey, I learned to laugh at myself after that.
Get Out While the Getting’s Good
Sometimes, no matter what you do, the desire to teach is extinguished, and it isn’t going to come back. In these cases, the right self-care to administer is often to decide you’re done teaching and retire. There’s no shame in that. Teachers are just people, after all, and people’s lives, interests, and needs change.
If you think you’re in this situation, don’t let it drag on too long. We’ve all seen professional teachers who hang on and keep teaching long after the passion is gone in order to keep their retirement or because they don’t know what to do with themselves next. These teachers are often ineffective at best. Don’t be one of them. Retire gracefully.
If you are going to discontinue your classes, make sure you give students adequate notice. Try to help students who are in the midst of projects finish, or refer them to other teachers who can help them complete their training. You can also hand your class over to another teacher, if one is available. Transition out of the teaching role respectfully, and then take a good, long break before jumping into something else. You’ve earned it.
Short-Term Self-Care
Even the best teachers can reach a point of crisis. Maybe they have been pushing themselves too hard and it’s finally caught up with them. Maybe they’ve expended a lot of energy helping a student through a personal crisis. Maybe something crazy has happened in their personal lives that has derailed their teaching. The point is, acute crisis situations arise, and you’ll need immediate, short-term self-care to handle them.
In my experience, unless something is literally on fire right now or you’re dealing with someone in immediate crisis—such as a suicidal student—the best way to handle an acute situation is to get away, calm down, get some perspective, and make a plan.
Get Away and Calm Down
It’s difficult to make rational decisions when you’re freaking out. Your amygdala—the part of your brain that just reacts—gets overwhelmed with panic, and your cortex—the thinking part of the brain—can’t do its job to get you out of the situation. The best thing you can do when this is going on is remove yourself from the situation, either physically or mentally, and calm yourself down. The idea is to break the stress feedback loop so you can move forward in a more constructive way.
Once you’ve removed yourself from the immediate situation, try one of these ideas to calm down and take care of yourself:
- Do something you consider therapeutic. Personally, my go-to stress relievers are bad rubber-monster movies, the mugwort bath at the local women’s day spa, and live drag shows, but you’re free to find your own.
- Get some hard exercise. Hike, run, or dance away your stress.
- Get outside. We’re Pagans, right? We derive energy from the earth. No better time for that than when you’re in a crisis.
- Get under or into running water. There’s something about the negative ions released in falling water that seems to release tension. A medicine woman I know likes to do healings in waterfalls when she can for this reason, but the shower will
do too, or a bath with Epsom salt and/or soothing herbs. - Meditate. Make sure you include deep breathing.
- Do grounding and centering exercises.
- Play with your pets. Animals are great for shifting your perspective. We have a very talkative parrot, and when we get upset, she says “it’s okay” over and over. I’m not sure if she’s trying to soothe herself or us, but when she does this, we make sure to calm down just so we don’t upset her.
- Go to a movie. Sit in a dark theater, trance out a little, and allow your mind to let go of the problem for a couple of hours and be wrapped up in something else.
- If your crisis is less a “trip to the emergency room” situation than a “crisis of faith” about a teaching situation, make a list of all the great experiences you’ve had teaching and/or the reasons why you’ve enjoyed it. Remembering these things and reliving them in your mind can help pull you out of an acute morale crisis.
Remember that it’s okay to get away from the situation and calm down. You’re allowed to take care of yourself and handle the problem thoughtfully and calmly. Unless someone is on the bridge, ready to jump, don’t allow yourself to get sucked into others’ stress about the problem. Find your center.
Get Some Perspective
Once you’re calm and you’ve detached enough from your emotions about the problem that you can begin to think clearly, ground and center (if you haven’t already) and try to get some perspective on the problem that’s not colored by your feelings. Talk to your friends or mentors. Do a meditation or a pathworking about the problem. Talk directly to your gods and ask for insight. Do some divination, or have a friend do it for you if you think you can’t be objective.
Make a Plan
When you’ve thought things through and gotten insight from outside (or inner) sources, make a plan for dealing with the issue. Brainstorm a variety of possible solutions. Pick two or three that seem the most reasonable, and think of any consequences they might have. (Chances are they’ll all have them; if this problem were easy to solve, it wouldn’t be a crisis.) Choose the one you think will solve the problem with the fewest negative repercussions. Check in with your gods or guides, and put your plan into action. Take some comfort in knowing that you have really thought this out, and you didn’t just jump at the first solution that presented itself.
After you’ve executed your plan, don’t dwell on the problem. Use some of the “getting away and calming down” techniques to let the problem go. It’s possible you’ll need to go back and tweak a few things after you’ve done your plan—clarify things with people, soothe hurt feelings, comfort or reassure someone—but for the most part, it’s important to move on and not feed the problem any more of your energy.
A true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.
Amos Bronson Alcott