Have you fallen in love with them, yet?

“Have you fallen in love with them, yet?” she asked.  We all snapped to attention with this query, so far was it from the actual emotion we were experiencing.  Um…no.  I don’t even like them much right now.

The “them” she was referring to were the 65 graduate students enrolled in a Human Relations for Leaders (group relations) course.  “She” was Dr. Terri Monroe, the professor for the course.  Terri asked the question of me and the other seven teaching assistants who were charged with shepherding the learning of the students.

We teaching assistants had been bemoaning the students’ inability to “get it,” their adherence to a technical way of learning and expectation for how they would be taught, their unwillingness to engage in the adaptive work they were being invited into—a discovery of self in leadership, and followership, and role, and power, and authority, using themselves as the instrument for learning.

I had sat in their seat four years prior as a student in this very course myself. Sat in the discomfort of stumbling headfirst into a new way of learning that required us to not just be empty vessels to be filled up with knowledge, but that acknowledged that our vessels were already fully loaded and asked us to engage in the push and pull and tossing around that would shake up our ways of seeing self, of seeing others, of seeing the world around us.

I, too, had been unable (unwilling) to “get it,” had attempted repeatedly to find ways to reimpose the normal teacher/student roles with one authority figure who stood at the front of the class; the rest of us passive receptacles of wisdom. I didn’t want to use myself as an instrument for learning. That was too hard, too painful. So, I tried mightily to revert to what was known, what was comfortable, what I was good at. Alas, the holding environment of that course, of Dr. Terri Monroe, was more powerful than our attempts to push against it.

And, as a result, I learned in a way that I had never learned before in a classroom setting. And I learned things about me, and others, and what it is to be human in the company of others and in the exercise of leadership, that I could not have learned through a unidirectional imparting of knowledge. 

I learned that there are many seats of leadership, not just those positioned at the front of the room or the top of the hierarchy.  I learned to watch the power of groups working subconsciously to influence those who would step automatically into role to work on the group’s behalf – sometimes at tremendous cost.  I learned that leadership was not at all what I thought it to be…what I had learned through the filling of the empty vessel by an outside source.

I learned in (and about) my white skin and the privilege it offered and the assumptions and judgments that it invited. I learned about the assumptions and judgments I implicitly imposed on others whose skin was darker than my own.

I learned through my voice, tinged with an accent garnered while living in places in the Southern United States. I learned most when I, for the first time, paid attention to when my voice couldn’t be heard, when it wasn’t welcome, when it didn’t have a seat of experience to issue forth from, when it wouldn’t issue forth because of fear. 

I learned that there was tremendous power (and learning) in silence, and tremendous power (and learning) in speaking when and what my body, my heart, told me I must. 

I learned through my bones and my heart and my tear ducts and my sweat glands and my muscles.   

I learned that the most impactful learning comes from inside of you as you struggle with knowing yourself, truly knowing your self, for the first time. And, I was humbled.

Though I learned all of this four years prior, in this very setting, with Terri as my guide, I was still new to the being of it, the living into it, the fully embodying it.  It was present to me. But, it was present alongside the layers of culture and norms and expectations in the here and now… and also in the there and then…in the lessons, and expectations, and stories that tethered me to an identity formed long ago, the orientation to performance that I felt in this role as a teaching assistant. 

My learning had loosened the tether for me, but it was still attached.  I had gained enough distance from it (that earlier part of me) to not be it (some of the time), but I feared being consumed again. So my defense was to push against it, to push against them, the students who bore far too close a resemblance to a me who was just a few years prior, a me that still lived somewhere within me. 

I couldn’t fall in love with them, because I couldn’t fall in love with those parts of me that I saw in them.  And, I was confounded by even the thought that I might be able to…love those parts of them…love those parts of me.

I’ve been thinking about this much lately, as I hold the space for the individuals in my Ghost Light offering to come into relationship with their fallback…as they, too, use themselves as an instrument for their learning, doing something new, and scary, and coming to see the parts of self that they were heretofore unable to clearly see…that they hoped were obscure to others, as well.

I’ve been thinking about it because I have fallen in love with them, with all parts of them. I love their shady characters, their anti-heroes. I love them because they are desperately in protection of something that feels threatened, that they value earnestly.  I love them for the gifts, the lessons, the learning these more constricted, shrunken parts of self offer…even if the delivery is decidedly bumbling and poorly scripted. 

It’s been 15 years since Terri posed that question – “Have you fallen in love with them, yet?” In that time, and no doubt in part because Terri believed that I could, because she had fallen in love with me even as I was in the struggle of learning how to learn, and learning how to love what feels like it’s unlovable in self and in others – I have fallen in love with them. The “them” I am referring to are the hundreds of individuals I have had the honor of accompanying in their “learning” over the years.  The “them” I am referring to is also the fullness of me.

It’s not been easy to fall in love with those parts of me that I want to disown when I see them in others.  It’s been a long journey. And, it’s a practice that I come back to every day with renewed commitment and will forevermore.

It entails my own willingness, my own effort, my own courage in stepping whole bodied into the learning – in my skin, my voice, my bones, my heart and muscles. It requires me to be actively in the noticing, in the reflecting, in the inquiring about self; which allows me to be in the inquiry about others with awareness of my projections, of my traumas, of my own tethers.  It allows me to see that I am not one enduring, consistent self…but I am a multiplicity of characters that shows up to the scenes of my life sometimes in the role of heroine, and at others in the (seeming) role of villain.

Because I am in the practice of seeing, of coming into relationship with, and accepting my bumbling, imperfect, messy, struggly self, I can fall in love with those I accompany in their practice. And, I do.