We Are All Teachers
On following the fascination, teaching from the edge, and the other ways of knowing.
It is a Friday morning. The laptop has opened. The shoulders have begun their small daily collapse — a quarter-inch toward the desk, the jaw set, the breath shallow without you noticing. The cursor blinks. The body has already started its quiet vote: not this. Not this again.
You stand up. You walk to the kitchen. You fill the kettle and do not turn it on. You look out the window at nothing in particular, and notice that nothing in particular has its own weather.
You have had this exact morning before. You will have it again tomorrow. You already know what the body is asking for. You do not yet know what to do about it.
That is who this is written for. Not the people who can put their head down and grind through what does not move them. The other people. The ones for whom the only sustainable path is the path that fascinates them, followed far enough that the work earns its keep. The teachers of their own creative path and their own spiritual way of business. The ones who refuse to choose between alive and surviving.
There is one voice that has stopped almost all of you, and it is the voice this essay is about.
It says: I am not an expert. I really need to learn more before I offer this. Why would anyone want to learn from me?
You know that voice. The body knows it too — the small contraction in the chest, the slight pull back from the keyboard, the half-formed urge to read one more book before saying what you have already lived. It is the most polite of all the voices that stop you. It dresses itself in modesty. It calls itself caution. It claims to be on your side.
It is not on your side. And the answer to it is older than the voice itself.
I. Expert is experience is experiment
Open a dictionary. Expert, experience, experiment — three words, one Latin root. Experiri: to try, to test, to put yourself to the proof of a thing (Online Etymology Dictionary, n.d.). All three trace, further back, to the Indo-European root per-: to try, to risk.
The expert is the one who has tried. The teacher is the one still trying. They are the same word.
You may never feel like an expert in the polished, never-questioned sense. That is not where you live, and probably never will. But have you had some experience? Yes. Have you been running some experiments? Of course you have. You have been living your life.
So we know what we know. Quietly, without inflation, without diminishing — what we have actually walked through. That is enough to teach from.
The vulnerability of being a good teacher is always being on one’s own learning edge. You do not stop being a learner the moment you start being a teacher. The two run together — that is what makes teaching alive. Adult development is built on this: the place where your current way of making meaning is no longer enough is the place that calls for more meaning-making (Kegan, 1994). The teacher who stays at the edge stays alive.
Parker Palmer put the whole spine of this essay in three words: we teach who we are (Palmer, 1998). The teacher’s inner life — including its uncertainty — is not the obstacle to teaching. It is the credential.
The qualification you have been waiting to earn is in the dictionary. You already have it.
II. Follow the fascination
There is one infallible compass for what to teach: what fascinates you.
Not what is impressive. Not what is profitable in someone else’s hands. The thing you cannot stop reading about. The thing you wake up still thinking about. The thing that, even unpaid, you would do.
Some of what fascinates you belongs in your kitchen and your hands. Birthday cards. Candles. The pot of soup. You like making it for yourself and the people who happen to be in your house, and that is the right scale. A hobby is not less than a calling — it is a different shape, and the world needs both.
But there is another kind of fascination, and it knocks differently. A voice that returns week after week and says, this thing I have lived could help another person who is where I was. Especially the work that grew out of a wound. Especially the work you have already turned into something for yourself.
If that voice is the one knocking, then relegating the work to a hobby is the wrong answer. The cave is not safer than the stage. Hiding in the creative cave — not testing, not sharing, not letting anyone touch it — how is it helping? The cave only feels safe because nothing happens there.
Steven Pressfield names the force that keeps you in the cave: Resistance, capital R (Pressfield, 2002). It is the inner pressure that opposes the work most precisely when the work matters most. It will not feel like fear when it arrives. It will feel like good judgment, like timing, like the sensible voice saying next year, when you are more ready. That sensible voice is Resistance wearing your face.
Julia Cameron’s answer is daily, before the voice wakes up: morning pages, three handwritten pages of whatever comes, every day (Cameron, 1992). Show up before you feel ready. Ready is a category Resistance invented to keep you from starting.
Once the work is out, it lives its own life. It has its own relationship with the world. It does not have to have anything to do with you. Your job is to make it, and to let it go meet the people it is going to meet.
The niggling that keeps coming back is the signal. The polished voice that calls it premature is the obstruction.
III. How to make a lightbulb
A lightbulb moment is when you really get something.
You have had them. The afternoon a sentence in a book reorganized your week. The conversation in a kitchen that ended one story and started another. The exercise in a workshop that suddenly let you feel the thing you had only been thinking about. Each one is small. Each one changes the shape of what is possible next.
There is now neuroscience for this moment. Kounios and Beeman call it the eureka factor — a measurable brain signature, a sudden right-hemisphere temporal activation that precedes the aha by about a third of a second (Kounios & Beeman, 2015). Sydney Banks, from a wholly different tradition, called it the Oh! — the sound a new thought makes when it arrives (Banks, 1998). The neuroscience and the Three Principles meet at the same moment. The teacher’s job is to set the conditions for that moment, not to manufacture it.
How do you set the conditions?
You break the material into pieces small enough to be held. Seven, eight, ten minutes of something — and then they have to do something with it. Talk it over with the person next to them. Draw it. Write the question it raised. Put their body in a different posture and notice what changes. John Medina puts the rule at about ten minutes for adult attention (Medina, 2008); the exact number matters less than the principle. Information without an act of integration is information lost. You love your subject, but more is not better.
Stories are sticky. Facts are not. Chip and Dan Heath built an entire taxonomy of what makes ideas survive (Heath & Heath, 2007); the short of it is that the sticky form is concrete, unexpected, emotional, and arrives as a story. The voice of a teacher is the mood the story is told in. When you have your story — the actual one, the lived one, not the cleaned-up resume version — your voice is already there. You do not have to manufacture a persona. Just tell what happened, in the tone it actually happened in.
Return to your own first encounter with the material. What was it like when you started? Where was the lightbulb in your own learning? Whatever helped you cross is the closest map you have to what will help them cross.
Your own first Oh! is your pedagogy. You do not need a curriculum yet. You need the memory of the moment the thing you now teach finally moved.
IV. Teaching from the other ways of knowing
There is a kind of intelligence that does not enter through the front door of the mind. It comes in through the body, through the side, through the senses. It does not arrive in sentences. It arrives in images, in feelings, in metaphors that mean more than they say.
This is the realm where genius lives. Most of us were schooled out of it.
The felt sense
The body knows things the front of the mind has not yet learned. We feel our way to the world before we name what we are feeling. Eugene Gendlin called this the felt sense (Gendlin, 1978) — the bodily knowing that precedes language, the place where you sense something is off about an answer ten minutes before you can say why.
When you cannot name the next step, you are not at the end of your knowing. You are at the edge of where words can reach. The next move is to give the unknown a shape — a metaphor, an image, a felt quality — and let the body work the rest out.
What schooling demoted
Why is this hard? Because we were schooled out of it. From the moment formal schooling begins, the rewards go to the verbal-analytic intelligence — naming, listing, defining — and the other intelligences are quietly demoted (Gardner, 1983). The student who learned to do well in school is often the student who learned to override the felt sense in favor of the answer the teacher wanted. We don’t grow into creativity, Ken Robinson said in his TED talk that has now been seen by more than seventy million people. We get educated out of it (Robinson, 2006). By the time we become teachers ourselves, the deeper knowing is buried under decades of override.
Iain McGilchrist has written most fully about what we lost (McGilchrist, 2009). The two hemispheres of the brain attend to the world in two distinct ways — one that grasps the part, one that holds the whole. Western culture has built a civilization on the grasping mode and a famine on the holding one. To teach from the holding mode is to bring something most students were never allowed to bring to school.
For the skeptic
If the analytic part of you is reading this with arms folded — what exactly is the other intelligence you keep pointing at? — there is now science you can stand on. Doc Childre and Howard Martin gave the popular version (Childre & Martin, 1999); the peer-reviewed work is sharper. The heart has its own intrinsic nervous system — about forty thousand neurons — and a measurable rhythmic electromagnetic field that communicates continuously with the brain (McCraty & Shaffer, 2015). The heart is not a pump with an attached metaphor. It is a small distributed intelligence whose signal we long ago learned to drown out with thinking.
You do not have to be spiritually inclined to grant this. You do not have to know what you believe in. You only have to grant that the dream, the poem, the metaphor, the image that has been lurking at the edge of your attention for weeks — these are not noise. They are signals from a different part of you, addressed to you, in the language that part of you speaks.
There is something bigger than the analytic self that wants to move you into the creative. You do not have to call it God to feel it. You only have to let go of the thinking long enough to notice that something has been trying to move through, and has been politely waiting for you to stop talking over it.
Metaphor as feeling
Metaphor is not decoration. It is the conceptual substrate of thought itself — that was Lakoff and Johnson’s contribution, and it has held for forty-five years (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). We do not use metaphor because we cannot think clearly. We use metaphor because metaphor is how we think when we are thinking about anything that matters.
And metaphor is not only an image. It is a feeling. Try this. Read each phrase and notice the body, not the meaning.
- Carrying water in cupped hands across a courtyard. A tightness in the chest. A small forward lean. The feeling of trying not to spill before the door.
- Walking through mud after late-autumn rain. Heaviness in the legs. The drag in the step. The patience that comes when you cannot move faster, and the small grief that comes with it.
- A door that has been swollen shut all winter, creaking open. A quickening. A held breath. Anticipation that is half-fear and half-pull, and a smell of last year’s air.
Each metaphor lands as a felt quality before the mind has a chance to translate it into a sentence. That feeling is the deeper knowing. That feeling is where breakthroughs come from. When you do not know the next step, you do not need more analysis. You need a metaphor for the place you are standing. The metaphor will tell you what kind of move the place is asking for.
Feeling, not figuring out
There is a trap close to this work. You can read a metaphor and analyze it. You can ask what does this mean? and stay entirely in the left hemisphere, still thinking what you already know. Images alone do not free you. Being into the image does.
The move is from figuring out to feeling. The metaphor is not a puzzle to solve. It is a place to enter. You stand inside it. You become the door, or the mud, or the cupped hands. You let the body of the metaphor do what the analytic mind cannot — sense what the situation is actually asking for.
With analysis, we work only with what we already know. With feeling, we have access to something we do not yet know. Being a learner — staying willingly in the not-yet-knowing — is what allows the body to feel something the mind has not yet caught up to.
Suspend the disbelief
Two hundred years ago Coleridge gave us a phrase that holds the door open: the willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith (Coleridge, 1817/1983). He was writing about how poetry asks the reader to enter a constructed world. The phrase has wider use. To work with metaphor as a way of knowing, you suspend the part of you that wants to know what is real and what is merely imagined — for long enough that the image can do its work. The skeptic does not have to leave the room. The skeptic only has to agree to wait outside for fifteen minutes.
The archetypal substrate
Carl Jung gave the most thorough account of why this works (Jung, 1959/1969). Beneath the personal layer of the psyche, beneath the inherited family stories, beneath the cultural overlays, there is an archetypal layer of inherited images — the wise old woman, the threshold, the descent, the home, the hidden path through the forest. These images are not arbitrary. They are the deep structure of the human psyche. When a metaphor lands and the body recognizes it before the mind explains it, what you are feeling is the archetypal image waking up in you — a piece of equipment older than any school you ever attended.
You do not have to believe in Jung’s full system. You only have to notice that some images are deeper than other images, and that the deeper ones move something inside you that no sentence can.
The fear of losing the self
When you dive deep into image and feeling, a fear can rise: if I let go of the thinking, will I lose myself? The fear is reasonable. The answer is no.
Being deeply creative does not mean dissolving into the work. It means having form and structure around the diving. The painter has the frame. The writer has the page and the form. The dancer, the actor, the singer — each has a stage. The form is what keeps the diver safe to dive. Without the form, depth becomes drowning. With the form, depth becomes the work.
When the work asks for more than the current form can hold, the form has to grow. Sometimes the form has been too tight for a long time and the body knows it. Sometimes life has become so structured that the only way back to the inner soil is to let go of structure for a season. The form follows the work; the work does not follow the form. But the form is there, every time. You do not lose yourself in a frame.
How to enter the image
Here is the actual move. You can practice it today.
You are stuck somewhere — on a decision, on a draft, on a sentence in your own life. Your analytic mind has gone around the same loop three times. Stop.
Find an image. Any image. Look out the window and take the first thing that catches your eye. Or invite a random image: a door propped open with a stone. A small boat tied off in shallow water, knocking against the dock. A bowl of soup that has grown a skin while you weren’t looking. Take the simplest version of it — two or three primary qualities. Simple. Super simple.
Then enter it. Not analyze it. Enter it. I am the door, half open. What does it feel like to be half open? What is on either side of me? What does the air feel like passing through? Stay with the felt qualities for two or three minutes. Do not narrate. Do not interpret. Feel.
Then come back to the stuck place and notice what has shifted. You did not get the answer from analysis. You got it from the body, after the body had a few minutes inside an image that was structurally similar to your stuck place. The body did the work analysis could not do.
If the image feels too tame, make it weirder. Strangeness is permission. The deeper imagery often arrives a little strange — a goose conducting a string quartet from the back row, a teapot reading yesterday’s newspaper because today’s hasn’t arrived, a snail at the starting line of a marathon, untying its laces. The strangeness is the body’s way of saying you have left the well-trodden mental path; pay attention now.
Arrien’s five shapes
The cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien spent decades studying the universal shapes that appear in every traditional culture’s art (Arrien, 1992). She narrowed them to five: the circle (wholeness, the held), the square (stability, the structured), the triangle (direction, the aimed), the cross (relation, the choosing), and the spiral (movement, the growing). She found that people, when asked to draw their inner state, reach for one of these five and not for the others. The choice is itself a felt-sense report from underneath language.
For the teacher, the shapes are a small set of metaphors that work for almost any stuck place. Am I in the circle right now — held, but maybe not moving? Am I in the spiral — moving, but maybe not held? Where do I want to be? The body knows. The shapes only have to be offered for the body to answer.
Teaching the touch
This is the part of teaching that goes furthest. You can teach a concept and the student will learn it. You can teach a method and the student will use it. But if you can teach the touch — the access route to the felt sense, the willingness to enter an image, the practice of feeling instead of figuring — you have given the student something nobody schooled into them, and you have given them a piece of equipment they can use for the rest of their lives.
Story does this. Drama does this. Fairy tale does this most clearly of all. Once upon a time… is not a stylistic flourish. It is a threshold-formula, a verbal opening of a door into the other room. The body knows what to do with that opening. The body has known since childhood.
Teaching like this is teaching through a shift of energy more than a transfer of content. You give the answer indirectly — by changing the room, by offering a shape the body recognizes, by holding open the half-second of silence after the metaphor lands. The student arrives at the insight, and it is the student’s. You only made the conditions.
Bringing the deeper way of knowing back into the room is the substrate of how you teach — every example tied to a sensed quality, every concept opening onto what the body recognizes before the mind catches up, every difficult abstraction grounded in a shape the body has already touched.
In any subject, for any student
The temptation is to think this is only for creative coaching, for spiritual teachers, for the soft side of any curriculum. It is not. The third way — the feeling way, the imaginal way — can be brought into any subject anybody teaches. The math teacher who pauses and says, what shape does this proof have? The programmer who teaches a junior to feel whether a piece of code is healthy before reading the diagnostic. The parent who hands their child a metaphor for a feeling the child cannot yet name. There is no subject too technical, too rigorous, too professional, for the third way to be quietly invited in.
And when you invite it in, do so with compassion for the individual — not for the room, not for the cohort, not for the average student. The individual. Some people will arrive with the felt sense intact and will be relieved that you let them use it. Some people will arrive with the felt sense buried so deep that they will resist the invitation. Both are fine. Let people be themselves. Let them not fit the shape you had imagined for them. The teaching is not for the cohort. It is for the next person, sitting in front of you.
Simple is potent. The longer you teach, the more you trust the simple — the single image, the single shape, the single felt quality — and the more you mistrust the elaborate explanation that has nowhere for the body to enter.
V. Responsible to, not for
There is a clean line that takes years to find and a lifetime to keep:
I am responsible to my students. I am not responsible for them.
The distinction is Melody Beattie’s, from the recovery literature (Beattie, 1986); it has saved more relationships than perhaps any sentence from that decade. The teaching transposition is what concerns us here. To show up. To prepare. To bring resources, openings, opportunities. To stay clear enough to see what is in the room. To — yes. That is mine.
But the work of receiving the teaching — of taking what is offered and doing something with it — is theirs. I cannot do it for them. I should not try. When I try, I quietly take from them the dignity of their own apprenticeship.
Sales, in this frame, stops being creepy. Molly Gordon calls it the sacred exchange (Gordon, n.d.). I offer. They offer their showing up, their doing the work, and the price. The price of the work is the price of the work. The worth is intrinsic. What you charge is the value of the transformation for them — not the cost of your time, not what your aunt thinks coaching should cost. The value to the person who is changed by it.
I am driving the bus. You get on the bus. Your experience is what you make of being on the bus. The bus is a metaphor from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999): you are the driver, your fears are the passengers, the road is your work. The passengers can shout from the back. They cannot have the wheel.
Charging is not creepy. Charging is the form of respect — for the work, for the student, and for the exchange that makes both possible.
VI. The middle way
The teacher caught between two extremes is the most common teacher.
On one end, the impulse to give it all away — to be so generous that there is nothing left over, no living, no business, no rest. The hours, the calls, the free advice, the bottomless inbox. I want to help. And after a year, the helper is empty.
On the other end, the recoil into hardness. The high-priced gate, the calculated scarcity, the no-free-anything posture that protects the asset but loses the warmth that was the actual gift in the first place.
Neither one is the work. The middle is.
The middle is office hours. If you make an appointment with me in office hours, I am available. A structure that says yes inside its frame and no outside it. Generosity with a shape.
The middle is also a sentence. I am not a beginner. I am not an expert. Let’s experiment together. I know what I know — and I am still learning the rest with you. The middle does not pretend. It does not perform. It is the actual posture of someone teaching from where they are, not from where they wish they were.
VII. The money story you inherited
Behind the imposter voice there is usually a money voice. I am not allowed to make money from my creative work. I should be poor and pure. See how virtuous I am, being broke.
These are not insights. They are habituated stress responses dressed up as morality. They feel like truth because they have been said inside your head ten thousand times. Repetition is not the same as truth.
We do not say starving minister. We say starving artist, as if the two went together by nature. They do not. The story is inherited, not true.
Lynne Twist spent thirty years working with both the world’s wealthiest and the world’s poorest, and the through-line of her Soul of Money (Twist, 2003) is the deepest reframe available on this question: sufficiency, not scarcity. There is no shortage anywhere. People spend money on the craziest things — on whatever they consider important. Your job is to make the thing important enough — first to yourself, then to the people you are trying to reach.
Raise the floor. If less than a hundred dollars in the bank sends you into panic, then the first job is a small cushion. Then a bigger one. The cushion is not greed. The cushion is what lets you keep teaching from a settled place instead of a desperate one. Have your lifeboat packed, so that when the world changes — and it will — you can pivot without losing the work.
The starving-artist story is older than you and not yours to carry. Set it down.
VIII. The thoughts that haunt
Some thoughts come back. I work and I work and I get nowhere. I am not enough. They will see through me. These are not insights either. They are old visitors. They come because they have always been allowed in.
There is a clean move from Jon Kabat-Zinn, originally translated from vipassana practice (Kabat-Zinn, 1990): notice the thought, name it, do not fight it. The fighting is what feeds it. Then go further — paint it. Give it a shape, a face, an absurd outfit. Look at it for a moment as if it were sitting across the room from you. Then say, Oh, I know you. The recognition is what disarms it. The thought is bored too — it has been doing this work for years and would actually like a rest.
This is the mid-teaching skill that nobody warns new teachers about. The panic-thought arrives during the lesson, on camera, in the room. You do not have to fix it before continuing. You only have to notice it and continue. The teaching keeps going. The thought rides in the back. Both can be true.
Recognition disarms. The thought does not need to be defeated; it only needs to be named.
IX. Fear, and do it anyway
The brain does not like things it cannot justify. Hours given to a project with no immediate reward will be flagged as wasted. You will be pulled to quit. You will be afraid. Sometimes terrified.
Susan Jeffers gave us the line that closes the loop on that fear: feel the fear and do it anyway (Jeffers, 1987). Stage fright does not mean you are not going on stage. Camera fright does not mean you are not making the video. Page fright does not mean you are not writing the page. The fear is data about how much it matters. It is not data about whether you proceed.
There is a small question that sorts the resistance into the two piles that matter: Does it hurt — or is it just hard? If it hurts, leave it. The body is telling you a clean no. But if it is just hard — if it is the ordinary hardness of doing something that matters, the hardness that comes with new ground — then it is yours. An engraved invitation from God. The hardness is the proof you are at the edge of your own growing.
Fifteen minutes a day. First thing, before the world arrives. James Clear’s math on small habits is the math of the teaching life (Clear, 2018): one percent better, repeated, becomes a different person within a year. You can pause. You can rest. You can do a really shitty job. You can do the same shitty job tomorrow. The one thing you cannot do is quit.
The wild secret is this — fifteen minutes, kept for years, makes you smug in the most delightful way. The progress is not visible on the day. It is visible from a decade away.
Procrastination is just your project being too big. Take it down to fifteen minutes. Take the first index card. Fill it with five words. Put it in a stack. Do the same tomorrow.
X. Be the metaphor you are
Marianne Williamson wrote it best, and it bears repeating because so few people live it: our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure (Williamson, 1992). The shrinking that looks like humility is its own teaching — and it is the wrong one. The student watching learns to shrink too.
Brené Brown gave that move a name we can use: daring greatly (Brown, 2012). The vulnerability of teaching in public — of letting your work be seen, judged, refused, embraced — is one of the highest-stakes yes moves available to a private person. The trembling is data. It is not disqualification.
We are all teachers. The question was never whether you have the right to teach. The real question — the one underneath the polite voice — is this:
What have you actually lived, that someone else could use?
Lay it down on the table. Not the polished version. The real one. The one with the wounds in it, and the things you got wrong, and the small turns that changed everything. That is the teachable thing.
Say yes to a lot of things. Some of them will work. Some will not. Both kinds of yes are necessary. The no’s you say to yourself in advance are the ones that cost the most.
Follow what fascinates you. Teach from where you stand. Stay on your learning edge. Trust the people who come to you to do their part of the work.
You are not a beginner. You are not an expert.
You are a teacher.
That is enough.
Eventually, if you stay with this long enough, you stop using metaphors and you start being one. The teacher who is the metaphor she teaches is the teacher whose work does the work.
Be the metaphor you are.
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