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*Part six in the series: “Teaching as a Spiritual Path: Soul Work for the Teacher in the New Paradigm.”
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I have been in education and teacher education for over 25 years.
What I have consistently observed is a profound imbalance in what teacher preparation programs deem important for teachers to know in order to be ready for the classroom.
The vast majority of teacher education and professional development focuses on strategies, methods, standards, data, classroom management, assessment tools, and compliance frameworks, everything that lives outside the teacher in order for the teacher to accomplish more control and authority to disseminate information.
And yet, most teachers today are exhausted, depleted, and burned out, not because they lack dedication or skill but because they have been trained to continually orient outward. More strategies. More interventions. More demands. More doing. Rarely are they invited inward. To tend to their own aliveness as the primary site of educational impact.
In this vein, no attention is given to the quality of the teacher’s inner life: their presence, their relationship to their body, their emotional coherence, their psyche, or the state of being they bring into the room each day and how the teacher’s presence becomes a tuning fork for the energy in the classroom moment by moment.
When, however, this inner dimension is addressed, it is often framed under the umbrella of “teacher wellness,” a recent and trendy add-on. Wellness is reduced to self-care checklists: get enough exercise, eat well, go to bed earlier, perhaps a brief mention of the nervous system or boundary work. While these are not unimportant, they remain surface-level interventions.
They do not touch the deeper question of who the teacher is while teaching.
This is a call for a different form of leadership altogether.
Teachers are not meant to manage life in the classroom; they are meant to stabilize it.
When a teacher’s psyche, soma, and soul are reunited, they become a coherent frequency within a living system. This frequency organizes the classroom not through command but through resonance. Like a tuning fork, the teacher holds a steady signal and vibration. One that students can entrain to, regulate with, and draw vitality and life force from.
Learning arises not because it is forced but because the field becomes safe enough, regulated enough, and alive enough for intelligence to emerge collectively. Now…insert all of the knowledge and methods teachers receive in their training as the secondary component of the classroom.
It is from this place that the teacher’s quality of beingness becomes a living transmission in the classroom. The teacher is the living curriculum. The educational system and teacher education programs have been at it for generations to take the “living” out of the teacher by standardization, monotony, compliance, and the reduction of teaching to technique rather than presence.
When a teacher teaches from a place of aliveness and vitality, burnout and exhaustion are revealed not as personal failures but as symptoms of an outdated educational model. Now a new paradigm begins to emerge. One in which presence sustains the teacher, and education becomes a living, regenerative system.
In my recently published book, The Initiated Teacher, and in the previous five articles in this Elephant Journal series, I call for a true evolution of teacher education and a new lens of “teacher wellness.” One that reunites the teacher’s psyche, soma, and soul. An approach that recognizes the teacher’s presence, beingness, and vibrational state as a living and moving curriculum in the classroom.
Until teacher education recognizes that the teacher’s inner state is not supplemental but central, burnout and exhaustion will continue to rise, no matter how many new techniques are introduced.
The future of education does not emerge from better programs alone; it emerges from teachers who are supported to become coherent, embodied, and fully present human beings.
When the teacher comes alive, the classroom does too.
This is the curriculum we have forgotten.
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Read part one of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Naming the Pain we’re not Supposed to Feel.
Read part two of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Learning to Die.
Read part three of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Teaching Soul to Soul.
Read part four of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Eros, Spirituality & the Teacher.
Read part five of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Teaching Breaks You.
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