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After 25 years of teaching, as I step into my 26th school year, I am once again reminded of the tremendous stamina, discipline, integrity, and love it takes for a teacher to continually stand in the fire of their service.
Before I wrote my book, The Initiated Teacher, and before I began consciously bringing the transformational world into conversation with education, I spent an enormous amount of energy trying to get out of the fire.
In the role of the victim.
Of course wanting the tension to stop.
Wanting the demands to lessen.
Wanting to realistically arrive at some imagined version of teaching in which I had finally become experienced enough, organized enough, wise enough, or spiritually evolved enough that the work no longer consumed me.
Oh please…when would the anxiety finally end?
But after 25 years, I understand something I could not have understood when I began:
There is no getting out of the fire.
There is only learning how to rest in the fire.
The teacher is the person in the classroom who receives everything.
We receive the children’s needs, emotions, conflicts, resistance, joy, grief, and endless bids for attention. We receive the moments when a child cannot yet regulate themselves, cannot find the words for what they are feeling, or cannot meet the expectations being placed upon them.
We receive parents’ questions, hopes, fears, disappointments, projections, and demands. We hold their understandable desire for their child to be safe, successful, included, challenged, protected, and deeply known.
We receive the requirements of administration, the meetings, documentation, deadlines, shifting priorities, difficult decisions, and continual requests to do more, often without more time, more resources, or more support.
And beneath all of it is the teacher’s sincere desire to serve.
But to offer service in integrity is to place ourselves directly in the line of fire.
The teacher is, in some ways, akin to the witch who was burned at the stake: standing at the center of the collective intensity, absorbing its heat, and being asked to remain present while everything burns around, and sometimes through.
What I have come to recognize is that there is no escaping this fire without also leaving the profound intimacy of teaching.
There is only learning how to rest within it.
The fire is part of the continued initiation that teaching is.
And so, as I begin my 26th year, standing in the fire no longer means trying to eliminate the tension or escape the tremendous responsibility of being a teacher.
It means learning to find pockets of rest inside the heat.
It means knowing when to soften, when to breathe, when to step back, and when to allow something to remain unfinished and chaotic. It means recognizing that I do not have to answer every request immediately, resolve every conflict perfectly, or extinguish every flame myself.
And I am doing a great job.
So, I am not going anywhere. I am here. Standing in the fire. Resting in the fire. And burning.
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