Novice Teacher Seeking Guidance - Discussion
For what it's worth...
I think a big part of stress reduction aspect is just getting people aquainted by the idea that "presence" is a lower stress experience than "worrying about the future that is actually unknowable or remembering the troubled past that can't change". But worrying and remembering is basically automatic and fighting past memories or future thoughts to make a thought-and-memory-free present also creates stress... You can't stop it and you can't fix it. So what is the solution?
Getting used to letting things be. Meditation is a chance to learn how to "let". It's the old joke that you can fight reality, but you'll only lose
But once you let things be as they are, you can find a bigger sense of presence in that. It's actually possible to rest in the midst of worries and memories. It's a change in attitude more than forcing the mind to be in a particular way.
So all the practice methods are there to create a container for "letting things be as they are" -- which really doesn't involve doing anything, but it's something humans have a hard time allowing unless they practice.
Whatever the practice is, it needs one component that helps someone re-find the present (e.g. breathing sensations for mindfulness of breathing practice, or a holy world which is used in centering prayer) and a method for respectfully acknowledging unhelpful worries or memories (e.g. labelling them as "worry" and "remembering" in noting practice).
And then you can say that by being mindful of all of this, there is a natural instinct to drop unhelpful worries and recurring memories over time, but that's something that is only learned through lots of low-effort repetition. The more you force it, the slower the progress But with a good, gentle, caring heart we create the best context for slowly learning this lesson and learn it deeply until it becomes an unconscious intelligence that doesn't get fooled. We learn to automatically recognize worry as worry and memory as a memory, and then we are confused and stressed out about them.
You also owe it to them to say that sometimes people need help with this and that's what therapy is all about. Sometimes people have oppressive recurring worries or memories. Sometimes repressed trauma can bubble up in the safe place of mediation. It's a real thing and people need to know that. It's a real risk of meditation and it's only ethical that people know about it.
You also owe it to them that practicing this a lot can leave to more spiritual experiences, both good and bad, and that's what religions with contemplative practice traditions are all about. This is a real thing and people need to know that.
People also need to know to STOP if they feel uncomfortable and they should feel completely free to get up and leave the meditation hall at any time. You also owe it to them to say that you can't personally guarantee their safety and they really need to look out for themselves. If you scare them, that's fine. Better to scare people than to hide important information.
Lots of ethical aspects of being a teacher. I personally do not feel that people should attempt teaching what they don't already know proficiently.
DhO is a place where, unfortunately, a lot of people who were not warned or given good guidance (or who have no teacher, did a retreat without any discussion of possible risks/side effects, had a big opening and now they have no one to help them) show up and need help.
I really wish teachers were much more forthcoming about the risks associated with meditation.
See also Daniel's ethical suggestions: 35. How the Maps Help – MCTB.org
"The maps tell you clearly what you are looking for and explain precisely why you are looking for it, how that insight helps, and how that insight provides the ground for what follows. The same thing could be said of the concentration state maps. If the stages of insight didn’t tend to bring up all sorts of unusual raptures and produce such a wide range of potentially destabilizing emotional side effects, there would not be so much need for the maps. You could simply tell people to increase their perceptual abilities until they awakened, and they would likely have few difficulties in doing so by properly applying the techniques. However, the insight stages do tend to cause these sorts of effects, so the maps are very useful for keeping people on track in the face of them.
Remember the chapter called “The Seven Factors of Awakening” when I mentioned that the first factor was mindfulness and that this was really good for sorting out what is mind and what is body and when each is and isn’t there? That is because the first insight you are looking for, the one that allows you to see more deeply, is stage one: Mind and Body. Get it? This stuff is not random or arbitrary. It is all clearly laid out in a way that helps and fits with reality. In other words, the order is significant and worth respecting.
Remember how I said in that chapter that we should try to experience the intentions that precede actions and thoughts, as well as the mental impression or “consciousness” that follows all sensations? That is the key understanding in stage two: Cause and Effect. Thus, mindfulness is the first factor of awakening because it leads directly to the first two classic insights into the truth of what is going on. If you want insight into something, then looking precisely into that aspect of things is the best way to acquire that insight.
Once we have directly experienced these two insights, then the three characteristics begin to become obvious in stage three, which is exactly why the next factor of awakening is called investigation of the truth, i.e. Three Characteristics. The seven factors of awakening and the insight maps tell you exactly what you are trying to understand and why. You will not be able to directly understand the three characteristics without first being able to distinguish what is mind and what is body and the relationships between them. Without understanding the three characteristics, regardless of what you call them, you will not be able to advance. The Buddha laid it all out step by step. While this may seem unromantic, unpoetic, uncreative, and even dry, it is also extremely practical and without a doubt the clearest presentation of exactly how to wake up that I have ever seen presented in any spiritual system, just so my biases are made perfectly clear. In short, these maps and techniques can be profoundly empowering.
Once the three characteristics become clear, the mind naturally speeds up and becomes more powerful. This is because it finally begins to draw on its tremendous power to see things directly and investigate without processing them through thought. Anyone who has driven a car, played a video game, or done just about anything else, knows that you just do it, but if you try to think about every little thing you are doing, the action would be impossible.
This increase in mental power due to non-conceptual and direct experience is related to the third factor of awakening, energy. Energy may now even be blazing up and down the spinal cord, the mind gets bright and alert, and soon energy is flowing naturally, as we begin to enter the early part of stage four: Arising and Passing Away. Remember how this correlates with the second shamatha jhana, where applied and sustained attention or effort are no longer needed? They just happen on their own, to a large extent, and energy is naturally present. Thus, it all ties together.
The next factor of awakening is joy or rapture, which comes to predominate in the second vipassana jhana and the Arising and Passing Away, just as it does in the second shamatha jhana. Thus, all the important advice about rapture given earlier applies to the insight maps in Part Four. We are generally advised to avoid becoming a rapture- or kundalini-junkie in this stage, although I suppose that if this is your primary reason for meditating, it is certainly your right to do so. Just be wary of the inevitable crash.During the mature Arising and Passing Away, as well as in Dissolution (stage five), tranquility becomes important and more pronounced, but then becomes too strong in late Dissolution. Thus, it becomes important to build the sixth factor of awakening, concentration, and developing concentration is an oft-recommended strategy in the Dark Night.
Finally, when the Dark Night really kicks in, as it will once we can again find our objects and stay with them (Fear through Re-observation), then Equanimity in the face of all experience becomes vital for progress, as stated in Part One. Thus, Equanimity can arise and Path can be attained.As mentioned before, the maps fill in the seemingly huge, frustrating, and nebulous gap from doing something like sitting on a cushion paying attention to the sensations of your breath and finally awakening.The maps also tell you exactly what the common traps and temptations of each stage are. They warn people about not getting stuck in Mind and Body by solidifying it into a jhanic state, which it closely resembles. They provide comfort and explanation when things might get jerky, unpleasant, or even downright painful in stage three, Three Characteristics. They admonish people not to get too fascinated with how much of a mighty meditator they might feel like in stage four, Arising and Passing Away, and even to examine the sensations that make up the seemingly wondrous and tantalizing corruptions of insight such as equanimity and rapture. They warn of the possibility of thinking that we are enlightened when going though that stage, as well as saying that it is normal for wild and sometimes explosive experiences to occur.
I spoke with a friend who basically wanted me to help him rationalize that his recent A&P experiences occasionally allowed him to touch High Equanimity. My advice was that a much more helpful form of inquiry would be to notice the sensations of fascination with this issue and notice the sensations of the rest of his sensate universe come and go moment to moment. If he couldn’t manage this, he should be putting his time into trying to figure out how to get together enough money and vacation time to do another long retreat and/or how to increase his daily practice time and the thoroughness of his investigation.The maps clearly state that the process is not a particularly linear one, and that after the highs of the Arising and Passing Away there usually follow times of difficulty when all the spectacular power of the mind and pleasure of meditation gained in the Arising and Passing Away are likely to fade dramatically. They warn of the numerous difficulties that may be encountered in the Dark Night stages, as well as provide lots of information about how to deal with them. The most common mistake is failing to investigate the truth of sensations deemed undesirable or unpleasant. It is hard to get on more intimate terms with reality when we feel a bit too emotional, vulnerable, raw, openhearted, or shaken, and so progress through the insight stages that make up the Dark Night is not always easy.
While I do generally wish to avoid biting the hands that have fed me, I must say that not telling practitioners about this territory from the beginning to give them a heads-up as to what might happen is so extremely irresponsible and negligent that I just want to spit and scream at those who perpetuate this warped culture of secrecy. While many teachers may not do so because they don’t think many people will ever get this far, that in and of itself is a scary assumption that should cause some serious questioning of their teaching methods, techniques, and perhaps even motivations.
Imagine that there is a medication called Damnital that is used to treat some form of suffering (perhaps it’s a pain medicine or an antidepressant). However, in a subset of patients its long-term use is known to cause pronounced anxiety, paranoia, depression, apathy, micro-psychotic episodes, a pervasive sense of primal frustration, pronounced lack of perspective on relationships, reduced libido, feelings of dissatisfaction with worldly affairs, and exacerbation of personality disorders, all of which can lead to markedly reduced social and occupational functioning. Imagine that these side effects are known to persist sometimes months and even years after someone stops taking the medication, with occasional flare-ups and relapses, with the only effective treatment being to restart the meds, perhaps increase the dose, add supportive care and counseling, and hope that these side effects pass quickly with little damage.
Now, imagine that you are living in the dark days of paternalistic medicine during which doctors prescribe these practices without fully disclosing the potential side effects despite being fully aware of them. Imagine that drug companies are not required to disclose known side effects. Does anything in this scenario make you even a bit uncomfortable? I should hope so!
Let’s say for the sake of argument that I am a fanatic who is blowing this way out of proportion. Let’s assume that Damnital only causes these effects in one out of every ten thousand patients. Would you have these side effects included on the little piece of paper that comes in the bottle? Let’s say it’s one in a hundred? At what point does it become absurd that those doctors and drug companies are being allowed to get away with this? Unfortunately, I must admit that I do not know the exact odds of these side effects happening to you. I do know firsthand that they happen and that if you cross the A&P you are likely to run into at least some of them.
These side effects are no fantasy. When they show up they are as real and powerful as if some dangerous drug had seriously skewed your neurochemistry, and I often wonder if that might be something like what happens. Thus, it seems only fair to have the same standards that we apply with such pronounced zeal and fervent litigation to drug companies and doctors also apply to meditation teachers and dharma books. For reasons unknown to me, this book is the first one I know of to spell out all of these things explicitly in language that everyone should be able to understand so that you can go into meditation having been fully informed of the risks and benefits and thus make informed decisions about your own practice. In the spirit of professionalism, I call on others who promote the dharma to immediately adopt a similarly high standard of open disclosure of risks, benefits, and alternatives for their own work.""
I think a big part of stress reduction aspect is just getting people aquainted by the idea that "presence" is a lower stress experience than "worrying about the future that is actually unknowable or remembering the troubled past that can't change". But worrying and remembering is basically automatic and fighting past memories or future thoughts to make a thought-and-memory-free present also creates stress... You can't stop it and you can't fix it. So what is the solution?
Getting used to letting things be. Meditation is a chance to learn how to "let". It's the old joke that you can fight reality, but you'll only lose
But once you let things be as they are, you can find a bigger sense of presence in that. It's actually possible to rest in the midst of worries and memories. It's a change in attitude more than forcing the mind to be in a particular way. So all the practice methods are there to create a container for "letting things be as they are" -- which really doesn't involve doing anything, but it's something humans have a hard time allowing unless they practice.
Whatever the practice is, it needs one component that helps someone re-find the present (e.g. breathing sensations for mindfulness of breathing practice, or a holy world which is used in centering prayer) and a method for respectfully acknowledging unhelpful worries or memories (e.g. labelling them as "worry" and "remembering" in noting practice).
And then you can say that by being mindful of all of this, there is a natural instinct to drop unhelpful worries and recurring memories over time, but that's something that is only learned through lots of low-effort repetition. The more you force it, the slower the progress
But with a good, gentle, caring heart we create the best context for slowly learning this lesson and learn it deeply until it becomes an unconscious intelligence that doesn't get fooled. We learn to automatically recognize worry as worry and memory as a memory, and then we are confused and stressed out about them.You also owe it to them to say that sometimes people need help with this and that's what therapy is all about. Sometimes people have oppressive recurring worries or memories. Sometimes repressed trauma can bubble up in the safe place of mediation. It's a real thing and people need to know that. It's a real risk of meditation and it's only ethical that people know about it.
You also owe it to them that practicing this a lot can leave to more spiritual experiences, both good and bad, and that's what religions with contemplative practice traditions are all about. This is a real thing and people need to know that.
People also need to know to STOP if they feel uncomfortable and they should feel completely free to get up and leave the meditation hall at any time. You also owe it to them to say that you can't personally guarantee their safety and they really need to look out for themselves. If you scare them, that's fine. Better to scare people than to hide important information.
Lots of ethical aspects of being a teacher. I personally do not feel that people should attempt teaching what they don't already know proficiently.
DhO is a place where, unfortunately, a lot of people who were not warned or given good guidance (or who have no teacher, did a retreat without any discussion of possible risks/side effects, had a big opening and now they have no one to help them) show up and need help.
I really wish teachers were much more forthcoming about the risks associated with meditation.
See also Daniel's ethical suggestions: 35. How the Maps Help – MCTB.org
"The maps tell you clearly what you are looking for and explain precisely why you are looking for it, how that insight helps, and how that insight provides the ground for what follows. The same thing could be said of the concentration state maps. If the stages of insight didn’t tend to bring up all sorts of unusual raptures and produce such a wide range of potentially destabilizing emotional side effects, there would not be so much need for the maps. You could simply tell people to increase their perceptual abilities until they awakened, and they would likely have few difficulties in doing so by properly applying the techniques. However, the insight stages do tend to cause these sorts of effects, so the maps are very useful for keeping people on track in the face of them.
Remember the chapter called “The Seven Factors of Awakening” when I mentioned that the first factor was mindfulness and that this was really good for sorting out what is mind and what is body and when each is and isn’t there? That is because the first insight you are looking for, the one that allows you to see more deeply, is stage one: Mind and Body. Get it? This stuff is not random or arbitrary. It is all clearly laid out in a way that helps and fits with reality. In other words, the order is significant and worth respecting.
Remember how I said in that chapter that we should try to experience the intentions that precede actions and thoughts, as well as the mental impression or “consciousness” that follows all sensations? That is the key understanding in stage two: Cause and Effect. Thus, mindfulness is the first factor of awakening because it leads directly to the first two classic insights into the truth of what is going on. If you want insight into something, then looking precisely into that aspect of things is the best way to acquire that insight.
Once we have directly experienced these two insights, then the three characteristics begin to become obvious in stage three, which is exactly why the next factor of awakening is called investigation of the truth, i.e. Three Characteristics. The seven factors of awakening and the insight maps tell you exactly what you are trying to understand and why. You will not be able to directly understand the three characteristics without first being able to distinguish what is mind and what is body and the relationships between them. Without understanding the three characteristics, regardless of what you call them, you will not be able to advance. The Buddha laid it all out step by step. While this may seem unromantic, unpoetic, uncreative, and even dry, it is also extremely practical and without a doubt the clearest presentation of exactly how to wake up that I have ever seen presented in any spiritual system, just so my biases are made perfectly clear. In short, these maps and techniques can be profoundly empowering.
Once the three characteristics become clear, the mind naturally speeds up and becomes more powerful. This is because it finally begins to draw on its tremendous power to see things directly and investigate without processing them through thought. Anyone who has driven a car, played a video game, or done just about anything else, knows that you just do it, but if you try to think about every little thing you are doing, the action would be impossible.
This increase in mental power due to non-conceptual and direct experience is related to the third factor of awakening, energy. Energy may now even be blazing up and down the spinal cord, the mind gets bright and alert, and soon energy is flowing naturally, as we begin to enter the early part of stage four: Arising and Passing Away. Remember how this correlates with the second shamatha jhana, where applied and sustained attention or effort are no longer needed? They just happen on their own, to a large extent, and energy is naturally present. Thus, it all ties together.
The next factor of awakening is joy or rapture, which comes to predominate in the second vipassana jhana and the Arising and Passing Away, just as it does in the second shamatha jhana. Thus, all the important advice about rapture given earlier applies to the insight maps in Part Four. We are generally advised to avoid becoming a rapture- or kundalini-junkie in this stage, although I suppose that if this is your primary reason for meditating, it is certainly your right to do so. Just be wary of the inevitable crash.During the mature Arising and Passing Away, as well as in Dissolution (stage five), tranquility becomes important and more pronounced, but then becomes too strong in late Dissolution. Thus, it becomes important to build the sixth factor of awakening, concentration, and developing concentration is an oft-recommended strategy in the Dark Night.
Finally, when the Dark Night really kicks in, as it will once we can again find our objects and stay with them (Fear through Re-observation), then Equanimity in the face of all experience becomes vital for progress, as stated in Part One. Thus, Equanimity can arise and Path can be attained.As mentioned before, the maps fill in the seemingly huge, frustrating, and nebulous gap from doing something like sitting on a cushion paying attention to the sensations of your breath and finally awakening.The maps also tell you exactly what the common traps and temptations of each stage are. They warn people about not getting stuck in Mind and Body by solidifying it into a jhanic state, which it closely resembles. They provide comfort and explanation when things might get jerky, unpleasant, or even downright painful in stage three, Three Characteristics. They admonish people not to get too fascinated with how much of a mighty meditator they might feel like in stage four, Arising and Passing Away, and even to examine the sensations that make up the seemingly wondrous and tantalizing corruptions of insight such as equanimity and rapture. They warn of the possibility of thinking that we are enlightened when going though that stage, as well as saying that it is normal for wild and sometimes explosive experiences to occur.
I spoke with a friend who basically wanted me to help him rationalize that his recent A&P experiences occasionally allowed him to touch High Equanimity. My advice was that a much more helpful form of inquiry would be to notice the sensations of fascination with this issue and notice the sensations of the rest of his sensate universe come and go moment to moment. If he couldn’t manage this, he should be putting his time into trying to figure out how to get together enough money and vacation time to do another long retreat and/or how to increase his daily practice time and the thoroughness of his investigation.The maps clearly state that the process is not a particularly linear one, and that after the highs of the Arising and Passing Away there usually follow times of difficulty when all the spectacular power of the mind and pleasure of meditation gained in the Arising and Passing Away are likely to fade dramatically. They warn of the numerous difficulties that may be encountered in the Dark Night stages, as well as provide lots of information about how to deal with them. The most common mistake is failing to investigate the truth of sensations deemed undesirable or unpleasant. It is hard to get on more intimate terms with reality when we feel a bit too emotional, vulnerable, raw, openhearted, or shaken, and so progress through the insight stages that make up the Dark Night is not always easy.
While I do generally wish to avoid biting the hands that have fed me, I must say that not telling practitioners about this territory from the beginning to give them a heads-up as to what might happen is so extremely irresponsible and negligent that I just want to spit and scream at those who perpetuate this warped culture of secrecy. While many teachers may not do so because they don’t think many people will ever get this far, that in and of itself is a scary assumption that should cause some serious questioning of their teaching methods, techniques, and perhaps even motivations.
Imagine that there is a medication called Damnital that is used to treat some form of suffering (perhaps it’s a pain medicine or an antidepressant). However, in a subset of patients its long-term use is known to cause pronounced anxiety, paranoia, depression, apathy, micro-psychotic episodes, a pervasive sense of primal frustration, pronounced lack of perspective on relationships, reduced libido, feelings of dissatisfaction with worldly affairs, and exacerbation of personality disorders, all of which can lead to markedly reduced social and occupational functioning. Imagine that these side effects are known to persist sometimes months and even years after someone stops taking the medication, with occasional flare-ups and relapses, with the only effective treatment being to restart the meds, perhaps increase the dose, add supportive care and counseling, and hope that these side effects pass quickly with little damage.
Now, imagine that you are living in the dark days of paternalistic medicine during which doctors prescribe these practices without fully disclosing the potential side effects despite being fully aware of them. Imagine that drug companies are not required to disclose known side effects. Does anything in this scenario make you even a bit uncomfortable? I should hope so!
Let’s say for the sake of argument that I am a fanatic who is blowing this way out of proportion. Let’s assume that Damnital only causes these effects in one out of every ten thousand patients. Would you have these side effects included on the little piece of paper that comes in the bottle? Let’s say it’s one in a hundred? At what point does it become absurd that those doctors and drug companies are being allowed to get away with this? Unfortunately, I must admit that I do not know the exact odds of these side effects happening to you. I do know firsthand that they happen and that if you cross the A&P you are likely to run into at least some of them.
These side effects are no fantasy. When they show up they are as real and powerful as if some dangerous drug had seriously skewed your neurochemistry, and I often wonder if that might be something like what happens. Thus, it seems only fair to have the same standards that we apply with such pronounced zeal and fervent litigation to drug companies and doctors also apply to meditation teachers and dharma books. For reasons unknown to me, this book is the first one I know of to spell out all of these things explicitly in language that everyone should be able to understand so that you can go into meditation having been fully informed of the risks and benefits and thus make informed decisions about your own practice. In the spirit of professionalism, I call on others who promote the dharma to immediately adopt a similarly high standard of open disclosure of risks, benefits, and alternatives for their own work.""
shargrol For what it's worth... I think a big part of stress reduction aspect is just getting people aquainted by the idea that "presence" is a lower stress experience than "worrying about the future that is actually unknowable or remembering the troubled past that can't change". But worrying and remembering is basically automatic and fighting past memories or future thoughts to make a thought-and-memory-free present also creates stress... You can't stop it and you can't fix it. So what is the solution? Getting used to letting things be. Meditation is a chance to learn how to "let". It's the old joke that you can fight reality, but you'll only lose But once you let things be as they are, you can find a bigger sense of presence in that. It's actually possible to rest in the midst of worries and memories. It's a change in attitude more than forcing the mind to be in a particular way. So all the practice methods are there to create a container for "letting things be as they are" -- which really doesn't involve doing anything, but it's something humans have a hard time allowing unless they practice. Whatever the practice is, it needs one component that helps someone re-find the present (e.g. breathing sensations for mindfulness of breathing practice, or a holy world which is used in centering prayer) and a method for respectfully acknowledging unhelpful worries or memories (e.g. labelling them as "worry" and "remembering" in noting practice). And then you can say that by being mindful of all of this, there is a natural instinct to drop unhelpful worries and recurring memories over time, but that's something that is only learned through lots of low-effort repetition. The more you force it, the slower the progress But with a good, gentle, caring heart we create the best context for slowly learning this lesson and learn it deeply until it becomes an unconscious intelligence that doesn't get fooled. We learn to automatically recognize worry as worry and memory as a memory, and then we are confused and stressed out about them.
But once you let things be as they are, you can find a bigger sense of presence in that. It's actually possible to rest in the midst of worries and memories. It's a change in attitude more than forcing the mind to be in a particular way. So all the practice methods are there to create a container for "letting things be as they are" -- which really doesn't involve doing anything, but it's something humans have a hard time allowing unless they practice. Whatever the practice is, it needs one component that helps someone re-find the present (e.g. breathing sensations for mindfulness of breathing practice, or a holy world which is used in centering prayer) and a method for respectfully acknowledging unhelpful worries or memories (e.g. labelling them as "worry" and "remembering" in noting practice). And then you can say that by being mindful of all of this, there is a natural instinct to drop unhelpful worries and recurring memories over time, but that's something that is only learned through lots of low-effort repetition. The more you force it, the slower the progress But with a good, gentle, caring heart we create the best context for slowly learning this lesson and learn it deeply until it becomes an unconscious intelligence that doesn't get fooled. We learn to automatically recognize worry as worry and memory as a memory, and then we are confused and stressed out about them.shargrol You also owe it to them to say that sometimes people need help with this and that's what therapy is all about. Sometimes people have oppressive recurring worries or memories. Sometimes repressed trauma can bubble up in the safe place of mediation. It's a real thing and people need to know that. It's a real risk of meditation and it's only ethical that people know about it. You also owe it to them that practicing this a lot can leave to more spiritual experiences, both good and bad, and that's what religions with contemplative practice traditions are all about. This is a real thing and people need to know that. People also need to know to STOP if they feel uncomfortable and they should feel completely free to get up and leave the meditation hall at any time. You also owe it to them to say that you can't personally guarantee their safety and they really need to look out for themselves. If you scare them, that's fine. Better to scare people than to hide important information. Lots of ethical aspects of being a teacher.
shargrolI personally do not feel that people should attempt teaching what they don't already know proficiently.
shargrol DhO is a place where, unfortunately, a lot of people who were not warned or given good guidance (or who have no teacher, did a retreat without any discussion of possible risks/side effects, had a big opening and now they have no one to help them) show up and need help. I really wish teachers were much more forthcoming about the risks associated with meditation.
I agree, and it's not just the risks. I've seen people who clearly experienced some initial opening being told some very unhelpful things that have shut them right down. One of the things that impelled me to want to teach was my sense that I could offer more helpful perspectives.
Thanks for the MCTB quote; I like the medication simile.