What Are We Doing When We Teach RC?
When we teach RC, we are accelerating our own development and evolution. We are thinking of ourselves as significant, powerful, intelligent, and capable. We are respecting and following our human essence. We are aligning ourselves with the upward trend of the universe.
Teaching RC is a powerful dynamic that causes us to grow and know ourselves and to delve into our own re-emergence in an efficient manner, perhaps more so than for our students.
WHEN RC BECOMES OUR OWN
The moment comes in the practice of RC when a person feels that the ideas, practices, and projects of RC are also hers and make complete sense in her life. That is when she may take the plunge into sharing with one or more people what is being so important for her. She may be provided with teaching credentials that mean a commitment to her own re-emergence and the re-emergence of others by teaching RC.
Some of the largest resistance we face in ourselves is not to the practice of RC but to its diffusion. This can come from the fear (always old) of being visible in front of others and offering ideas and showing our commitment and adherence to them. Earlier in our lives when we tried to be ourselves, we were not always welcomed with open arms. It was more the opposite: we were criticized, shamed, reproached, or even punished or attacked.
Once we have discharged enough not to automatically believe the fear, we can start to believe and feel that some ideas are defendable and worth offering despite certain risks, and that we may know how to deal with the results of offering them more constructively than in previous periods of our lives.
When we have made our own the complete theoretical body of RC, we want to take care of it. Wanting to take care of something implies wanting to keep distresses from interfering with it. We also want to share it so that other minds can use it, benefit from it, and even improve it. That is when we are RC teachers. It is our project, and we organize to teach it to people whom we will want to have close to us for our whole lives, with whom we will practice RC and develop it together.
WHO AND HOW MANY TO TEACH
The people we teach will need us at the beginning, while they are still under the strong effects of living in an oppressive, not very humane system that has filled their minds with distresses, confusions, and incorrect information. They will observe us and consider us an important person who is offering them a different perspective. We will be crucial until they can produce for themselves a perspective outside of their distresses. To get to their own perspective outside of distress can take one class or a decade, depending on how much direct support we can invest in their re-emergence, in their finding their own intelligence and maintaining it in direct contact with ours.
That is one way to decide which students and how many we want in a class. Logically, it is those whom we are able to reach in this way. I don’t think it would make sense to recruit more people than that. To do so would demonstrate a lack of understanding of the mutual support and re-emergent relationships needed and what Community building means. If we are not going to be totally in charge of these students (until they decide to be members of the Community), we are going to have to delegate them to other people. I don’t think that would represent our full responsibility toward everything that surrounds us.
Does this mean that only we will be in charge of them? No. We are going to think and design their re-emergence together with other people: our assistant, the experienced members of the Community whom we invite to our class, the organizer of the class, the interpreters, the local Co-Counsellors with whom the students can have three-way sessions (that include us, until they can trust and have individual sessions with people besides us).
It is a process of continuously thinking about others, which leads to continuously thinking about ourselves and what we need to discharge to be that close and consultable, reachable.
This is a way for me to calculate the number of people I can reach and be a reference for until they “become independent” from me. It is not a standard model to follow (far from it) and perhaps cannot work in some other places. It is only an example—among many others possible—of how we should continuously be thinking about everything and everyone once we decide to become teachers (leaders) of RC.
Donostia, Gipuzkoa, Basque Country
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC teachers
(Present Time 183, April 2016)