We Often Teach Backwards

We often begin by giving people information.

I think we have this backwards.

We don't live in a time when information is scarce. We have more information at our fingertips than perhaps any people in human history. And yet having access to more information has not necessarily made us wiser, more connected, more compassionate, or more whole.

We don't have a lack of information. We have a lack of embodiment.

Knowing about something is different from knowing it.

This distinction shapes how I teach.

In my five-day Circle training, for example, I spend roughly the first two and a half days allowing people to experience what it feels like to be in Circle before I give them much methodology.

I want their bodies to know Circle before their minds are asked to understand it.

I want them to experience the pace, the listening, the relationship, the silence, the discomfort, the connection, and the field that becomes possible when human beings gather differently.

Then we can talk about methodology.

Because once someone knows what Circle feels like, they have something deeper than a set of instructions to guide them.

They can look for the feeling rather than constantly asking:

Am I doing this right?

That difference matters.

When methodology comes first, we can become preoccupied with imitation. We learn the steps. We repeat the language. We perform the practice correctly.

But correctness does not necessarily create embodiment.

Experience gives us something to integrate.

Then information can help us understand what we have experienced. Practice allows us to return to it intentionally. Reflection helps us make meaning. Over time, what we once had to consciously practice begins to live within us.

Experience → Feeling → Meaning Making → Methodology → Practice → Integration → Embodiment

Eventually, by focusing on the feeling of the experience the practice isn't something I am trying to do correctly.

It has become part of how I know how to be.

This is true far beyond Circle.

It is true of leadership.

It is true of racial healing.

It is true of grief.

It is true of community.

It is true of spirituality.

And it is true of our relationship with the Earth.

Transformation does not happen simply because the mind understands something.

The body has to know it.

There are even times when the body knows and the mind doesn't and everything is fine.