Session 1: Listening To and Honoring The Inner Teacher

January 21, 2023 // 9am-11am ET

Join the session here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81788771047?pwd=ZE41TnZwTVRVUFhrUDZqYUpzcFhuUT09

Meeting ID: 817 8877 1047

Passcode: 452564

“We all have an inner teacher whose guidance is more reliable than anything we can get from a doctrine, ideology, collective belief system, institution, or leader.” -Parker J. Palmer

Session Overview

In the first session, we’ll give welcome, speak to what you can expect from this program, and introduce the Courage & Renewal Touchstones that define the clear boundaries we use to help create trustworthy space. We’ll focus most intently on recognizing the reality of your inner teacher and reflecting on what helps you listen to and honor its guidance. During the session, you’ll have time to reflect in smaller groups on the questions below.

In advance of the session, we also encourage you to read the Courage & Renewal Touchstones document to start familiarizing yourself with them, as well as an excerpt from Chapter II of A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer that talks about the inner teacher. Those two readings are provided below. Lastly, we invite you to watch the video below of Parker speaking about the significance of the inner teacher.

Questions for Reflection

How has your inner teacher guided you to be here today?

What helps you “hear” your “inner teacher?” What helps you discern its guidance?

“You are the only you that has ever lived. Your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences. And if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” -Howard Thurman

“The source of our integrity – the genuine within us – goes by many names: soul, true self, inner light, identity. When we connect with that part of ourselves and celebrate it in others, we gain a clearer understanding of who we truly are, why we’re here, and the gifts we bring to the world individually and collectively.”

Additional Quotes from Session 1:

In Embers, his posthumously published journal, the Ojibway author and storyteller Richard Wagamese who made his home in Canada shared this insight:

“MY SPIRITUAL FATHER once told me, ‘Nothing in the universe ever grew from the outside in.’ I like that. It keeps me grounded. It reminds me to be less concerned with outside answers and more focused on the questions inside. It’s the quest for those answers that will lead me to the highest possible version of myself.”

The American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator Nikki Giovanni, in conversation with James Baldwin in A Dialogue expressed this truth: “If you don’t understand yourself, you don’t know anybody else.” To which Baldwin insightfully replied, “Power without some sense of oneself is to me another kind of instability…”

Our colleague Parker J. Palmer writes “…from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all our clues about living from people and powers around us.” Yet, “we are born with a seed of selfhood that contains the spiritual DNA of our uniqueness – an encoded birthright knowledge of who we are, why we are here, and how we are related to others.”