Welcome back to the Wisdom Workshop newsletter — an almost-weekly missive by educator and artist Sean Waters.
This is S2:E4 of the Art of Living Beautifully, explores non-attachment and dreams.
and we’re one week away from S15:E1 of Writing the Good Life! more on that below.
This week, I watched “A Cloud Never Dies” a documentary about the moral beauty of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Monk Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Thích Nhất Hạnh was known for his Engaged Buddhism: speaking out against the United States war in Vietnam, he penned fourteen precepts that include a commitment to non-attachment of views, an increasing awareness of suffering, a responsibility to care, a conservation of energy, an injunction to live simply. A complete way of being in the world. My favorite of his fourteen precepts:
“Plant seeds of joy, peace, and understanding in yourself in order to facilitate the work of transformation in the depths of your consciousness.”
Considering this as an example of a teacher who created, embodied, and engaged his life’s work — I thought about how my own commitments might inspire my creative practice as an educator and artist, and found myself asking:
What if I took a “spiritual approach” to continuing education?
What does that even mean?
Five Themes of a Spiritual Education
“Are you waking up?”
— Amara"By having reverence for life, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the world."
— Albert SchweitzerThere are many who seek knowledge for the sake of knowledge: that is curious. There are others who desire to know in order that they may themselves known: that is vanity. Others seek knowledge in order to sell it: that is dishonorable. But there are some who seek knowledge in order to edify others. That is love.”
—St. Bernard of Clairvaux, qtd. in Spirituality, Philosophy, and Education.“Spiritual mentoring is not about dictating answers to the deep questions of life. It is about helping young people to find questions that are worth asking because they are worth living, questions worth wrapping one's life around.”
—P.J. Palmer, qtd. in Spirituality, Philosophy, and Education.“There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
— Rumi
Btw, I’m not advocating for or against a spiritual education, whatever that means.1
Drawing from my own spiritual vows and the continual influence of my own spiritual teachers, these five themes emerged that, I hope, point towards a more engaged education to draw out and bring forth a deepening awareness of who we are and what is real. Here are the five:
Cultivating Energy: an Orientation Beyond the Self
Lim Loehr — performance psychologist and writer — identifies four sources of energy : rest, nutrition, movement, and spirituality. For Loehr, our spirituality is our orientation to something greater than ourselves. A devotion to a craft, a set of principles, values, and/or religious ideals.
In practice, we’d improve our vocabularies of what matters beyond ourselves. At work, a lifelong spiritual education would promote fuller engagement. Here’s the Harvard Business Review on why renewing energy is better than managing time.
A Holistic, Integrative Study of the Self
Next door to orienting to something greater than ourselves, somehow, knowing thyself may be the primary spiritual exercise2. And putting on our own oxygen mask can be tricky.
In practice, we would educate our bodies (somatic intelligence), our feelings (emotional intelligence), our social fields (social intelligence), our cultural histories (critical intelligence), our minds (analytic intelligence), and our orientations to meaning, life, and death (spiritual intelligence) with imaginative play, improv, humor, or invitational creative writing.
Making Meaning
We attend carefully to our language and metaphors, our values and principles. Being sensitive to how we make make meaning, we affirm the power of language and maintain sensitivity to the shades of how we might relate to meaning: “making,” “searching,” “awakening,” “aligning with,” “embodying” and more.
In practice, we might pay attention to what we pay attention to. Notice and note synchronicities — to become more receptive to the exceptional encounters that might point us in the direction of personal growth. We could ask ourselves each morning: what is most alive for me today? Where am I being drawn? And each night, we could ask: what exceptional encounters did I notice? What do they mean?
Beyond Dogma
We respect and may embody religious commitments, but we’re not attached to them. We embrace the uncertainty of the future, the pervasive mysteries of life and death that no one has a monopoly on. We explore scientific explanations of phenomena, but see modern science in historical, cultural contexts.
In the words of Thích Nhất Hạnh: we “practice non-attachment to views, freedom from ideologies as a direct answer to the war. We are determined not to be idolatrous about any theory, doctrine or ideology, even Buddhist ones.”
Inter-Subjective Listening
The persons we are, in the genes that we replicate, co-arising with our social environments. We’re one-of-a-kinds. Snowflakes, if you will. Incarnations that life-designers might call iterations. And we’re back to questions about language and meaning, storytelling, and caring, deep listening to each other.
In practice, we would esteem, honor, and be awed at the dazzling variety of subjective experiences of meaning, energy, and selfhood. We might create psychologically safe spaces for true dialogue as David Bohm articulated3. When we come together, we appreciate the whole-as-parts and the parts-as-whole.
That sounds pretty good.
In Lieu of a Conclusion
“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
- Socrates"There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it."
- Edith Wharton
My research this week suggested that there are as many spiritual approaches to education as there are educators who consider themselves spiritual.45
This immediately resonates with the Wisdom Workshop, and I’m curious about finding other “spiritual educators” who are looking for meaningful ways to embody a holistic approach to know thyself and do good in the world.
With gratitude for the gift of making art at all,
Here’s to waking up to our potentials,
Sean
P.S. Writing the Good Life 15 starts Wednesday, March 20th!
If you want to start and keep a transformative journaling habit this spring, consider joining us for this one-of-a-kind, seven week cohort-based workshop on the intersection of mindful writing and active life design. Enrollment is $700 or $50/month.
🎉 And we’re doing three springtime specials!6
(1) Refer a friend and get $200 : $100 for you / $100 for them
(2) New Substack subscribers get $200 off
(3) Buy one, get one free for a friend or partner
This spring, we’re bringing a focus on the JOY of growth as we (re-) read Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, and The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path For Higher Creativity.
The syllabus for Season 15 of Writing the Good Life is here.
The curriculum is designed specifically for teachers, coaches, writers, and helping professionals who are in life-transitions.
Thank you thank you thank you!
In 2006, researchers who examined the relationships between spirituality and health found twenty-seven distinct definitions of “spirituality” among which “there was little agreement.” To quote the Wikipedia: “this causes some difficulty.”
“We are not, as a culture, going to make much progress on this crucial issue of educating the human spirit until we found out who we are. And right now we don’t a a clue.” — Scholar and historian of religion Huston Smith in The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education.
In “Spiritual Capital: A Framework for Spirituality-Infused Leadership Education and Organizational Spirituality,” Alain Adrian Noghiu argues that we ought to see spirituality as a “form of capital rather than merely as a personal capacity, trait, or activity. . . introducing structure-oriented understanding.” Excellent consideration: to be able to measure, invest, and consider the spiritual dimensions of organizational intelligence.
See the work of Dr. Ashwani Kumar, who studies “Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry.” In 2022, he edited Engaging with Meditative Inquiry in Teaching, Learning, and Research: Realizing Transformative Potentials in Diverse Contexts, “aspiring to awaken awareness, intelligence, compassion, collaboration, and aesthetic sensibility among students and their teachers through self-reflection, critique, dialogue, and creative exploration.” Word!
Email sean@wisdomworkshop.io for promo codes.