Amy Oscar

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A message from the most powerful teacher I have ever known: me

I had this thing I used to do with ‘gurus’ – the people who seemed to hold the secret key to the universe. I idolized them.I built them into statues of themselves and lay rose petals around the feet of my idea of them. If I happened to meet one, at a workshop or workplace, I’d freeze – going into this weird spastic freak out that  jammed my circuits and made lose touch with myself until I couldn't speak. So afraid they'd see through me I shrunk myself away.What I didn’t understand was that the anxiety that I felt with successful people was guidance - an invitation to be successful, too; and, the bone-chilling dread that I felt, as if I were standing outside of myself looking in, was guidance, too.A message from the most powerful teacher I have ever known: me. Well, not me exactly, not in the way most people think of the word. The teacher I now know as ME, the I Am self that was calling me home.Back then, I never would have understood that. I would have said that something outside of me was calling to me, guiding me. Which is fine - it still works.Back then, I had no idea who I was.  I had no idea how to be. My primary role models, my parents, were unusual. My father has cerebral palsy, a birth ‘defect’ which, though he would have preferred it to be otherwise became the defining fact of his life - and, by extension, mine.His facial tics and lurchy way of walking obscured his beauty, his athleticism, his grace. It also set him apart from ‘normal’ people so persistently that he was unable to fully feel his life. He was often angry, very controlling, a bit of a bully and, in later years, depressed.My mother had a different kind of ‘defect’. Severely abused by a troubled family, her fragile and gentle psyche broke into pieces. A painter, a poet, a prism of paradox - she was wildly creative one moment, stutteringly timid the next;. My mother was scholarly, brilliant about art, music, and the natural world while distressingly naive about the simplest things: how to talk on the phone, apply makeup or put an outfit together.I felt like a freak. People stared at us. Then, they looked away. Several times, when I fell behind, walking more slowly than my father on a sidewalk, I saw people turn back to look again - curious about “that man who has something wrong with him.”Once, I overheard a woman whisper, “He must be drunk. How disgusting.” I wanted to shout at her - to defend my dad. I wanted to push her to the ground and hurt her as much as her words had hurt me. To this day, I continue to send love to the little girl inside of my heart who regrets that I did not do it.Instead, I walked stiffly forward. Desperate to just feel normal.I began to bury the parts of myself that were anything like my freakish family. As a result, I had no idea how to be. I lost the thread of the gifts my parents gave to me - their gentleness and wisdom, their artfulness and love of nature - as I searched for escape from the story I was in.I began by studying my friends’ parents. I noticed the way they dressed, the way they acted. I studied the rooms of their homes. I snooped through their closets and medicine cabinets.I can still remember standing in the kitchen at my friend Freddi’s house, staring into the gleaming (and huge) side-by-side refrigerator, studying: the iceberg lettuce in its glass bowl; the milk in a glass bottle, cap on; the barbecued chicken, cut neatly into quarters; the perfect cube of margarine wrapped in gold foil.I didn’t know I was studying them. I was simply following my hunger, my longing to find adults who ‘felt’ normal. Who felt 'right' to me. I seem to have been questing for relatedness - some sort of 'being witnessed' which I wasn't getting at home.I studied Edith, the mother of my childhood friend, who lived next door. Like my mom, Edith was a painter. But unlike my mom, she seemed to have no trouble organizing her life around being a mom, too. Edith's house was tidy. Her schedule firm. You knew what to expect. Each Christmas, there'd be 'bullah', a Swedish sweet bread which Edith fashioned into soft, buttery wreaths, scented with cardamom and just a soupçon of lemon. Sprinkled with crystal sugar. OMG! Heaven!I studied Carol Burns. Well, actually, I RAN to her. Carol had eight children of her own and maybe if I hung around at her busy, joyful home, she’d let me stay for supper. A whirlwind of activity, Carol took in laundry and ironing for money, volunteered with the needy, and somehow managed to love and care for all of those kids. She was a powerful, palpable force of love and when she looked you in the eye, you knew she was seeing you.Mrs. Quillard, my kindergarten teacher let me sit on her lap when I was frightened. Mr. Murphy, my sixth grade teacher, drew on the blackboard in colored chalk and told stories instead of handing out worksheets.In 9th grade, in a book by John Steinbeck, The Pearl,  I discovered literary metaphor and, as Pablo Neruda writes, in his "Poetry Poem" "... something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings," and I, too, began to make my own way, "deciphering that fire."  For the rest of my life, I would have this secret language, hidden in a secret pocket of the world, yet displayed in full view, the pulse of God in the world, and in me. I'd found my teacher.After that, there was Mr. Liquori and the color-saturated travel slides he shone on the wall of his tenth grade social studies classroom. And the petite science teacher, whose name I cannot recall, who wore high heels and mini-dresses yet possessed the soul of a furred animal. She reconnected me (finally) to nature and my inner botanist was born.And Carol Mitch, who gave me the gift of cell biology - and the greater gift of seeing me as a scientist. And Marcia Levy, playing scratchy Simon and Garfunkel records on the turntable as she wept into a tissue, opening my heart -  to poetry, to adults, to another braided gift, music that wasn't just background noise but meant something. My grandmother took me to see Fiddler on the Roof, which told her story. My father took me to see Jesus Christ Superstar, for reasons I don't know. From these plays and books, I learned about Judaism and Christianity. Buddha came to me through Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. Religion was a muddle to me. I'd never heard of - or more likely, simply couldn't fathom - the depths of Hinduism, Islam, Tao.Though my soul was searching for the mysteries these traditions held, their practices confused and frustrated me. Like many seekers, I would find my way to faith through the new age movement.I tried - and studied - all of it. (Well, most of it. Embodied practice - like yoga - didn't yet call to me. That would take time. I was sorting around in metaphysical rainbow space. (And again, all without hallucinogens.)Fast-forwarding through that time:Tarot Cards, Crystal Magic, Reading Auras.Chakras. Energy Medicine. Hugging and talking with trees.Past lives - as a high priestess, a spirit trapped in stone and a nature spirit.Channeling Archangels and Aliens.Werner Ehrhard. Tony Robbins. Ramtha.Blavatsky. Alice Bailey. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.Dorothea Maclean. Elementals and Angels.I devoured books like one starving for words. Which I was. These words. All of them.I consumed books as fire consumes paper. I was working as a Systems Analyst by then, working with computers and corporate bankers and lawyers, but every day on my lunch hour, I sat on the floor of Samuel Weiser's basement bookstore with an iced latte and a tower of titles: all of them glowing.Oh those were marvelous times! Om Nama Shivaya.Eventually, I made my way to DMA, where Robert Fritz, the founder of the (not so humbly) named, Institute for Human Evolution, was teaching people to use the creative process that artists have always known, to create the lives they wanted.By day, I served as the Associate Director of the NY office. By weekend, I was whipping through Fritz's entire catalog of courses: Advanced Teacher Training, Macrostructural Pattering, Additive Picturing. (Aren’t these names wonderful?)I began to lead sections of our four- day teacher training. "You’ll be leading this whole training soon,” Fritz told me one day. I was 27 years old and a glittering path lay before me.One day, I looked out from the stage and saw, hovering over the heads of 200 people, a blanket of undulating white light.  Awed, I felt special and confident and completely at home.Until, one day, I didn’t. I was on stage, fielding questions from the group, when a man in the back row raised his hand. I can still see his face. He looked tired, sad and worried. I can't remember the exact question he asked but I do remember that it was about his daughter, who was roughly my age. I do remember that he was aching with longing. And he was reaching out for help.Looking back, I imagine that he said something like this: “I’m 50 years old and in a few months, my daughter will graduate from college and I will be alone. And I don’t know what to do with this sadness.”I felt as if I'd been struck by lightning. And suddenly, I was standing in a circle of light. Everything else - the 200 people in the audience, the other trainers, the hotel staff - seemed suspended in time, frozen as I stood there,  having a conversation with ... God? But this wasn't the God I'd read about and heard about. This was ... God. Saturating me. Soaking into me. Vibrating through me like a gong - I was the gong, and I was being rung, body, mind and soul.I recognized this feeling - and this voice. It was the same voice I'd heard in middle school, in high school, each time a new layer of mystery opened before me - metaphor, symbol, poetry, cell biology. A 'voice' that was a vibratory shift - that gong ringing. What's more, I knew this voice as intimately I knew the inside of my own face.The 'voice' was ringing a question through me. I was being offered a choice: Give the 'story' you're supposed to give, the canned response you've been trained to offer or find and tell the truth. Two paths opened out before me and I stood at the fork in the road.On the first path, I would speak the party line and deliver my teacher's message. I'd be promoted, quickly, and go on to lead teacher trainings across the country.On the second path, I would tell the truth - my truth: I didn't have an answer for this man's suffering. I was not yet that teacher. Then, I would step from the stage and enter a different sort of training program. One that would take longer, and require much more of me but which just might, on a day far in the future, lead to another stage, and another sort of truth-telling: my own.It was that clear. Like staring into a diamond - and seeing rainbow light. Like looking into a mirror and seeing your future self look back.I told the truth. And as I stepped from the stage, that gong still ringing through me, I knew: I am done here. I was not yet ready to change the world with my wisdom. I didn’t have any wisdom yet.So, that's how I enrolled myself in mystery school. I didn't know it then. In fact, back then, I felt like a failure. I'd never go on to lead teacher trainings. I wasn't ready. A few months later, I was pregnant with my first child.So, here is where we come full circle and I can tell you about that guru: the most powerful guru I have ever encountered: me.For on that stage, a new aspect of myself had opened its eyes, a steady, silent awareness that was tethered to a truth that I know as I Am. A built-in teacher slash companion slash counselor slash playmate slash wisdom keeper who is as solid and real and complete as it is possible to be - and who, mysteriously, incredibly also permeates everything, all the time, everywhere.I began to feel the presence of an internal energy reading device, which felt constantly for resonance and congruence. Without being told: "You are being trained to read energy," I knew: I am being trained to read energy.It was automatic. It was steady. Every choice was held up to this inner core of knowing and compared to it. When I chose toward alignment, things worked. When I chose out of alignment, things went wrong.The more that I worked with this skill, the more acute - the more ‘heightened’ - it became.  Like any other skill, it took practice and sometimes, effort. The feedback I received was remarkably consistent: alignment felt good - things felt flowy, energized and I felt engaged. When I was out of alignment, I felt an inner blip, as if on a radar screen or a pinch of warning that reminded me: Pay attention!I learned to calibrate my thoughts and actions to align with what felt right. I learned to avoid what felt wrong.And here is the moment when I need to stop and explain a few things:1) There is no outside force controlling me or you. This is a conversation with our own divine nature. We are free to pursue it or ignore it. This 'training' is more like an entrainment. More a steady and step-by-step reasoned and reasonable discovery of how the world works.2) Everyone reads energy - you, me, your cat and your mother-in-law. Your boss reads energy. Your mechanic reads energy. And so does the waiter who just took your sandwich order. Everyone, everywhere reads energy all day long.It's just that I seemed to be watching myself read energy. I seemed to be witnessing my progression from sleepy kind-of intuitive person to wide awake mystic teacher.And I seemed to have a friend, a helpful watcher walking through all of this with me: an inner witness/teacher who showed up in dreams and waking life to pull my attention toward the latest study subject (which was most often, me): Look. See how you blame others for your unhappiness? See how that story you just told was not really true? Look! Always the message was the same: Look. Know yourself. Know the world.Meanwhile, I was living a normal life - packing lunches, driving carpools, building a PTA. And when my kids entered middle school, I was also working full-time, as a magazine editor.Still, all the while, the voice was there, calling: Look! Notice! Stay awake. I’m reminded of the Rumi poem, in which he writes, “Don’t go back to sleep.”  This was like that.I don't remember what sparked the acceleration which followed. I do know that something happened - some inner shift away from fear toward opening. I know this because it's a pattern - it's how things happen. I know because I understand now what I did not understand then, that expanded awareness is always here and always available to us. That we open a little at a time or we open with a great big cracking. My way has been the slower way and, perhaps, the more cautious. Whatever the catalyst for the acceleration, it began here: one day, while interviewing a story subject, a new window of consciousness opened, a little room of awareness which seemed to be located just outside my head, to the upper right of my forehead. Inside of this 'room', I could see this woman's story. (This was also the first time that, as something was happening, I was able to receive 'more' information about it at the same time - as if the experience was part of a wholeness, which contained both information and activity. (What I now call a 'holographic download', but which, back then, I just felt like another inner 'gong' as it penetrated all the levels of my awareness at once.)I saw/sensed that I had always been able to do this story-seeing trick. I saw that this ability wasn't being added on to me but was being illuminated, as if a flashlight had been turned on inside a previously dark room. That room had always been there. I had been there before. (As I write this, it may help if I explain that this room is where, as a child, I would translate the animal communication, which I received through my body and intuition. And it was this room where I solved spelling and math puzzles. This room is probably where I go when a story or a film takes me out of present time into its world. Though I'm not sure of that last thing. I will have to watch next time, and report back.)During the interview, as this woman and I spoke and I watched her story assemble itself inside of the room of awareness - I saw that this story - and by extension, all story - was a kind of architecture. With story, a world of connections were made: literally constructed, out of blocks of emotion and threads of thought, waves of feeling and dots of ideas. And all of this - blocks and threads, waves and dots, were pulled into connection in an invisible ordering process which made 'sense' of it all. I could also see what didn't fit - what didn't fit the 'sense' of her story.  Blanked out spaces, gaps that seemed smudged away - or hidden behind fog.When I asked her questions about the missing bits, she gasped."How did you see that?" she asked. "How did you do that? I never made that connection! But it's true - and it changes everything!"At first, I couldn’t control it - the little window would pop on sometimes. Other times, silence. But mostly, it was becoming more clear and easier to work with.It was at that time that a friend handed me a taped set of Caroline Myss's Energy Anatomy. I listened with tears in my eyes. Finally, the magic I’d been searching for! Finally, a teacher who saw the world as I did - symbolically, meaningfully but also, scientifically.I enrolled at CMED, Caroline’s own institute in 2005. There I studied patterns of consciousness and archetypal counseling. At the same time, people in my office started talking to me about their spiritual lives. What’s happening? I asked, and the voice, on whom I’d come to rely, responded: You’re teaching.At work, I felt a growing unease: wasn’t there something more important, more meaningful that I was supposed to be doing? I felt as if I’d been weaving something and dropped a thread. But where - and what thread?Something was terribly wrong. One day, at a meeting at work, I burst into tears for no reason at all. When my bewildered editor asked, “What’s wrong?” I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.And you know what, even as I sit here, 11 years later to recount this story to you, I see something new.For that is the exact same answer I gave to that 50-year-old man from the stage that day. "I don't know," I told my editor. And as I walked from her office, the 'voice' returned: Yes you do. It said, loud and clear. And with it, the memory of that moment on the stage came rushing back.Which is how, on my way back from my editor's office, while standing by the copy machine, I was struck by lightning for the second time.Just like the first time, I was standing in a spotlight as everything around me stopped moving. Just like the first time, I felt the deep gong of awakened presence. I was shown the stage and reminded of how very much I'd loved working with these concepts. How much I'd loved teaching and helping people to discover who and what they were capable of.As I was reminded, I was watching my own story be threaded together like a broken strand of pearls. I was seeing how everything that had happened to me since that moment had led to this one. And a strong cord of knowing was anchored into my heart. That path that I'd chosen all those years ago was opening to me now. It was time for me to teach now, from  my own experience - my own wisdom. And this time, I was ready.That night, I fell to the sofa with a blinding headache: God, I prayed. Please use my life. Give me something meaningful to do - and please, oh, please make it about more than just me. Two days later, I was asked to design and launch a weekly column about angels.Once that happened, everything changed.The angels drafted me into mystery school.They showered me with signs and blessings. They completely changed my life.I was ready now. But first, in order to integrate everything that had happened to me - and was still happening for this expansion doesn’t end, but unfolds and unfolds - I needed a context, a container in which to hold it all. What I needed was a new story - a deeper, wider story that could contain the world in which I lived physically AND the world I’d discovered behind my eyes.I began to talk about what was happening to me. Friends called, asking for guidance. Colleagues gathered around my desk to talk about God. I didn’t notice it at first. One day, my boss called me into her office, asking for guidance.(This had happened once before. But I wasn’t ready then.)I began to understand - and as I did, new gifts were added on to me, new visions shared. I began to see, sense and know things that other people could not see.  I contained this, too, as best I could.I got some training -  from Caroline Myss and Doreen Virtue and several gifted healers, story masters and many, many books.I was also being trained - directly and specifically - by the angels.I was guided to exactly what I needed. Connections were made, doors swung open. I began to write about it - and, as I did, I saw that doors had always opened when I was on the right path. Connections had always led me where I was meant to be.In 2011, I self-published Sea of Miracles. I released it. People started reading it and their lives started to change. And then, two months later, the angels woke me up. It was 4:44 a.m. As I opened my eyes, I saw/felt/sensed a single phrase: It was there all along. It’s for you. It’s all for you. That phrase hung in the liminal space that I have come to know well - the room of awareness just above and outside of the right side of my head. There, I saw with certainty, precision and complete clarity, what I can only call ‘an invitation.” Write it down, I heard/knew/understood.I raced for my pen and tried to keep up as a fully-fashioned five-week training program poured through me onto the page. The Soul Caller Training was written in 18 hours - with a 10 hour break to eat dinner, sleep and wake up to begin again. At the time, as the work flowed through me, I knew it as “The Flow Materials”. I understood that this was part one of a larger body of work that would continue to flow, if I wanted it to and if I opened to it.I let it flow - and, with a lot of iced tea and much support from the wait staff at Panera Bread, just two days after awakening with that download, I was done.I was sitting outside at Panera Bread in the Woodcliff Lake Shopping Center. It was somewhere around lunch time and I was putting the finishing touches on things when I felt my attention drawn away from the page. I looked up to find a van driving by with the word “FLOW” emblazoned on its side along with the illustration of a rushing faucet. I laughed. After my experiences with the My Guardian Angel column - and writing Sea of Miracles - signs like this had become a part of my everyday life.My relationship with the call and response universe is entertaining - full of bright coincidences like this one. I turned back to my work, smiling. A moment later, my attention was called again. I looked up and the FLOW truck was passing once more. As I sat there, the driver circled me three times. Finally, he pulled out of the parking lot and drove off.A moment later, “So you believe in miracles?” a woman’s voice asked.Surprised, I turned. She was dressed all in white – white jeans, a white, nicely fitted stretch tee shirt, white socks. Even her shopping bags – and there were several: from Chico’s, Banana Republic… – were white. Except for her sneakers, which were black; and her straw hat, white from head to toe. She had a warm and welcoming presence – not overly friendly but engaging. She gestured to the book I’d left open on my table: A Course in Miracles.“Ohhhh” I said. Then, “Yes, I believe in miracles.”“And are you a teacher of that course – of miracles?” she asked. Which was a really interesting question, wasn’t it? Especially since the passage I’d been reading in ACIM was all about the characteristics of God’s teachers. (And I’d been reading it because, as I was leaving the house that morning, my attention had been drawn to the book - which had been sitting on my shelf for YEARS, unread.)“Yes,” I said.“And where do you teach?”“Online,” I said.“So you teach that course - online?’“Well, yes, but not exactly. I mean…” stammer, stammer. “I use this book – it’s one of many I use – as a jumping off point for my work. But I teach my own material. My own work.”“Oh,” she smiled. “What’s your work called?”Now, at that point I had taken a few classes on platform building, something you have to be able to do if you want to be a teacher online. So, I ‘d been feeling for a title for this material that would resonate with the reader and would, also contain the bright energy of this work. So, with all of that pressure working inside of me - I choked. “Um…. “ I felt put on the spot - and I felt my cheeks heat up. I wasn’t ready to give up the name of this work - it felt vulnerable, tender, too new and precious. Instead, I pointed to the book. “This isn’t what I teach - this material came through years ago… um… this is the work that Marianne Williamson teaches out of.”She looked at me. Her eyes were so direct, so blue. “And your work, your class,” she repeated. “What’s it called?”Cheeks flushing, I felt for a response. This was EXACTLY what I was thinking about when she interrupted me. There were several names that feel resonant to me:  Soul Caller, The Parallel Path. So, with all of that swirling in my head – along with my genuine concern that if she asked me: What’s it about? I would have to come up with the ‘elevator speech’ version of this crazy and wild work on the spot – I blurted, “The Soul Caller Training.”“Good name,” she said, and then, she returned to her lobster salad sandwich.I blinked.I looked down at my work. I glanced back up at her... more than a few times. She wasn’t reading anything. I offered her my book.”No thank you,” she smiled. Then, she gathered up her white shopping bags and walked toward the parking lot.“Goodbye,” she waved. I watched her like a hawk.By then, I had written hundreds – and read thousands – of stories about mysterious strangers like this: people who appear out of the blue, engage with someone, deliver important guidance and disappear without a trace.I watched her because, frankly, I wanted something life-altering to happen. Her words had felt charged with meaning - important. But, you know, that could just be me - doing some magical thinking. And wouldn't it make this story 'really' amazing if I could prove (to whom, I wonder now?) that this woman was an embodied angel and that i was being allowed to peek behind the veil.Angels show up all over the place – so why not a little cafe in northern New Jersey? And for that matter, why not for ME?In the stories that I’ve read, these helpful and mysterious strangers behave in ways that telegraph some kind of ‘difference’ that alerts us that this person is ever so slightly … um… unusual. Perhaps they read someone’s mind; perhaps they say our name, when there is no way they might know our name. Perhaps, as in this story, they are dressed unusually – and they engage us in a discussion that answers a question we need answered. And then, they disappear without a trace.I wanted to see her disappear. I watched her walk to her car - a white family van – either Mercedes or Lincoln – and load her white shopping bags into the hatchback. I watched her climb in, and begin to back out of her parking spot.I only glanced away for a second. I swear. I looked down to catch the papers that had fluttered up in a sudden breeze. And of course, when I looked up, her car was gone.I stood up, scanning the parking lot in every direction. Nothing.I was left, like all the other people reporting such incidents with both the certainty and the doubt that accompanies such encounters.■Was she sent to deliver a message or was it a coincidence?■Had her car disappeared into thin air or had she pulled around a corner and driven out of an exit I could not see?■Had she been an angel or a nice older woman, interested in life, in the cover of a book she saw on my cafe table?■If she wasn’t an angel, does our conversation ‘count’?The answers to all of these questions is the same: Yes. Anyone can deliver a message from The Divine.  The only thing that matters is that we keep asking questions, and listening for the answers.I end with another passage from A Course in Miracles: “It is crucial to say first that this is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you establish the curriculum. It means only thata you can elect what to take when. It is just because you are not ready to do what you should elect to do that time exists at all. (You will see miracles through your hands through me. You should begin each day with the prayer ‘Help me to perform whatever miracles you want of me today.’)”That work wasn’t just an invitation to me - it was an invitation to call you into mystery school, too.Two years later, the angels started waking me up again - it was time to develop this book. They’re waking up other teachers too. And political leaders and revolutionaries all across the world. The call is the same: Come home to love. Re-occupy your body, your heart, your mind - your life. Reanimate the story that you came to the planet to live.Why the soul caller training works1) through mountaintop perspective, it shifts the reader into the center of her own story2) it awakens the reader to the most powerful force on the planet: her own imagination and teaches her to see her own projections3) through blessing, it embraces the ego (and other disowned parts of the soul) and includes them4) through forgiveness, it heals the primal wound of separation5) the angels help me to teach it  - in every class, students receive signs: feathers, coins, visitations, dreams, birds, butterflies, hummingbirds. They hear words whispered directly into their ears. They receive clear, credible proof that there is more to the world than they’ve been toldAll of this arrives easily, organically - because the student is ready.And today, I find myself here again. Standing on the edge of something new, emerging from the roiling oneness. I'm forming into something solid, something real. With new eyes, I saw that everything in my life had led to this moment: every job, every encounter, every experience - all of it, a boot camp in being me. And my ‘unusual’ parents? They weren’t to blame, they were my gurus. So was my husband, my children, my job - and every other thing that’s happened to me - especially the painful, difficult and all out sucky things.My whole life, I suddenly understood, was my guru - and it had been constantly guiding and teaching me all along.And I knew, before the voice told me: This is what the gurus know.We are all the chosen one. You me and everyone we know.We are all gurus for each other, all drawn to the people who resonate with who we really are. And that inner teacher, that’s the voice of the true self, the I Am that knows who and what we really are.The next time I encountered a powerful teacher, I didn’t shrink, I bloomed. For I understood: You are in love with this person because s/he is a reflection of YOU.The only thing that separates these gurus who seem born walk on water, to walk through walls, to walk directly into boardrooms and bedrooms and take what they want is this: They know.They know: It’s up to me. I am the teacher I’ve been searching for.I am the one who senses resonance and dissonance. I am the one who lets the veils fall from my eyes.  I already sense the meaning and mystery in the world. And I know what calls to me.So do you.And all I can say about that is: "You just have to trust."You have to find a way to befriend the quiet voice inside of you that knows who and what you are, and the other voice - the gong-ringing voice - that also knows. You have to build a kind of temple to them - to both of them - inside your own heart and in the world, somehow. Then, you have to find a way to splash your own beauty all over the walls, to layer the rooms of your own heart and mind and belly with the tapestries you weave. You have to dance right up the front path of that temple - the sacred architecture of who you really are, with your arms waving, your feet bare, your heart willing and ecstatic and drink the juice out of your own cup.Step inside. The temple is for you. It’s always been for you.You are the key, the solution, the answer to the riddle.You are the teacher you've been waiting for.