Teachers

What was said to the rose that made it open

was said to me here in my chest.

So lately I wondered, what wàs said to the rose that made it open? This beginning of one of my favourite Rumi* poems always had a certain sweet and inspiring taste to me. More recently, this taste has shifted to a rawer, richer flavor that forced me to reframe the process of opening.

If roses are anything like human beings, opening up can actually be immensely painful and terrifying. We usually see so much beauty in a flower unfolding itself, but how about the unfolding of our own hearts?

As the poem indicates, something was said to the rose, some sort of input form outside of itself that made it open. In the human case, this input usually involves a teacher. As we all know, teachers come in many, many shapes. Maybe the only influence us budding flowers can have on our teaching schedule is to prepare ourselves for this fact so that our mind is open enough to recognize a teacher even though they look like the complete opposite.

I realized this when I met my last teacher. It was nothing like the gentle unfolding of soft petals that you see all around in spring that caused my heart to open. What was said by this teacher touched upon all my fears, shattered all ground beneath me and utterly broke my heart.  A teacher can be someone who breaks you, but if it’s done from a place of love and to some extent, wisdom, we really can only be grateful since it frees us from our most claustrophobic prison: ourselves.

If we as students allow ourselves to feel the pain of our teachings but not get hooked by it, what lies before us is a life as a rose in bloom. Although that’s a temporary life, and we know that by the time of the next fall we will shed our petals and again return to the earth, we not only open to life but become part of it.

*Rumi is a 13th century Sufi mystic