You might know your inner critic intimately, but what about your inner teacher?

How to get acquainted.

Dear Writing friends,

As you know, I don’t usually send out letters on two consecutive days but, over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had some complications with my fractured ankle and, a little like a consumptive Victorian poet, I’ve been confined to the sofa, sipping ginger tea and feeling a bit sorry for myself.

Therefore, there has been a slight technical scheduling hitch.

However, this enforced stillness has given me lots of time to reflect.

As I’ve written about many times, slowing down and allowing myself to be still doesn’t come easily to me. Even at rest, I tend towards movement: walking, swimming, stretching, strength training.

But here I am on the sofa. The stillness is inescapable. In fact, it’s as if the universe hung a giant pink neon sign, right above my head.

SLOW DOWN.

And so this week I’ve been taking myself on a different kind of walk, trying to escape the throbbing in my right foot.

When I lie back and close my eyes, I travel inwards. A few days ago, as I lay here, I heard a voice, very clearly, inside my own head.

Stay here, the voice said. This is the work you need to do.

It sounded gentle but very firm. I listened.

In the world of writing and writers, we talk a lot about the concept of the inner critic, that creature - a gremlin or gargoyle or perhaps even an old writing teacher - that crouches on your shoulder, hissing nasty things in your ear. 

I think we don’t talk quite so much about the concept of an inner teacher or mentor. 

But I really believe that this concept is just as true.

We all have an inner resource, a sense of something, however flimsy or shadowy, that knows what we need and wants to guide us towards it.

Usually, this inner teacher gets crowded out in all the other noise. But when we make the space to tune in, I know that we can nurture it.

In the years when I worked as a therapist, I loved to use tools like creative visualisation and metaphor to help people to begin to listen deeply to their inner teacher.

I never met anyone, no matter how battered or broken or stifled or doubting, who didn’t find somewhere inside themselves - sometimes very quicky, sometimes with a little practice - the beginning of an inner knowing.

Your inner teacher may be only vaguely present to you right now. Perhaps you’re worried that you can’t hear them at all. But if you begin to listen, I believe that you will.

In Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life, educator and activist Parker Palmer urges us to take notes, not on what our external teachers might tell us, but on ‘the words that arise within us’ as we listen, read, learn. These thoughts and words within us, he writes, offer us access to our own ‘inner teacher.’

How do you begin to reconnect with your inner teacher?  

Well, stories and poems, music and dreams, art and nature are fantastic places to start.  

These objects - internal or external to us - that offer us glimpses of our inner world are what Parker Palmer calls ‘third things,’ the art objects or texts that can help us to reconnect with what we know inwardly but have learned to forget or turn aside from. He writes:

"What T. S. Eliot said about poetry is true of all third things: '[Poetry] may make us . . . a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

Writing Experiment

You could use these questions as starting points for some writing in your journal:
What are the metaphors, images, words, colours, rhythms that you feel drawn to? What made you calm or happy when you were very young? 

What are the the scents and textures that evoke memories for you?

What do you see or hear in your dreams?

We can also help one another to recover a sense of our inner teacher. Parker writes:

“First, 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. Second, we all need other people to invite, amplify, and help us discern the inner teacher's voice.”

Who in your life invites, amplifies, helps you discern?

Who helps you to explore, acknowledge, remember?

I don’t know who this feathered being is who appeared to me in my notebook but I’m listening to what she has to say.

Just a heads-up that paid subscribers now have access to Creative Rest, a seven-part series of restful, restorative writing practices, as part of their paid subscription. Subscribing costs £6 per month (£60 per year; £1.15 per week) and includes an open invitation to our monthly very friendly and supportive live Dear Writing Together Zoom sessions.

I completely understand that a paid subscription is not for everyone or within everyone’s reach. If you or someone you know is struggling and you would find some Creative Rest and gentle, supportive writing encouragement helpful, please just drop me a line.

If you enjoy reading this and you know someone who’d like it too, please do share.

Dear Writing friends, thank you so much for being here with me.
Sophie xoxo