Master Teachers in Disguise

I have previously stated that I firmly believe life is a classroom designed to teach you the meaning in life. Life is for doing, learning, and enjoying, and the lessons you learn are mostly up to you.

You get to set the curriculum, and you are the primary teacher.

But you are not the only teacher in your life. Far from it.

Not only is this true, but your favored deity is not the only Master Teacher.

Wait…hear me out.

Most people think their Master Teacher is “in the skies”. Not so. There are Master Teachers here, there, and everywhere. Why don’t we recognize them as such? Because they’re also masters of disguise.

(See what I did there with the pun?)

How do they disguise themselves? Only as some of the most potentially powerful learning tools in our lives: mistakes, guilt, resentment, fear, pain, disease, stubbornness, addictions, depression, death, emergencies — all of the things most people would, if they could, eliminate.

Some try awfully hard to eliminate them, too. Ever notice the themes of many bestselling self-help books? How to get rid of this Master Teacher, how to dispose of that Master Teacher, 101 ways to eradicate some other Master Teacher.

Why would we not take advantage of potential sources of wisdom in our lives?

Maybe we forgot that they are teachers — or maybe nobody ever explained it to us.

Let’s pretend your Master Teachers sent me here to explain what they have to offer you and what great friends they are. That way maybe you’ll use them and stop giving them such a bad rap. Consider me the goodwill ambassador for the Master Teachers in Disguise Union.

There is a funny scene from the musical Showboat. Two mountain men, who have never seen a play, stumble into the showboat theater, unaware that the actors are acting in a play. They converse with the heroine and encourage the hero. When the villain arrives, they chase him off the stage with guns a-blazing!

The mountaineers are proud of themselves for having done “the right thing”.

The irony of this, of course, is that the audience, watching Showboat, forgets that the men playing the mountaineers are actors, too. The audience laughs at the na?veté of people mistaking play-acting for real-life. In order the appreciate the humor, however, the audience watching Showboat must be lost in the illusion themselves.

That’s how Master Teachers get away with the disguise: we forget they are sources of wisdom — and seldom are we interested in remembering again.

If someone stood up during a performance of Showboat and began yelling, “Those aren’t mountain men! Those are actors! Those aren’t real guns! Those are props!” the person would be escorted out of the theater.

The Master Teachers need the same illusion to teach as well as they do. The more we believe the characters in a movie (and forget they’re really actors), the more moving the movie can be. Thus, the more we believe the Master’s disguise, the more powerful and complete the lesson.

So…why am I spilling the beans?

If you’re struggling too much with the teacher, you might not stand back and learn the lesson. The techniques I share with my clients allow them to take that step back. You can learn from past Master Teaching sessions — all that you might have considered the doom and gloom of your past. You can also use the techniques to learn more quickly the ongoing lessons being taught by your Master Teachers.

But by exposing the Master Teachers (the “villains” of the piece) as the wonderful, kind, loving friends they are, am I not risking the effectiveness of future lessons?

Not likely.

You’ll probably forget all of this.