Dedication, Transformation & the Arts

Experience the essence of creativity and dedication with Amy Edelstein as we journey with her to CoSM, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in the Catskills. This episode celebrates Alex and Alison Gray, the visionary artists who have devoted decades to the transformative power of art. For their entire adult life, they have been expressing their own adventures in consciousness through their unique for of art, becoming leaders and pillars of the psychedelic art movement. They exemplify how art can be a conduit for personal and collective growth, and their center stands as one of the rare collective spaces where people can come to explore the inner and artistic expressions in a collective and collaborative fashion. 

For educators seeking to reignite their passion, this episode is a heartfelt exploration of rediscovering the 'why' behind teaching. Amy shares a compelling exercise from her professional development sessions, inviting teachers to open to themselves and re-acquaint themselves with their vocation or calling to teach.  This introspection often reveals a profound sense of purpose that transcends standard metrics like test scores. Experience how nurturing these inner drives can lead to more enriching and vibrant educational experiences for both teachers and their students. Enjoy this episode of the Conscious Classroom, which unravels  the pillars of learning spaces which foster joy, creativity, and transformation.

Transcript

Amy: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teens to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Conscious Classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein. Today I want to talk about dedication, transformation and the arts.

Amy: 1:06

I had the opportunity to go visit the center of Alex and Alison Grey, called CoSM Chapel of Sacred Mirrors up in the Catskills in New York. If you've never heard of Alex and Alison Gray, they are unique. They are a phenomena. They both have been practicing artists very prolific and performance artists as well, since the 1970s, and Alex even earlier than that. They were independent in their own exploration of consciousness and purpose and being, and when they met they really truly found each other as soulmates. And for the last 50 years they have been married creating, producing collaborative art. Creating producing collaborative art, orchestrating event spaces for artists and creatives to come together and to teach and to mentor and to make art a form of exploration of our higher human potentials. I first met them probably around 2007, when their center was in Chelsea. The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors was a beautiful event and art space in Chelsea. I was helping to organize a New Year's Eve dialogue about human transformation and our higher potentials with them and then, of course, being who they are, they had a blowout New Year's Eve party with music and dance afterwards. What impresses me about them as mentors and teachers is that they're completely passionate about their purpose and their craft.

Amy: 3:10

It got me thinking a lot about the energetic difference between the learning environment that is created around people who are passionate about their craft and about teaching and about nurturing their students' potentials to emerge art students, writing students and what happens in the classroom. Because classroom teachers are, they give their time, their life, decade after decade, to their students and to teaching. And yet the rigid structure of the way our school system is organized and the teaching to tests and the way that we are, in a lot of ways, presented with roadblocks around creating long-term supportive mentoring relationships with our students leads to a very dry and desiccated atmosphere, desiccated atmosphere, whereas the atmosphere around the grays is just brimming with invitation to create and to learn. The grays also run art programs and monthly gatherings where they're creating art alongside everyone who comes. Often, when we're teachers, we are presenting knowledge, not learning and creating alongside our students.

Amy: 5:00

I really started to feel that there's a key in this, that it's not just because they're free from the education structure in the way that it is, and it's not just because they have been influenced by and are really strong proponents of the psychedelic revolution which I'm not, but I just respect their work and their lifelong dedication and their intimations of how we can live in a non-separate way, in a way that fosters goodness and kindness and love and vision and harmony among all creatures. The key that I think lies in this is how they stay true to what their higher vision is. When I work with teachers and I do professional development with them, one of the exercises I often do is a simple sentence completion and we do free form stream of conscious journaling, answering the sentence stem. I teach because and I invite people for five to 10 minutes to keep answering that question and maybe the surface quest surface answers will be I teach because it's my job. I teach because I my pension, I teach because this was the degree I got, and then I invite them to keep going deeper.

Amy: 6:32

What is it that inspires educators to educate? What is it about? Immersing in learning and discovery and creativity and potential that is so meaningful? And I've had teachers come to me with tears streaming down their face saying nobody has asked me that since I graduated college, I haven't given myself time to think about what my purpose is in teaching. Being measured by student attendance and student test scores is not going to feed our souls, it just won't. Won't.

Amy: 7:32

Connecting with our desire for a better world, one that really expresses heaven on earth, and seeing if we can inspire in our students a way of thinking and believing in their own potential and in their creativity and in the inherent goodness of life, despite all the bad things that happen, that we can stay connected with our purpose as a teacher, if you find yourself teaching out of a deficit, out of a lack, if you find yourself teaching out of a deficit out of a lack, trying to dig yourself or your students or your school or your district out of a hole, you simply won't get there. You'll smother your heart's passion with the practical and with trying to keep pace, and you'll always feel behind. The only way to teach and inspire that kind of creativity is to connect with our purpose. Because once we're firmly rooted in what we care about, that vision of the possible floods our whole being. And even if it hasn't come to fruition yet, even if it hasn't come into being yet, even if we can't see it manifest, because we're so connected with our heart's purpose and with what we care about and what we want to see and we're meditating on what we want to see and not on lack and deficit that starts to become more real to us. And when what we care about becomes more real to us, that passion spills over into the classroom. And all of a sudden we are teaching from the fullness of our vision and not from the deficit of where we seem to be right now, given the lenses that we're told to look through.

Amy: 9:46

Teaching from deficit is a habit. We're given those lenses, but it is just a habit, and it's a habit that we can change. And the way we change it is through giving time and space to our own meditation, our own contemplation, our own study of the great role models across history, well known, little known, legend, myth and fable, ancient texts and modern insight and practice, mindfulness. Practice is wonderful. It's only wonderful if we do it. Knowing about it, being able to relate the benefits, as ChapGPT described them to us, is good. It's better to know about it than not know about it. But immersing yourself in the present moment, learning and training to be able to observe, without judgment and reactivity, everything that's happening in our experience, in our minds, in our memories, in our plans and our overwhelm, being able to let all that rise and pass away and rise and pass away like endless waves on the shore while we remain steady, is the training that helps us stay present and inspired by our vision. Training that helps us stay present and inspired by our vision If we're constantly pulled off our vision because we're overwhelmed by what we have to do or we're worried about what our mind is telling us about how well we did or didn't do in the last interaction with someone we care about or someone who holds influence over us. If we can't stay steady in our practice, it will be hard to stay steady in our vision.

Amy: 12:04

When I had the good fortune to meet Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg, south Africa, in 2002, just 10 years after a part, I'd ended Standing right next to him and looking at his face. He did not have an easy life, both politically and personally. He had a very hard time and the joy in his eyes and the luminosity in his face didn't come from an easy life of rest. It came from the, the fruits of a life deeply lived and one that never gave up on his vision of the possible. If you're a teacher and you're looking in the mirror, if you're anyone and looking in the mirror and you don't see that luminosity and you don't see that luminosity and you don't see that kindness because you're exhausted and you're overwhelmed and you're bitter and you're constantly behind and consider that an emergency. And consider that an emergency for yourself as well as for the state of your students and whether your students are your younger employees or your boss or your family or your classroom. What I mean is those in your circles.

Amy: 13:56

If you look back and you don't see that luminosity and that kindness and living warmth, put your attention on your ideals, put your attention on what you care about, on a vision of the possible, and give yourself that important, really essential practice of cultivating your stability in your presence through different forms of mindfulness practice and really do the practice, really clock those hours. You know, if you want to learn to play an instrument, you have to practice. If you want to learn a language, you have to practice. If you want to learn a language, you have to clock the hours. If you want to be a better chef, you definitely have to clock the hours. And that's the one I haven't really mastered yet.

Amy: 15:10

If you want to realize a life that's fueled by the ineffable, by the numinous, by discovery, by emergence, by an inner richness that is, as they call it, the pearl beyond price, we have to give it space and time. And if you're concerned about the bullying you see in classrooms, if you're concerned about the anxiety you see in your students, if you're concerned about the elevated temperature of media rhetoric or the nastiness of our comedy these days, put the time into your mindfulness and your compassion building. Give yourself that treat. It does take work and it does take discipline. And I know when it's been a long week or a day it's hard to find the discipline and time and space to do it. And yet, if we care about the future of education, we have to put in the time. And when we put in the time. It's going to have its own magnet. It's going to propel us into wanting to put more time into it, wanting to put more space into our practice, wanting to push aside the constant demand for order in our busy lives and give ourselves to a contemplation that brings about relaxation and love and care and order.

Amy: 17:27

So let's do a nice long practice right now, and oftentimes we do just five minutes, thinking that maybe you were driving or maybe you're in a space where you can't do a slightly longer practice. So if you're in one of those environments where you can't stop, pause here with a commitment to yourself that you are going to come back, whether it's to this practice or your own practice, and give yourself some time, give yourself some space to contemplate the unknown, known. So take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Take another deep breath in and another full exhalation. Let your breath return to normal, to natural breath. In this deep breath. Slightly longer practice, maybe 10 or minutes or so, we're going to cultivate well-being.

Amy: 19:14

So allow yourself to roll your shoulders back, to move your neck from side to side, letting out any kinks or pops, stretch your feet, pointing your toes downward and flexing them up, and then making a few circles with your ankles, going one direction and then even it out the opposite direction. Do the same with your wrists, stretching your wrists up and pointing your fingers down, and when you move to any way that you feel like would help your body arrive, come to stillness and allow your body to find its natural repose. It's natural stillness, letting yourself simply be, with nothing else to do, no activity you need to follow. And now rest your attention in your inner eye on the most beautiful flower or field of flowers that you can imagine, feeling the vibrancy, the richness of color, the delicate shape and form, bringing to mind something so beautiful you feel you can't appreciate it enough. You stretch your heart and take it in, and yet its beauty is even beyond that.

Amy: 22:37

Release, trying and, as you inhale, know that you are taking in the beauty and, as you exhale, allow your cells to absorb everything beautiful. Go at your own pace, without guidance, with the rhythm of taking in effulgence and splendor and grace and luminosity, color and balance, and the rhythm of allowing all that to seep into every cell in your body, feeling the infinite beauty in our mind's eye. Thank you. Now, as you release the image of beauty, allow yourself to breathe in love and care for yourself and breathe out love and care and breathing out a fullness and abundance and overflowingness of care for everything in the whole cosmos. Breathing in kindness and care, filling your being with kindness and care, filling your heart and letting your heart radiate out that beautiful care and light to your whole body, to your mind, to your organs, to your hands, to your feet, feeling yourself with love and care, kindness and well-being. Filling the universe with love and care, with kindness and well-being.

Amy: 29:15

As you release the image of kindness flooding in and kindness reaching out to the farthest corners of the universe, allow your attention to come back to your form, seated on a chair or cushion To your hands what a gift they are resting on your thighs and as you look around you, appreciating the gift of your beautiful surroundings, even if there's only one shape or color that is pleasing, find that shape and allow yourself to shift from our meditation into the world of activity, maintaining this inner eye on the richness and abundance of love and care in the present and the potential of the future for a world animated by this. Thank you for your effort and intention and commitment and I'll see you next time. Thank you for listening to the conscious classroom. I'm your host, amy edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundationnet for links and more information, and if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.