Aesthetic Space

Drawing on the Larger Wisdom

I finished teaching my last Psychology of Transformative Learning class yesterday. The title of the course felt daunting to me (I didn't come up with that title, the class I suggested would have been called "Imaginal Ways of Knowing" or "Psychology of Perceiving and Knowing"), but I did what I always do--I taught it from "third space." I knew that it wasn't me who was teaching this class. The subject itself (transformative learning) was teaching it, and I was there to learn about transformative learning along with my students. I didn't need to fret about the material, because the right material would show up.

Third space is similar in some respects to Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious and psychologists often refer to third space as “liminal” space. Theologians define it as a “Divine Third” and Martin Buber called it “Thou.” One might also call it the imagination. Our traditional institutions—religion, psychology, medicine, education—have removed the liminal layer from their practices. If something can’t be measured or seen clearly, it is presumed to not exist. Third space is where we find inspiration, creative renewal, and meaning.

Third space is that place of expanded knowing and intuitive wisdom; it's the great unknown of inspiration and possibility. We could define it as our creative process, or as a realm that is just beyond our ordinary, every day rational intellectual capacities. When groups of two or more come together in meaningful ways for a shared purpose, there is a larger wisdom available to draw upon, a wisdom that lies within the center of the group itself. Teaching from that place keeps me inspired and renewed. It ended up being a great class!

Third Space

When I was two years old, I was sitting on a carriage swing with my older sister. She sat on one side while I sat on the other side facing her. The neighborhood kids were pushing us too hard and I wanted them to stop, so I put my foot down and my leg snapped. It split in two above the ankle. I had just learned to walk, so after my tiny leg was encased in a plaster cast, it was back to crawling for me.

When I was twenty-six, I again lost my ability to walk when the car I was traveling in was struck head-on by an oncoming car. It was a high-speed impact on the highway and fortunately I was wearing a seat belt. Unfortunately, my spinal chord was displaced by 40 degrees, I broke T-12, my body was paralyzed from the waist down, and the doctors at the Mayo Clinic (where I was flown by air ambulance) gave me less than 5 percent chance of walking again. It was a slow, painstaking process of re-learning and rehabilitation.

Not surprisingly, these two events gave me an attendant fear of “stepping out.” There is no part of me that is interested in getting injured again, having spent too much of my life encased in body casts and wheelchairs. But I have always been a risk-taker, with a yearning to see and do new things. Perhaps that is why the exploration of my own creative process has always been most important to me. I needed another “world” I could explore that would not bring bodily harm. The world that I found was a place that the ancient Sufis called the “imaginal world.” I like to call it third space.

Life Is Calling All Of Us To Be Teachers

Almost two years ago I published a book on teaching, Getting Messy: A Guide to Taking Risks and Opening the Imagination. The heart of the book was to show teaching (at its best) as a creative process of learning along the way. By approaching teaching as a process of ongoing inquiry in which we are learners (along with our students), we’re able to stay renewed, recharged and inspired. Because if we can be learners when we teach, then there must be something bigger than us—what I call a “third thing”—that is actually doing the teaching. Burn-out, fear, anxiety and terror happen when the weight of the situation is all on our shoulders—when we feel we must be perfect, have all the answers, be “in control.” But when we find and access the third thing, we have space we can breathe into. We can be “headless”—operating from our hearts and the highest parts of ourselves, rather than our egos and linear minds.

Being a teacher in the traditional sense presents us with an automatic polarity doesn’t it? On one side of the polarity is the teacher, a person who is expected to have professional expertise and managerial control. On the other side of the polarity are the learners, who seemingly have come as empty vessels, waiting to be filled by our infinite wisdom. Despite the wisdom and expertise that we hold, this dichotomy of teacher-student automatically presents a friction, a tension, however we wish to soothe it over. But when we find third space as teachers, we bridge the dichotomy between teacher and student, and the process of teaching and learning finds its highest form. Beauty, grace, and inspiration are now present in the room. We are participating in the mystery. After all, it does say somewhere in the Bible that when “two or more are present, there I am in your midst.” I don’t consider myself to be a religious person, but I have always taught with this in mind. There is a third thing that is present when I teach, and that third thing is where the beauty of teaching and learning lie.

Recently Jennifer Louden and her colleague Michele Christensen hosted an on-line program called Teach Now. I admire Jennifer Louden. She has an ability to speak and present information simply, elegantly and powerfully, and their program appears to have been wildly popular. While the word teacher, for most people, typically evokes the image of a kindergarten or high school teacher, Jennifer Louden and Michele Christensen describe those who are called to teach as members of “a tribe” who want to share ideas, energy, information with others for the sake of serving. Jennifer writes: “Life is calling many of us to be teachers, to share what we have learned and are learning.”

I love what Jennifer and Michele did in their Teach Now program, and I hope that Getting Messy will be a helpful support to those who are called to teach. It can be purchased on Amazon by clicking here, as well as several local bookstores in the Bay area (see the list on the right-hand column of this blog). And you can find out more about Teach Now here: http://jenniferlouden.com/teach-now/