It's About The Horse

ErinR76 · Member Joined: 12 Aug 2011 Posts: 506 Location: Austin TX

Central to the pedagogy of CTT (courage to teach) groups is "creating a space that welcomes the soul". So everything we do in these groups is premised on certain assumptions about the soul's nature and needs, about what will make the soul feel welcome. These assumptions are rooted in yet another metaphor from nature: the soul is like a wild animal.

Just like a wild animal, the soul is tough, resilient, savvy, resourceful and self-sufficient: it knows how to survive in hard places. Many of us learn about these qualities in the darkest moments of our lives when the faculties we normally depend upon utterly fail us—the intellect is useless, the emotions dead, the will impotent, and the ego shattered. But sometimes, way back in the thickets of our inner lives, we sense the presence of something that knows how to stay alive and helps us to keep going. That something, I suggest, is the tough and tenacious soul.

And yet the soul, despite its toughness, is also essentially shy—just like a wild animal. It will flee from the noisy crowd and seek safety in the deep underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out! But if we will walk into the woods quietly and sit at the base of a tree, breathing with the earth and fading into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek may eventually show up.

rest of article, which focuses on how to honor the soul in the profession of teaching, can be found here:

http://www.couragerenewal.org/parker/writings/heart-and-soul
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A horse is NOT a large dog that thinks like a person.