The Art and Practice of Learning

The Art and Practice of Learning Aaron Stern and Marianne Murray

v. Jan. 2022

WHAT WE MEAN BY LEARNING Let’s invite ourselves to release the word learning from images of school, and skills attainment, and success or failure, and open up to its more evocative and mythic qualities. The linguistic roots of the word belong to the activity of discovering our way: pathfinding. The word’s origin connects also to the shared wisdom, or lore of a community: an accumulated story of meaning.

At the Academy for the Love of Learning, when we talk about a love of learning we are pointing toward a passion to know our selves intimately, and to understand each other. To recognize the myriad aspects of the world in which we exist, inwardly and outwardly, and their interconnected nature.

As learners, we are explorers – pathfinders – following a mysterious urging of the soul that is first and foremost a feeling or sensation: a somatic urging fueled by curiosity and enlivening interest in what it means to be a human being. Thus, the work of the Academy is, at heart, more about an immersion into the spirit and soul of learning than in the content of what is learned.

The Academy’s view of learning recognizes it as an energy that lives in all of us – young and old alike. It is a longing to know: Who am I? Who are we? What is this? It is a longing infused with embodied curiosity, passion, and wonder. This urge to learn and explore is an appetite that yearns to be satisfied. If we open to its impulse and become enlivened by it, following it to the point of fulfilment, then we are nourished by the learning process.

Satisfied, the sense of urgency may come to rest bringing a sense of wholeness and a consolidation or integration, and a readiness to open fully to whatever is next. Learning in this context is, quite simply, engaging with the emergent quality of existence. This kind of learning evokes an embodied sense of wholeness and opens us to our learning destiny. It fosters the unique path of change and transformation that awaits each of us if we are to flourish and embark upon what is uniquely ours to do.

This basic human impulse to learn is powerful when it is awakened and encouraged to thrive. It activates creativity, expression, and connection. It is characterized by exploration, reflection and discernment, and a coming to rest in the satisfaction of knowing, albeit at times only temporarily.

Unfortunately, our early experiences of learning within the context of formal education, and sometimes our family environment, can lead to our learning spirit being buried, lost in the shuffle, co-opted. As a result, we often learn to imitate and stop there, rather than innovate ongoing and ultimately develop our own original relationship to all that is.

Another way of framing this phenomenon is that, as children, a kind of “colonizing” of our minds takes place in the name of learning. This is especially true within institutionalized education which is largely transmissional in nature, such as in our system of public schools. While

there is clearly a need for socialization, it is important that educators (and that means all of us) recognize the powerful impact of this system of learning and encourage discernment, creativity, and choice. What children our being taught is one way, but it is not the only way. Do we recognize the difference – and the impact?

It is extremely important that the spirit of learning itself not be compromised by this agenda. Developing a capacity to “take the lid off learning” and open to what lives outside this system of assumptions and beliefs is critical.

Without this recognition, individual creative uniqueness can submit, unconsciously, to the authority of what is being taught. How then can we become truly free human beings; to know ourselves in the most profound sense? For this not to happen is an unfathomable loss. Perhaps equally, our capacities to find solutions to our most intractable problems as human beings may well be seriously curtailed.

Let us remember that educate has two roots: to mould or train (educare), and also to lead or draw out that which lies within (educere). Not only is it a mistake to conflate these two meanings, it leads to a dangerous omission.

As we lose our capacity for discovery and creativity, we lose our way. We could say that learning is to education, what spirituality is to religion: when we are bound only to a form, we lose our ability to express the fullness of our humanity or to enliven aspects of our selves and our world that have lost their vitality.

In order to respect the human learning spirit and soul’s urge to learn, and to liberate our creative potential, we must discover ways for a dynamic dialectic to occur between our essential selves and the “colonizing” that takes place in our minds through socializing education. This is a critical form of waking up! We must come to understand our proclivities, our impulses, and our particular capacities, and trust that there is a place for their development. Imagine teachers who ask not only, “what do I have to teach this human being?” but also, “Who is this human being?” Imagine an educational system that surrounds the activity of learning with love, rather than a fear of failure. Imagine a system that is compassionate and inspirational, rather than punitive. At the Academy for the Love of Learning, we call this an ethical container for learning and strive wholeheartedly to create such learning environments in all our work. Imagine with us children who, early on develop a trusting and embodied love of learning, and who walk through life this way with a new sense of freedom and agency. Our intent is that together, we can experience learning as we are describing here: a deep restoration of something sacred that lives within us all – the learning spirit itself.

Tragically, and with all good intentions, most often we teach as we were taught, and thus the situation continues to replicate itself over generations.

In the absence of teachers – and, again, that’s all of us - who transmit their

true passion for learning, our individual and collective urge to learn and transform gets buried. Without elders who embody a wise and inquiring relationship to the culture in which they are situated it is difficult for children to develop their own capacities for discernment. Childhood most often becomes more a process of uncritical indoctrination into a prevailing culture than an initiation into self-discovery, connection, and exploration, and so the cycle continues.

THE WORK OF THE ACADEMY FOR THE LOVE OF LEARNING The Academy for the Love of Learning’s many activities aim to shine a light upon learning – the soul’s urge to learn and spirit of learning - and elevate an understanding that learning is a practice that can lead us to dismantle patterns of confusion and delusion and awaken our minds and hearts so we become more fully and compassionately human.

Of course, there are many kinds of learning: some informative (facts, techniques, concepts, skills, stories) and some transformative (capacities, qualities, capabilities, sensitivities). At its best, learning is both informative and transformative. The work of the Academy involves the development, practice, testing, and research, of the arts and practices of learning that are essential to on-going transformation and that support the capacities of creative and authentic expression, personal leadership, and fully engaged learning in community.

TRANSFORMATIONAL LEARNING Even though we may not be conscious of doing so, from the very beginnings of our lives, we are always making meaning (learning) from our experiences.

Over time, this meaning-making process creates our uniquely personal framework of assumptions and beliefs through which we recognize, interpret, and understand all that we encounter in our lives. We can think of meaning- making as an internal narrative or pattern through which we make sense of experience. Much of this narrative pattern is subliminal – absorbed without question into the fabric of our being through our immersion in family, school, friendships, work, community, media and so forth – yet it is a powerful determinant of how we see the world, engage with others, and orient towards anything that is new and different. To a great extent, our narrative pattern gives us a sense of stability and predictability in our lives.

Sometimes, events occur that disrupt the internal narrative pattern to a greater or lesser degree. Such an event could be as simple as reading a thought-provoking book or meeting a dynamic teacher. More drastically, it could be a personal or close encounter with illness or death. Whatever the cause the result is, to a greater or lesser degree, a destabilization of our well-established internal system for making meaning. In simple terms, when we encounter an experience that disrupts our narrative about how life is and should be, we tend to lose our capacity to make sense out

of what has happened. We are thrown into cognitive dissonance and become disoriented. In such moments, how we find our way through this disorientation will determine how deeply and in what way we may be changed by what has happened.

Unfortunately, such dramatic events in our lives may cause us to respond in ways that are detrimental to our wellbeing. We become defensive, angry, or fearful, constricted emotionally, or caught in the cycle of a trauma response, for example. At such times, our capacity to learn creatively is severely limited and, while we may have been changed by the experience, that change is not life enhancing. Instead of opening to the new and its potential, we contract and seek affirmation that the world as we already know it is the only world.

This can cause us, and those in our midst, great suffering.

However, if we connect with our innate impulse towards learning, such moments of disorientation may result in positive life change. They can be mind-expanding, profoundly disrupting and opening the cognitive structures – the patterns – through which we make meaning of our experience. The process of recognizing and embodying new and more expansive narrative patterns takes time. We may need support to gain perspective in the midst of our destabilization, but at some level the impulse to learn is activated.

When we reflect on what has happened, explore our responses, and recognize and express how we are impacted, we have the opportunity to open to a deeper sense of agency and connection with our own humanity.

Our self-awareness and capacity to be present becomes larger and more inclusive. We have been changed by our experience, and this degree of change could be described as transformative.

For those of us who aspire to participate in healing and transformative activities within our culture, it is essential that we surrender to a parallel personal transformational process. As the twentieth century spiritual teacher, John Bennett, observed: “…we can be free from the past only when we have so changed ourselves as to be no longer the same person who performed the action. A dishonest [person] does not become honest simply by ceasing to act dishonestly, but by an inward change that makes it impossible for [them] to act dishonestly.” In other words, we must become the change that we wish to see in the world.

The Academy’s approach to learning invites a depth of experience and reflection that supports the possibility for transformation. A blend of arts experience; soma; depth/transformative facilitation and pedagogical design; and awareness-based practices, create an alchemical vessel for individual and group transformative learning and change focusing on the establishment of learning as a practice. Through exercises, conversations and storytelling, contemplative practices, physical and artistic expression, and the careful cultivation of what we call a learning field, participants can

learn to trust and explore the disruption of their internal patterning as it arises.

They discover ways of navigating the discomfort of not knowing, as well as the power of connection with others in that discovery process.

Transformative learning intends to provoke the exploration and questioning of habitual patterns of meaning making in order to invite something new and as-yet unimagined. This kind of learning challenges our reflexive assumptions about what is true or right; embraces rather than defends against difference; pushes us up against what we assume to be our limitations; and dares us to embody the fullness of our own unique creativity.

LEARNING AS A PRACTICE The urge to learn can be fierce, exhilarating, and sometimes daunting. Ultimately, it is deeply satisfying. In the thick of an experience, we may feel pain and disorientation. We may want to resist what is happening and protect ourselves from discomfort. With practice, however, we can cultivate the capacity to live at our learning edge – just a little outside our habitual sense of comfort – and to explore and integrate experience in an evolutionary process of self-transformation. As we engage from our own learning edge, and invite others to participate with us, we become more expansive, more present, and more connected.

For this reason, the Academy’s intention is to orient participants in our programs to the practice of learning: honing the awareness, confidence, and ability to stay present to the learning potential within all aspects of our lived experience. We do this through what we call engaged awareness in action and the practice of staying in contact, within ourselves and the others in our midst, as we enter into experience together. Just as many spiritual traditions teach practices for mindfulness and the cultivation of presence, the Academy’s approach to learning is as an intentional and fully integrated practice in service of living ever more compassionately, effectively, and wholeheartedly as human beings in community.

© 2016 The Academy for the Love of Learning, Inc. | rev. 01/22