Bliss!

Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.

--Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 183-184

Bliss has been on my mind quite a bit for the last few weeks. Primarily because my covenant group is discussing bliss as defined by Joseph Campbell, and also because I spent the last three weeks in a classroom, observing and working with first-graders, as part of my field experience for grad school.

Bliss is a funny idea to think about.

"Our bliss is the what, where, and when that we feel most authentic, most ourselves. What is your bliss? It is what you are doing when time drops away and you reside in an eternal now."

according to an essay by Bodhi Bliss.

Have you ever been in that zone? That timeless and perfect endless instant when all is right? It is such an amazing place to be, and until recently, I considered myself fortunate to find that moment, in rare and precious instances. They felt few and far between.

The idea that we can actively pursue those moments by finding our bliss is a new idea for me. How amazing that I have managed to live my life that way, anyway. I have always sought to live life in a way that feels positive, feels right. It’s a way of choosing authenticity, and the older I grow, the less patient I am with people who choose to live inauthentically, dishonest to themselves and everyone around them.

Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi says,

“What is common to such moments is that consciousness is full of experiences, and these experiences are in harmony with each other. Contrary to what happens all too often in everyday life, in moments such as these, what we feel, what we wish, and what we think are in harmony.”

Ironically, losing a job, a position that I loved in the beginning that became sheer torture by the end, was my first step into what I hope and believe is a new place of bliss for me.

Last night, in my class on Effective Teaching, Effective Schools, we did mini group presentations on the theories of assessment. By the luck of the draw, literally because I was in the right seat in a count to go the right group, I was in the small group that presented a section on student-led assessments. And I’m the only person in class who has been able to experience student-led assessments in real life, at my children’s school, with assessments led by my own children. I could show a real example, bring the concept home to the other students, and make an idea live and exciting for them. Perhaps this class will go out to teaching jobs convinced of at least one new idea that they will try to implement that will make education better for small groups of students, a little at a time.

After the class, a fellow classmate walked up to thank me for everything I shared in class that day. He surprised me; I hadn’t done that much sharing, I try to not speak too much in that class in order to allow everyone a chance to participate. So I wait, and only participate when I see that no one else is ready, or when I have something to share that I am so overwhelmingly passionate about that I cannot in good conscience stay silent. I find myself challenging assumptions a lot in this class, and I worry that I am offending people, making them angry, or shutting them down in defensiveness so that they can’t hear another idea, another way, another alternative.

It was with a great sense of gratitude that I heard this gentleman from class thank me for my participation in class, and observe casually that some school would be lucky to have me as a teacher. It’s the third time someone from that class has made that observation, and each time it blows me away, because I’m not expecting it. I’m often leaving shaking my head, wondering if I’ll survive this grand educational experiment, if I’ll survive in the world of education, if there’s any way I can make a difference in the face of bureaucracy and ill-informed laws on education that hamper schools and teachers from really doing their job of educating children.

Following bliss … that timeless moment when we are not aware of the passage of time, when we enter that zone of perfect wonder and rightness. It feels so good to be there, and the further I go in my education, in my goal to become a teacher, the more I find myself in bliss.

I am grateful that I have had a path open for me that allows me to take those steps into bliss. I am grateful that I have been given another opportunity to follow a dream and make it reality. I am grateful to have the support of friends and family along the way, cheering me on, sympathizing with my frustrations, congratulating me on my successes.