The teachers who have had the most impact on me and on most learners I know are teachers whose "selfhoods" have been deeply invested in what they are doing.

As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.

Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.

Whoever our students may be, whatever the subject we teach, ultimately we teach who we are.

Connection and connectedness are other words for community and communion.

The people who help us grow toward true self offer unconditional love, neither judging us to be deficient nor trying to force us to change but accepting us exactly as we are. And yet this unconditional love does not lead us to rest on our laurels. Instead, it surrounds us with a charged force field that makes us want to grow from the inside out - a force field that is safe enough to take the risks and endure the failures that growth requires.

The answer comes to me through studying the lives of the Rosa Parks and the Vaclav Havels and the Nelson Mandelas and the Dorothy Days of this world. These are people who have come to understand that no punishment that anybody could lay on us could possibly be worse than the punishment we lay on ourselves by conspiring in our own diminishment, by living a divided life, by failing to make that fundamental decision to act and speak on the outside in ways consonant with what we know to be true on the inside.