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*Part four of the series: Teaching as a Spiritual Path: Soul Work for the Teacher in the New Paradigm.

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*Author’s note: In an age that still splits intellect from embodiment, this essay is a reclamation of the teacher’s body as holy ground. Even as my hand trembles writing these words, I know this is the initiation of our time: to name what has long been exiled: Eros, Spirit, and the Teacher, as one living current.

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My life has been a crucible, learning to walk, both inwardly and outwardly, the line between being a Montessori educator of children and a sexuality development teacher for adults.

On the surface, both belong under the wide canopy of education.

But in the deeper ancestral strata, it can feel like stepping into the village square during a modern witch hunt: scrutiny without understanding, moral panic disguised as “concern,” and the ever-present risk of being misread, misquoted, or made an example.

The stakes are not theoretical; they live in the body as an inherited tremor, our foremothers’ wisdom once burned at the stake now stored in our cells as a cautionary tale about visibility and power.

This tension, between what my soul is unequivocally called to bring and my 20-plus years in the schoolhouse, has kept me up at night. It sounds like the hum of “say the wrong thing,” “show up the wrong way,” and the old projections of being “too much, too sensual, too intense, too spiritual, too alive.”

And yet, despite the tremor, there is a relentless spiritual will in me. It feels less like a choice and more like a vow—to keep walking, to dissolve, both in myself and in the collective, those historical threads of fire and silencing.

I have been careful where needed and courageous where required, trusting that the heart of my calling is not to annihilate or split off either identity, teacher or Eros, but to consecrate their reunion.

To my knowledge, this path isn’t well-worn. Mentors appear on both sides, but the stepping forward is my responsibility. And the trail keeps leading into more heat, steadily, step by step, as I claim this purpose across more dimensions of my life and work.

The Body of the Teacher Has Been Severed

At its core, modern schooling dissociates teachers from their bodies. While “self-care” is increasingly name-checked in professional development, the profession still glamorizes overwork: caffeine for breakfast, grading for dinner, stoicism as virtue, and martyrdom as pedagogy.

The cultural script says: give your body away in the name of service; contort yourself to the system; keep going.

This isn’t just a feeling, it’s measurable. United States K–12 educators have led all professions in burnout since the pandemic years; Gallup found 39 percent of teachers felt burned out “always or very often” in 2023 (compared to 26 percent of other workers), with structural drivers like unmanageable workload and unclear expectations at the core.

The RAND State of the American Teacher surveys continue to show elevated stress and burnout relative to other working adults, with modest improvements in 2025 but persistent well-being gaps, proof that the body cost remains high.

My soul’s work is to bring the teacher back to the source, to re-marry Eros (life force) with the living body of the educator so that presence, not performance, becomes the method.

Eros as the Current of Transformation

Eros is not merely sexual desire.

Eros is the current of transformation itself, the urge to unite, create, and become. It shows up as Heart Eros, Creative Eros, Collaborative Eros, Consciousness Eros, Mystical Eros, Sexual Eros.

Any genuine pull (or push) between beings or toward a work is Eros signaling connection, boundary, or becoming. When we collapse all Eros into sex, we lose the medicine of the moment; perhaps what’s asking for expression is creativity, collaboration, wisdom, or a sacred no.

To teach with presence we must be erotically literate: able to differentiate sexual Eros from other forms, to name what moves between us and another human, and to respond with clarity.

This is one reason sexuality development matters: learning to meet our erotic life force consciously gives us language, boundaries, and discernment rather than collapse and confusion.

The Greeks named many loves, Eros, Philia, Agape, Storge, yet beneath them runs one current. We can feel it in Montessori’s great stories of cosmic formation, the impulse to cohere and create. That same current hums in a child absorbed in work, in an artist deep in color, in a lover surrendered in intimacy, and in a seeker bowed in prayer.

Eros is an evolutionary driver, and spirituality, creativity, and sexuality are its sibling expressions.

The Classroom as Spiritual Ground

For years, I imagined my “real” spiritual life would happen elsewhere: ashrams, mountains, retreats.

Then I noticed what was in front of me: a child helping a friend sweep up beads, another wholly taken by the bead frame, breath slowing, attention polarizing, a hush of devotion without words.

I realized my classroom was never separate from my practice.

Seeing the child’s soul as they met their work was my practice.

(Montessori named this deep voluntary concentration “polarization of attention.” Through my lens, it is prayer in motion.)

The problem was never that teaching wasn’t spiritual.

The problem was forgetting how to see.

Sacred Sexuality as a Threshold

Years ago, I felt an unexplainable pull to enter the terrain of sacred sexuality.

It wasn’t about chasing pleasure. In truth, I couldn’t explain it logically at all, but I knew that if I ignored it, something in me would wither.

That impulse led me to enroll in a nine-month certification in the Self-Pleasure Modality™ with the Institute of New Paradigm Intimacy, an experience that became far more than a course. It was a complete change of trajectory, a return to the body as temple and the soul as teacher.

It was here that I met the deepest layers of my unconscious self, my fear of power, the need to control outcomes, the shame buried beneath professionalism, and the longing to be met fully, without masks.

What began as curiosity became initiation.

That program opened a doorway unlike any other, a reclamation of erotic innocence, emotional aliveness, and embodied truth. It brought me back to the source of vitality itself.

And now, years later, I serve as Director of the Institute of New Paradigm Intimacy, guiding others across this same threshold of remembrance and integration.

Sacred sexuality taught me that sexuality is not separate from spirituality; it is the place where spirit and body meet. It is the forgotten threshold that, once crossed, brings us back into wholeness.

It showed me that the classroom and the temple are not two worlds; they are the same ground, approached through different doors.

When Eros and Spirit Reunite in the Teacher

Both soul-to-soul teaching and sacred sexuality demand the same posture:

>> Be present, not perform.

>> Meet the other without agenda.

>> Listen beneath words.

>> Honor what is true in the moment.

To teach in this way is to remember that education is inherently transformational. Every lesson, rupture, repair, and quiet moment of concentration shapes consciousness, of the child and the adult.

Teaching becomes a living exchange of Eros and Spirit, a reciprocal current that changes everyone it touches.

This return to the body is spiritually essential. Too often spirituality is framed as ascent, up and out of density. Integration is descent: Spirit into matter, light into flesh.

Eros is the bridge between crown and root. Split them, and we hover in abstraction or drown in impulse. Weave them, and heaven and earth meet in a human being who can teach from presence.

This is why embodiment matters in education: the teacher’s state of being is the silent method children feel most.

The body becomes a living altar, and the classroom a temple of becoming.

Teaching, I realized, was never just a profession. It was my practice. My temple. My initiation ground.

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Read part one of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Naming the Pain we’re not Supposed to Feel.

Read part two of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Learning to Die.

Read part two of this series: The Teacher’s Unseen Curriculum: Teaching Soul to Soul.

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