Some of My Teachers Don't Have a LinkedIn Profile

Some of my most important teachers don't have a LinkedIn profile.

One of them is a vine from the Amazon. In the Putumayo of Colombia they call her Yagé; further south, Ayahuasca. The traditions that have worked with her for centuries speak of her as a spirit, a grandmother, a teacher. There was a time when I would have smiled at that. Today I am more careful with what I think I know.

Rainforest in Columbia

In ceremony, there is nowhere to hide. Not behind a title, not behind a good argument, not behind being busy. What comes up is what is there. Sometimes it is grief I had walked past for years. Sometimes it is a beauty so simple it is almost too much to bear. And sometimes it is the quiet recognition that I had been living one step removed from my own life.

Other teachers have human faces. Taita Bernardo Chindoy of the Kamëntsá in the Sibundoy Valley. The Shipibo healers of the Peruvian Amazon, whose songs seem to know things about you before you do. Lynda Caesara, who patiently taught me to perceive energy. What they share is a quality of attention I am still learning: they don't hurry. They listen to the land, to the plants, to what cannot be seen. I often feel like a beginner in their presence, and I have come to love that feeling.

Some teachers came disguised as hard moments. Accidents. Bomb blasts. A few situations I was lucky to walk away from. Each one asked the same question in a different voice: are you really here?

And the business world was a teacher too. It gave me rigour, wonderful colleagues, and an understanding of what committed people can achieve together. I look back on the young man who worked all those hours with respect. He did his best. But he was also running, and what he was running from, I only began to understand much later, on my own healing path.

Much of what I once thought mattered most no longer does. The next step, the next achievement, the next proof that I was enough. It wasn't wrong. It just wasn't the point.

What matters to me now is harder to put into words, and harder to live. It has to do with presence. With looking, instead of looking away.

Because there is a great deal to look at. There is so much trauma in our world: in families, in organisations, between peoples, passed on from one generation to the next. There are challenges ahead of us that no strategy will simply solve. And the faster we go, the more easily we run past all of it, past others' pain and past our own.

I don't think the answer is to run faster. I think it is to slow down enough to see what is really there, and to stay with it a little longer than is comfortable. That is not weakness. It may be one of the most needed forms of courage today.

The plants have never wanted to take me away from life. They have always sent me back into it, with clearer eyes. What remains is not a high but a kind of sobriety: being awake to life as it is, including the parts we would rather not see. Living as both an act and an art.

I am deeply grateful. To the spirits of the plants, and to the people who carry their traditions with such care. To my teachers and mentors. To the colleagues I have worked alongside. To the people who trust me with their stories and teach me in return. And to my two sons, who remind me every day that presence is not a concept.

I remain a humble apprentice to life. I stay curious, because the journey continues.

Life, with all its messiness and beauty, moves me again and again.