February 1st, 2023—Have you ever considered the positive and productive role of destruction in your teaching? This might seem like an odd question as it combines what appears as a contradiction, destruction as an asset to effective teaching. The question emerged, for me, during a recent professional development session I was leading. As a group, we were reading and reflecting on May Sarton’s poem, “Kali Prayer”. Kali is considered the Hindu goddess of ultimate power, time, destruction, and change. She is the manifestation of the ferocious form of the goddess Mahadevi, the supreme of all powers, or the ultimate reality. Key to understanding Kali’s application to teaching is her pairing with Mahadevi, the goddess of ultimate reality. In this sense, destruction and creation are bound together in paradoxical relationship, each needing the other to bring forth their gifts. Kali’s power of destruction clears the way for the realization of what is really real, ultimate reality.
May Sarton opens with a poetic prayer, “Kali, be with us. / Violence, destruction, receive our homage. / Help us to bring darkness into the light. / … Put the wild hunger where it belongs, / Within the act of creation.”
During the professional development session, we lifted out many themes related to our teaching and our leadership experiences in higher education. For many of us, university life can be hard and disheartening, leading to a sense of bitterness, frustration, and anger. The sources of these feelings are varied, but they are often associated with an institutional emphasis on productivity, efficiency, and standardization. Under these conditions, the call to serve, for many faculty and staff has been buried or set aside under the pressures of institutional imperatives. And with few public or communal places to express this pain, the bitterness and anger can grow and grow. Our time together, where many negative emotions were expressed, became a space of communal healing when they were brought into the light of shared experience.
Sarton’s prayer/poem to Kali gave us permission to be angry, to experience pain, to grieve our loss of the work we were called to do. What we often missed while deep in the presence of our bitterness was the clearing potential of destruction, Kali’s special gift, to create something new and unexpected.
Each of us knew the intimate roots of our personal suffering, a story we knew all too well from our internal conversations with self. Yet the act of sharing, going public with our inner dialogue, brought the community together. We jointly held the pain and repurposed it toward creativity. Our open hearts of compassion, our collected presence, invited a sense of imagination and wholeness the far surpassed technical solutions. Each of us was given permission to name our challenges and to exercise our personal agency as we moved toward wholeness.
It was during this conversation around anger and creation that I was reminded of my early days as an educator. I reconnected with a story I had forgotten, in part out of embarrassment and partly because I had grown past the negative elements of my early teacher self. I shared with the group, that as a young teacher I got really mad and upset with my students when they didn’t listen, take their learning seriously, or just had other agendas in mind besides my carefully structured lessons. Sometimes the anger was mild and easily dissipated. Other times I would keep my frustration hidden and stuffed away until the thin skin of my carefully constructed ego as teacher could no longer hold the pain. Then I’d let out a burst of anger and bitterness, destroying lessons or damaging relationships. Sometimes the target was an individual student and at other times I vented my pain at the whole class. Kali ruled the day with destruction. It felt like I was engaged in a cycle of self-destruction and self-deforming of my gifts as a teacher.
I don’t really know when the change occurred. I suppose it was gradual as I learned more about myself as a teacher, what I valued and why. And I developed nuanced skills and knowledge of effective teaching. Through time and increased wisdom, I learned not to fear anger but to repurpose it toward creation. I still get angry, but now my Kali energy is directed at clearing away obstacles to learning for myself and my students. Destruction is now often a source of self-healing and self-formation. May Sarton captures, for me, this process when she calls on Kali to “Help us to be the always hopeful / Gardeners of the spirit / Who knows that without darkness / Nothing comes to birth.”
I don’t know what will come to birth for the faculty and staff who attended the professional development session. That is their journey to take. I do know that change will occur as they redirect their Kali energy of bitterness, anger, and frustration toward the creation of something new. I look forward to hearing their stories of renewal, even as they work to heal from the pain of disappointment in the ways that institutions tend to value efficiency over humanness.
Have you ever considered the positive and productive role of destruction in your teaching? I hope this essay invites you examine the many ways that Kali can bring light and wholeness into your teaching. The danger of fueling Kali with suppressed anger and bitterness is noted at the end of Sarton’s poem, “Bear the roots in mind, / You, the dark one, Kali” For the gathered participants in the professional development session, there was a sense of plea in these words. A warning of sorts. If the energy of destruction, penned up behind bitterness and anger, becomes too big, when it is released, it can, like a catastrophic flood in nature clear away everything right down to bedrock. The roots of calling, the passion to serve others, can be wiped away, leaving nothing upon which to grow something new.