Teo leader learning curve

The Dreaming House is quiet again, except for a sappy love song playing on the radio in the comedor, crooning about "tears at not seeing you." The group has gone home, the ladies have finished breakfast and are off cleaning the guest rooms already, and baby is sleeping in his little playpen crib set up here in the dining room. And I'm tired, my calves ache from my first climb of the Pyramid of the Sun in almost a year, and my lips sting from a careless sunburn. But I feel a sense of contentment, completion, even confidence. I now know that I am capable of leading a group by myself. While another leader brought this last group, I worked it, mainly because the leader, as sweet and inspirational and knowledgable in other areas as he is, knows jack about Teo. He brought together a lovely group of recovery folk, and pretty much turned them over to me, so I bucked up and stepped forward and said, of course I will serve as your expert guide and teacher and of course I will facilitate transformative experiences for you. On the first day, my guts rumbled ominously with fear and self-doubt the whole way from the house to Gate 1 of the pyramids, as I tried to follow my own advice of breathing deeply and feeling the ground beneath my feet. Well, I need not have worried. Like Guadalupe said to Juan Diego - Comprehend and know, my youngest child, nothing should scare or concern you. Are you not in the fold of my garment? Yes, indeedy ma'am, you are right here, you who are my mother!!!!

All my fear is such a product of my mind, which is like a duh, master of the obvious, doh sort of revelation. Maybe mastery of the obvious should be one of the Toltec masteries - maybe its actually synonymous for Mastery of Awareness, because once you become aware of all the stuff you've been believing, it is pretty much like, oh yeah, duh! You sort of hit yourself on the forehead and can't believe you've been so blind, when suddenly all your lies and beliefs and crap you've bought into seems so obvious. Well, anyway, once I breathed deep and got my molecules gathered together coherently, I actually turned out to be a good teacher. In fact it turns out that I'm impeccable with my word - one of the participants told me that, that I'm a role model for impeccability of the word, while another called me articulate, which was just as surprising to me! Who knew - all this time I just imagined myself to be bumbling along, having no clue what I was talking about and thinking the people gawking at me from the "audience" had even less clue. It is such a great teaching for me to show me how far off my belief about myself was from the truth! Anyway I had to pull it together because I quickly realized the leader of the group was on vacation - he did the work of getting the bodies at $1400 a head, and it was my job to teach them and provide them with illumination at $75 a head. Hmm, the math of how that worked out wasn't exactly inspirational to me, but I figured I'd be rewarded in the beauty of the experience and the opportunity for my own growth as a human and a teacher. And indeed, it was so. By the time we got into the pyramid grounds that first day, I remembered that the most powerful teaching for me is to be in gratitude, that gratitude opens your heart and centers you faster than anything else, and so this is how I began our day. I opened our circle with a prayer of gratitude to the ancestors and spirits of Teo, thus inviting us all to be present in the moment with hearts open. It worked for me at least, and there I was!

I hit some trouble spots with the group, though - I guess that's to be expected with any group. Kind of like the universe can't let you off the hook completely, ever. When we went into the Temple of the Women, the old pervy guard Dimas was there, lurking under the trees with his bike. You used to be able to pay him off with 30 bucks and a gropey hug, and he'd let you do the ceremony in there, and he'd only come complain nervously when someone started having some kind of cathartic bawling hollering emotional release over the well, or like the time one lady collapsed into a spasm of out of body convulsions on the floor (that was fun!). Anyway, when I saw him, I said I thought he'd retired and he said no, he'd been moved to another post - guess they discovered he'd been making bank off of illegal bribes. But he warned me that the new guard wouldn't let us do anything in the temple. And indeed it was true. There had been a new guard who was supposedly really into both the bribes and the energy, but I guess he was found out quickly and removed from the post as soon as he had been installed. So when I went down into the sweet alive vibe of the temple expecting to see him, all I found was this miniature hunched over old man bent over a broom, slowly sweeping, and looking all the world like some creepy wizened messenger of the grim reaper, and nothing like a guardian of a sanctuary of the Divine Feminine. So I just came out with it and asked him if we could do a ceremony, and he got a wide-eyed look on his face like I was speaking of werewolves or dracula, lifting his greenhandled broom defensively, and he said "Nnnoooooo." No, you can't, you can't. I said okkkkkkkkkaaaayyyyyy. But meanwhile I had a bunch of expectant ex-addicts outside waiting to walk through the portal into the womb of the Mother, and now I was going to have to say no, and be the total shlump who can't deliver the goods - no, I don't think so. So I brought them in anyway, and just told the geezer that we were just going to walk through, but I slipped them into one of the rooms and got them touching the walls and dreaming and breathing the charged air and tripping out on the Mother. The poor old guard came after us, still wielding his green broom, and his head still tipped back, slack-jawed in alarm, and said, they'll fire me if they see you! With utmost compassion I put my hand on his shoulder and said I am most grateful to you for letting us enter. We'll pass through very quickly to see the sacred well. His little eyes darted back and forth, looking for spies in the mortar of the bricks, and said, well, make it fast, and his eyes landed on me pleadingly. So I pulled up the squeakingly heavy metal lid over the well, the birthcanal of the Earth Mother, and quickly tugged my dreamers past to peer into its depths. It was a lesson in the reality of "no time no space" - where transformation can happen in a second - you don't need hours to hang over the well, because people walked away completely altered in spite of the brief moment our nervous guard allotted us. He actually thanked me for being so quick and looked at me with new eyes as we paced away ceremoniously - he looked at me with kindness and gratitude, while I of course was completely grateful for his courage and trust.