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I loved English! - What I learned from my students

By Ms. Itsumi Nakada, English Teacher, Japan

While they are students, children spend more time at school than at home. Therefore, we can say that school has a tremendous impact on a child’s growth. The same can be said about the presence of the teacher. This episode is about a female teacher who experienced tremendous changes in her students’ behavior after she changed through Miross.

Lonely childhood

When I was very young, I was lonely. My parents were busy with their jobs and did not have time to pay attention to me. And I did not have any friends at school. Because I did not smile or laugh and had a gloomy outlook, I was always alone at school. So I focused on my studies and that was all I did. Thanks to that, I was always at the top of my class in high school. I was pushed to attend university, but I was tired of studying. So I started working as soon as I graduated from high school. I got married at age 23. I was blessed with two children. As my husband’s income was not sufficient, I thought about doing something to help us financially, and decided to operate an English cram school.

After that, I studied English diligently and became an English teacher. I opened an English cram school and worked very hard. On top of that, I finally started university 17 years after graduating from high school. After graduating from this university, I became a part-time English teacher at a junior high school. I kept working as a teacher for the sake of “helping the family finances”. But then I got a divorce from my husband and became a single mother. I was forced to work even harder to raise two children.

Days of anxiety

Before I knew it, I had worked as a teacher for 25 years and had reached the level of being an expert. Then there was a change in the school system and two teachers were assigned instead of one for each class. At that point, I started to feel increasingly anxious. I started comparing my teaching methods with those of the other teacher during class, and I felt inferior. Students started complaining about my teaching and some started talking and ignoring my lessons. I didn’t like that situation and started to keep some distance from my students. The more I did so, the worse the situation became. I had become a teacher in order to help the family finances and was not especially found of this job in the first place. This feeling kept coming up and it caused tremendous stress, both physically and mentally. When I was at the end of my rope, I encountered Miross.

Miross is about a totally different dimension

In order to solve my issues, I had studied various practices involving the mind and heart. As a result, there were times when I had brief mental relief, but my sense of anxiety would come back and I was never totally free of anxiety.

When I encountered Miross, I found it was different from anything I had ever seen before. At the first Miross seminar I attended, I learned the trap of this world of “front and back of the same coin”, which totally changed my general perceptions. Man and woman, front and back, strength and weakness…. everything in this world is like the front and back of the same coin and they exist as a pair. “Oh, yes, that’s how it is!” When I was able to perceive it without sense of resistance, I realized that my perception of “dislike” about English also had “like” as a pair, and I was able to internalize that perception naturally, not just understanding it at the thought level. “I never thought that I actually liked English!”

What I see in my eyes now

What surprised me in learning the trap of this world is the fact that “everything you suppressed gets reversed and appears in front of you as external reality”. I hated the students who are very loud and rowdy and I tried to keep my distance from them. Actually, they were doing exactly what I wanted to do as a child when I was lonely and did not have a friend. “Maybe those students are trying to show me what I wanted to do but could not?” When I came to that realization, I started to find them adorable. I was very surprised with this transformation of my internal state.

The next day I was free of limited and fixed ideas about myself and thus had changed, I noticed that the atmosphere of the class was totally different than before. The students who were very rowdy were quiet and listened to my lesson, and they came to me after class, saying, “Ms., I enjoyed your class today!” Furthermore, when I did let go of making an effort to improve students’ performance and left it to their own efforts, they proactively started studying hard and their grades made a sudden improvement.

After encountering Miross, I now feel my job as an English teacher is my true vocation.
I would like to learn more about the self through what comes up in front of me, and convey the principles of “life can be changed in an instant!” which I experienced, to the world. I just love English!

What do you think about this story? In this episode, she often mentioned “trap of this world”. By just simply accepting “this is how the world is”, she instantly let go of the suffering she had for long years. There is no need of effort or learning for this, but if something is ever needed, it is to simply say to yourself, “Oh that’s how it is!”. Nowadays things change so beautifully that Ms. Nakada says, “It is like I start seeing flowers blossoming wherever I go”.