4.9 • 944 Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2025
⏱️ 32 minutes
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This episode of Living Myth begins with an unassuming teacher finding herself in a public controversy for refusing to take down posters that state that everyone is “welcome, important, respected, encouraged, valued and equal” in her classroom. As she said in an interview, "I would do anything to protect my students. I love all of them unconditionally, and as teachers, we protect them from danger, quite literally. This is the one small thing I can do to stand up for them, to protect them from being affected by racist sentiments that are affecting their classroom and our culture."
There's an old idea that says that at critical points in the course of life, we find ourselves in situations in which we have to become worth our salt. For, there are truths set within each soul that can become a medicine and an antidote against the rampant falsehoods and political manipulations being used to create fear, to drive divisions and to cause people to abandon their own genuine selves.
The greatest challenge has always been the risk of becoming our genuine selves in a world that tries to turn us into everyone else or scare us into believing things that are simply untrue. Genuine change begins in the depths of the individual soul, and this is the struggle that we came here for.
We are the students of life trying to awaken further and we are the potential teachers and leaders and healers trying to tap the wisdom of the sage set within our own hearts. Each time we allow ourselves to be touched by the beauty of the world and by the roots of truth, we take another step in the direction of generosity and inclusion; we go further on the path of the soul and come closer to understanding how we are all in this together. Whether we diminish our lives out of fear or grow more soul and live in truth depends upon how much we become worth our own salts.
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0:00.0 | Welcome to the Living Myth podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective. |
0:18.0 | This episode begins with an unassuming teacher finding herself in a public |
0:23.8 | controversy for refusing to take down posters that state that everyone is welcome, important, |
0:31.6 | respected, encouraged, valued, and equal in her classroom. |
0:38.3 | There's an old idea that says that at critical points in the course of life, |
0:43.3 | we find ourselves in situations in which we have to become worth our salt. |
0:49.3 | For, there are truths set within each soul that can become a medicine and an antidote against |
0:57.5 | the rampant falsehoods and political manipulations being used to create fear, to drive |
1:04.2 | divisions, and to cause people to abandon their own genuine selves. |
1:31.8 | There's an old idea that says that a person must become worth their salt. The sense is that salt is an essential preserver of life and also a source of endurance and at certain critical |
1:40.9 | point in the course of life. We each find ourselves in a situation in which we have to become worth our salt. |
1:51.8 | That's what I thought of while watching an interview with a schoolteacher in the state of Idaho, which is typically considered to be a conservative place. |
2:05.1 | Sarah Inama is a middle school teacher who described how a school administrator came to her |
2:12.5 | during her lunch period and instructed her to take down posters in her classroom by the end of the day. |
2:20.8 | One of the posters states that everyone is welcome here and features images of child-sized hands |
2:28.6 | with skin colors ranging from light to dark and a heart in the palm of each of the hands. |
2:36.1 | Another sign says, in this room, everyone is welcome, important, accepted, respected, |
2:43.2 | encouraged, valued, and equal. |
2:47.0 | The teacher said that they told her that the posters were in violation of district policy |
2:53.8 | because in today's political environment, they're considered to be just a personal opinion. |
3:01.9 | The political environment she refers to includes the Trump administration dismantling the entire Department of Education |
3:10.8 | and an executive order that insists that all references to DEI or diversity, equality, |
... |
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