What It Means To Be Skillful

Skillful – To be skillful in teaching or as a teacher is to be responsive rather than reactive, to hold clear intentions and act from a place of awareness both of ourselves and of those we teach. Skillfulness is the ability to hold knowing and not-knowing at the same time with a sense of openness and willingness to grow and learn.

A colleague recently ask me what I meant by skillful? What was I hoping people would understand it to mean? It was a question I had never stopped to ask myself because it came so easily to me from the start. Skillfulness is often used as a term that refers to how we are mindful and present in our lives. I was first exposed to

this idea in my own mindfulness practice as a way of describing how were meant to participate in our lives — skillfully.