This weekend, a dear friend of mine sent me an essay by Maria Popova that has haunted me since reading it (at least six times now)

The essay is titled “How To Shed The Surface Self” (you can read it for yourself here)

Writing about the early 20th-century mystic and poet Evelyn Underhill, Maria Popova pauses to observe something that felt less like philosophy and more like a confession most of us carry quietly:

Isn't that idea precisely the ache at the center of so much of what is exhausting about education?

We operate only at the surface level and wonder why so little of the work feels authentic, meaningful, engaging, and transformative…for our students or for us

Our students show up with their performance of engagement (or disengagement), their social armor, their learned adaptations to a system that has taught them, for years, that what matters is what you produce, not who you are.

And then we look out across the room and wonder why something essential always seems just out of reach.

We are encountering each other as surfaces, not as souls

The students encounter the teacher as a surface without ever really stopping to contemplate the universe of humanity flowing underneath them

The teacher encounters the student as surface without ever really stopping to contemplate the kaleidoscope of conflicting (and still emerging) persons yearning to break free

The staff encounters the school leader as a surface without ever really stopping to contemplate the vast complexities swirling in and through and around them at all times

The leadership encounters the staff as a surface without ever really stopping to contemplate the competing interest pulling at them at every moment

And so, we go about our days, smiling, nodding, grumbling, sighing at each other…all the while missing the great mystery that lies just beneath the surface

Underhill's framework, as Popova explains it, draws a sharp distinction between the surface-self — the social persona assembled from habit, expectation, and the long game of "getting on" — and the deeper self, what she calls the buried spirit, which "knows not habit and desires nothing but free correspondence with the Real."

Most schools are, by design, masterful engines of the surface-self

They are, to borrow from Underhill, the wrong machine

In them, we sort students by performance. We rank teachers by metrics. We build systems that reward legibility and penalize ambiguity.

And that, to me, is the deepest problem in education

The inability (or inaccessibility) of being able to meet each other as our deepest, truest, most authentic selves within a construct meant (ideally) to do that very thing!

Education should literally be the place where we meet each as “souls”—as selves most fully engaged—especially for our students, who are in moments of crucial self-discovery in their most critical years of formation

And yet, we seem to have decided that meeting as souls is somehow off limits

We have, instead, constructed a system most antithetical to the pedagogy of soul craft

A system whereby the gradebook fails to measure hope.

The GPA leaves out longing, desire, belief, curiosity, wonder

The professional development seminar misses the point of purpose, gratitude, play, authenticity, connection

And the game continues

Not from cynicism, but from necessity — and eventually, from habit.

Underhill calls this the limpet: the surface-self that has "cemented itself like a limpet to the rock of the obvious, gladly exchanging freedom for apparent security, and building up... a defensive shell of fixed ideas.

What Underhill describes with such startling clarity is the inner conflict that arises when the surface-self and the buried spirit begin to pull in opposite directions.

She writes about the restless oscillation between who we have learned to perform and who we most deeply are — the uncomfortable sensation that the life we have been living is somehow out of alignment with the life that wants to be lived through us.

Educators know this feeling all too well

It surfaces in burnout.

It surfaces in the cynicism that creeps in after years of reform initiatives that promise transformation and deliver compliance.

It surfaces in that particular Sunday evening dread — not just fatigue, but a sense of estrangement from the reason you entered this work in the first place.

It surfaces in the exhaustion felt in February

It surfaces in the isolation often felt that is hard to share with anyone else

This surfacing is what Underhill would call the voice of the deeper self, the voice that refuses to be silenced, insisting that there is something truer and more alive available than the role you have been playing.

The conflict is uncomfortable. But, as Underhill argues, this discomfort is not a problem to be solved.

It is a doorway to be pursued

Underhill's name for the process of moving from surface to depth is purgation — a word that sounds severe, yet proffers hope

It requires what she calls "courage, singleness of heart, and self-control."

It is the work of ascending the mountain of self-knowledge and, crucially, throwing aside your superfluous luggage as you go.

For educators, that luggage is worth examining.

It might include the belief that emotional distance is the same as professional objectivity.

The assumption that rigor and warmth are in tension.

The reflex to cover material rather than uncover meaning.

The habit of performing confidence when curiosity would serve students better.

The fear that being fully present — as a human being, not just as a teacher — would somehow undermine your authority.

What Underhill offers is a reassurance: shedding the surface-self does not leave you with less. It leaves you with more — a self that is "strong and disciplined," not because it has suppressed its feeling nature, but because it has integrated it.

The brute energy, the keen intellect, the desirous heart — "long dissipated amongst a thousand little wants and preferences, are gathered into one."

The teacher who has done this work is recognizable.

She doesn't perform certainty she doesn't have.

She doesn't pretend that a student's suffering is irrelevant to their learning.

Such teachers—nay, such educators—bring something into the room that is harder to name than technique but impossible to miss — a quality of genuine presence that students can feel in their bones

We all know these types of educators. They are more than likely the very reason we got into education ourselves

The work before us, then, is to identify that "yearning” for what it is: the ache to be seen, known, valued, and told that we matter.

It is more than content consumption

It is education as soul-craft

So what does it actually look like to teach from depth rather than surface?

It begins with our own willingness to not-know. The surface-self is addicted to answers. The deeper self is at home in questions.

When we model genuine curiosity — not academic performance, but actual not-knowing — we signal to students that depth is welcome here. Sometimes the most honest and most courageous thing we can say in a classroom is “I don’t know”—thereby opening a door into wider learning that leads us farther up and farther in

It continues with attention. When we attend to a student not to evaluate them, but to truly be with them and their way of thinking — something shifts. They feel seen below the surface. And feeling seen below the surface is one of the rarest and most transformative experiences a young person can have.

It lets them know they matter, not as a data point, but as a human being aching to belong, desiring to feel valued

It requires that we share some of our own interiority. Not inappropriately, not in ways that burden students with our struggles, but enough that they understand their teacher is also a person in the process of becoming.

When we say "I used to think... and then something changed me," we are inviting students into the possibility of their own transformation.

When we sit with a student in our full humanity, within the boundaries of the role, we create and hold space for them to be at-one-with their own most authentic self

At the end of Popova's essay, she returns to Underhill's destination — that interior sanctuary where you discover "a being not wholly practical... so foreign to your surface consciousness, yet familiar to it and continuous with it."

The being you recognize as the truest you.

Education, at its most essential, is an invitation to that recognition.

Not just for students — for teachers and leaders too.

The classroom, when it is working at its best, is a place where two or more people are simultaneously engaged in the difficult and luminous work of becoming more fully themselves.

That is why the ache matters.

That restless sense that we are only meeting each other as surfaces — that is not resignation.

That is the deeper self, still leaning toward the light, still insisting that something realer is possible.

That ache, that yearning, is worth listening to.

Blessings on the journey

Scott

This piece was inspired by Maria Popova's essay "How to Shed the Surface-Self: The Forgotten Visionary Evelyn Underhill on Touching the Depths of Being" on The Marginalian, drawing on Evelyn Underhill's Practical Mysticism (1914).

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