Chris Breen

I found these inspiring questions in a fascinating book, Presence, by Senge, Scharmer, Jaworski and Flowers (2004). The questions prompted me to realise that I have spent most of my life unconsciously following the advice offered by Rilke  in trying to accept and love the ongoing presence of these questions in my life.

Early childhood memories include moving house frequently and often struggling to breathe because of asthma. I also have a vivid memory of a near-death experience that happened when I strayed out of my depth in the school swimming pool. When the whistle was blown to signal the end of the session and everyone else left the pool, my half-drowned body was discovered and had to be pulled out of the water. It feels as if these experiences sowed the seeds for an acceptance of chaos and uncertainty and a strong determination to make the most of this second chance for life!

Around the age of ten, I learned that I could best access parental love and general acclaim through certain approved forms of success. I chose to use my capabilities to excel in maths and running – even though competing successfully in many events on Sports Day was inevitably followed by a fortnight off school with asthma.

This drive for success/love continued in high school when I took up the challenge of running fast over hurdles. My determination to succeed is evidenced in my decision to ignore the athletics coach’s advice that I give up attempting to be a hurdler as, in his opinion, I’d never succeed.

I won the national U17 110-metre hurdles title two years later.

This cussed determination showed itself again when I decided to ignore my asthmatic past and physical limitations and move my focus to an even more strenuous athletic event: the 400-metre hurdles. And nothing less than competing at international level could satisfy my need to achieve. However, I was prevented from reaching the pinnacle of athletic success when South Africa was excluded at the last moment from the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico because of its apartheid policy. This meant I was unable to take my place with the other competitors at the starting line for the 400-metre hurdle heats. This sense of failure was so great that I found myself unable to continue pushing my body to succeed and stopped training seriously for that event shortly after the announcement.

This pattern of drivenness continued when I chose to study chemical engineering at university purely because I had been told that this was the most difficult degree using both mathematics and science – my two most successful school subjects.

I (inevitably?) changed career direction after completing my degree and started my work journey teaching mathematics and physical science at Voortrekker High School in Cape Town, again with a self-imposed challenge – this time learning to speak Afrikaans fluently.

My restless internal drive took me overseas after just over a year of teaching when I enrolled for a Master’s degree in the Teaching of Mathematics at Exeter University.

And my world shifted on its axis! Everything I had previously believed and experienced was turned upside down by the new perspective I was offered that asked me to accept the challenge of subordinating teaching to learning. 

I returned home on a mission to find out how this shift in focus could be successful in a rigidly constrained South African mathematics classroom. This project increasingly became my Work and I moved from high-school classrooms (after another six years) through the Mathematics Education lecture rooms in UCT’s School of Education (twenty-six years) and finally to flat-surface venues while freelance-teaching personal leadership on programmes at UCT’s Graduate School of Business as well as in the corporate world (fifteen years and counting).

I had unknowingly timed my initial 1984 arrival at UCT to coincide with the start of protest action against apartheid education by school pupils in the Western Cape. My involvement in running a mathematics education NGO in addition to supervising students in township schools brought me close to this struggle, and with that came an understanding of the realities of inequality as well as the extent to which I had benefited from apartheid. I decided to focus my research on the development of a pedagogy for transformation through experimentation in my own mathematics education classroom. This was not an easy path, as I frequently made choices that brought me into conflict with colleagues and bosses on academic, political, and educational grounds. 

I was fortunate to find supportive inspiration when I made a move to connect with like-minded overseas colleagues (although the academic boycott prevented face-to-face contact for a long time). After some years, a few subject specialists in the UCT School of Education worked with me (again with opposition from the majority of the rest of the staff in the department) to introduce a Master’s degree in Teaching for teachers who enjoyed their work and wanted to grow their enthusiasm and expertise. This move enabled me to develop theoretical foundations for my grounded explorations. As shown by my curriculum vitae, I had just finished my term of office as President of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME), been awarded a C1 rating by the National Research Foundation and received a UCT Distinguished Teacher Award when I decided I had had enough of the stress of this different and often conflict-dominated work and I took early retirement from UCT’s School of Education.

I only realised the loneliness of this chosen path many years later while attending a conference on Biocentric Education in France. My eyes filled with involuntary tears during the presentation of a Brazilian educator. I suddenly became aware that the speaker had walked a similar path to me and had found inspiration from many of the same activities and theorists. My intellectual exile was over. No wonder I was crying...

The other thread of the answer to this question – Who is my Self? – has been equally painful. Having lived through the breakup of my parents’ marriage, I had made a promise to myself that I would use all my strength, drive, and intellect to ensure that I never got divorced. But after eighteen years of marriage, I had to live with the painful reality that I had failed to keep this promise as I divorced my wife, the mother of our wonderful two children. It took this heartbreaking event to awaken me from my deep sleep so that I could see the numerous shortcomings that had accompanied my excessively driven and achievement-focused approach to life as well as my ongoing needy attempts to (unsuccessfully!) seek love through pleasing others. A humbling period of self-reflection and therapy followed, which nudged me to explore a different path.

My departure from the School of Education in 2008 hastened my exploration of what Hollis calls the ‘second half of life’, during which we are challenged to listen to our Soul and match our outer actions with our inner knowing. For the first time in my working life, I was not drawing a monthly salary; I was mainly accountable to myself and not an employer. I began to choose the type of teaching assignment I would accept, with the intention of expanding learning possibilities in my sessions.

In particular, I started exploring the intelligence of heart and body through movement by doing a personal development course in a movement field called Biodanza. This form really spoke to me, and I decided to continue in more depth by training to become a Biodanza facilitator. This process deepened my understanding and skills in movement and embodied learning, and this became a major pillar in my evolving teaching methodology.

I was able to understand and embrace these various aspects of my life when I took the opportunity of crafting the required monography for completion of the Biodanza facilitator training, into a major reflective piece, which I called Coming Home.

All this learning and expansion was exciting. However, it also made me realise that despite all my focus on growth and insight, I had not yet fully learned some crucial lessons from my earlier life and was still trapped in certain familiar but destructive behaviour patterns. I sadly divorced for a second time, and a whole new cycle of failure and grief and recovery started.

The past decade has given me the chance to foreground and merge these various Self and Work threads with new clarity and stronger foundations in both my personal life and in my corporate teaching.