I had not grown up around large animals, and nothing about that afternoon suggested I should try again. My friends were experienced riders. I was not. Someone put me on a horse and left me to figure it out while they started a comfortable trot ahead of us. My horse, sensing immediately that I had no idea what I was doing, decided to join them anyway. I bounced along helplessly until I understood that I had exactly two options: wait to be thrown, or choose to fall. I chose to fall. The puddle was waiting.

I stayed away from horses for years after that. It was not until I was a class teacher, the summer before taking on my first class, that I felt pulled back. Not for pleasure exactly, but because I had a feeling the horse had something to teach me that the classroom needed me to develop.

So I took lessons. And what I learned had almost nothing to do with riding technique. I learned how to begin a conversation with a horse using nothing but the clarity of my intention and the steadiness of my body. I learned that a horse will not follow an unclear leader, not out of stubbornness, but out of self-preservation. The horse needs to know that you know where you are going. I learned to stay in rhythm with the horse’s movement, not to impose my own rhythm on top of it, because a rider out of rhythm is a burden, not a guide. And I learned the difference between pressure and what horse people call suction, the art of becoming interesting enough that the horse turns toward you rather than away.

That last one stayed with me for a long time.

Last year I took our entire faculty to Painted Bar Stables, where Erika Eckstrom, a former Waldorf student, runs her operation with the kind of authority that horses respect and humans flock towards. We stayed on the ground. Erika challenged the faculty to work with the horses toward concrete goals, earning their trust, eventually cleaning their hooves. Nobody was allowed to simply muscle through it. The horse would tell you immediately if you were tense, timid, or unclear.

At one point the teachers discovered they could get the horses to come toward them by offering grass and treats. It worked beautifully. Then someone said, out loud, that they wouldn’t be allowed to do this with children. The group laughed. And then went quiet. Because the question that we were thinking was: if not treats, then what? How do you become interesting enough that a child turns toward you?

That is suction. And it cannot be faked. A horse knows the difference between a person who is genuinely present and a person who is performing presence. So does a child. And underneath the suction is something even more fundamental: the horse needs to feel safe. It feels safe when the human drawing it closer is clear, calm, and settled in themselves. Not dominant. Not tentative. Present.

This is what I want for teachers this summer. Not a reading list, not a new methodology, not another course that adds to the pile of things you already know. Find a stable near you, introduce yourself to a horse, and pay attention to what it tells you about your presence. You might start with treats. That is a fine place to begin. But notice what happens when you put them away.

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Laura Hayes has been a Waldorf educator for more than two decades, teaching and leading in Germany and the United States, and currently serves as School Director at Ithaca Waldorf School in Ithaca, New York. She writes about the inner life of the teacher because she believes personal development is not optional in this profession. Her book The Stance of the Teacher: Teaching From Integrity is available on Amazon. Learn more at www.laurahayes.coach.

What kept bringing me back was the feeling that I had more to say about teaching than I was hearing anywhere else. Not about curriculum or child development or lesson planning, but about what it actually costs to show up as a teacher. What this profession unapologetically requires the teacher to develop personally.

A few months ago, I stopped waiting. My colleague and outreach manager had started asking me to write “Laura Letters” for our community newsletter, and the act of writing regularly pulled me back to my own voice. At the same time, faculty members were coming to me with questions I recognized immediately, because the answers had been sitting in that document for years. So I went back and I finished it!

I have helped bring other books into the world. I co-authored Silver Linings Stories with a group of health coaches. I produced Myrefall Mystery with my seventh and eighth graders, a mystery set on a Maine island, twenty-four hours, eight friends, one missing brother. Those were collaborations, and I loved them. But this one is different. This one is entirely mine.

Writing it surprised me more than once. I did not expect to write the words “we are hypocrites if…” and mean them. I have never thought of myself as someone who calls things out that directly. But there it was on the page, and I left it, because it was true. A tango metaphor appeared that I hadn’t planned, and it turned out to hold more than I knew when I wrote it.

The book is called The Stance of the Teacher: Teaching From Integrity. It draws on Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner’s Pedagogical Law, systemic constellation work, and Nonviolent Communication. But more than any framework, it draws on 28 years of teaching and leading across different contexts, different schools, different countries, and slowly learning what it means to show up as fully yourself.

The central belief running through every page is this: personal development is not optional in our profession. It is not a bonus for the particularly self-aware or the ones with extra time. It is the work. If we are not willing to engage with it, we owe ourselves an honest conversation about whether teaching is where we belong. I say that with care, not judgment. I have had that conversation with myself more than once.

The book is available now on Amazon. I hope you will not just buy it but read it, argue with it, fold the corners, and bring it back to me.

Order The Stance of the Teacher: Teaching From Integrity here

https://www.amazon.com/Stance-Teacher-Teaching-Integrity/dp/B0H5J4JMT3

I remember the first time someone pointed that out for me. I was an intern, trying to lead a class, and I lost the students halfway through. My mentor told me afterward that I wasn’t grounded enough, that I needed to get into my body more. In Waldorf language, the word for what I was experiencing is excarnated: not fully in. What I hadn’t understood yet was that my excarnation was contagious. The students floated off because I had floated off first.

It was frustrating, not because the feedback stung, but because I had no idea how to do what she was describing. I thought I knew what it felt like to be in my body. After all, I had been living in it my whole life. But I was lucky enough to meet Beatrice Lührig, a teacher and family systemic constellation facilitator, who helped me find my way into a fully incarnated state. I still remember the moment I was able to feel my toes from the inside out. It sounds like everyone should be able to feel that. I apparently hadn’t. Only then did I realize I had spent most of my life living about three feet above my head. It may also explain why I was never able to catch a ball as a child.

That experience pointed at something I would spend the rest of my career trying to understand. You can learn every method. You can study child development, practice your transitions, read Steiner cover to cover. And still walk into a room and lose the class, not because your techniques failed, but because you weren’t fully incarnated and present.

This is what my book, The Stance of the Teacher: Teaching From Integrity, is about. It came out of years of teaching, of making mistakes in front of children, of working through conflicts with colleagues and misunderstandings with parents that no communication strategy fully resolved. What I kept finding was that the methods helped, but only up to a point. Past that point, what mattered was who I was bringing into the room.

After the book came out, a colleague asked me: what’s next? Are you going to offer workshops, a training? Another said: I want more of the stories. I want you to coach me through this. Those conversations are part of why I’m here.

This Substack is where I plan to continue what the book started. I will write about the inner life of the teacher, about integrity and presence, about the moments that expose us and the slow work of becoming more fully ourselves in the classroom. Some posts will draw on Rudolf Steiner and Anthroposophy. Some will come from my own experience. Some will come from the edges of what I am still working out in my own practice.

If you are a teacher who has ever felt the gap between what you know and who you are able to be on a hard day, I think you will find a home here. I would love for you to write back and tell me where you are in this work.