Anabella L. Hoppe
What the credentials do not say
I am asked: Who are you?
The short answer is on my CV.
All true. None of it the whole truth.
Before I held a sword or walked a circle, I spent decades in classrooms — student, teacher, professor. I believed education was the answer. If we taught well enough, designed well enough, reached well enough — we could heal the world.
I built my doctoral research on this:
Higher Education is an art. The art of assimilating cultural values and communicating them. The art of awakening the capacity to create a new natural and social order. The art of thinking and living.
I believed this. I still do.
But belief is not the same as embodiment.
I taught future teachers the difference between education and indoctrination:
Education runs through freedom. Indoctrination imposes by force. Education forms the will. Indoctrination breaks it.
They nodded. Took notes. Wrote papers.
And I went home empty.
Not because they failed. Because I had given everything I knew — and none of it answered the question I could not stop asking:
If education is an art, why am I not more whole?
I had degrees, certifications, a carefully constructed philosophy. I was someone worth listening to.
But I had forgotten how to be someone worth being.
My Doctorate in Educational Leadership and Master of Theology taught me Action Research and Augustine, Aquinas, and the great tradition.
I studied my teaching. My students. My methods.
I did not study my own emptiness.
I wrote papers. Impressed professors.
Before the degrees, before the titles — there was ICU. There was Hospice. A young nurse learning that presence is the only curriculum that never runs out.
I did not know it then. It took decades and five teachers to bring me back to what that silence already knew.
I taught bilingual education in Dallas. Fourth through sixth graders. Spanish and English. Curriculum I created, adapted, defended.
Bilingual education is not just about language. It is about translation. Not word to word — world to world.
A child moving between Spanish and English learns that reality can be named in more than one way. Truth is not singular. The same experience can be carried in different tongues.
Years later, on Wudang Mountain, listening to Shifu Yu speak of the circle in words I only half understood, I remembered those children.
Translation is not about accuracy. It is about remaining present while meaning shifts.
I had spent my career teaching others to translate. Now the mountain was translating me.
Action Research is cyclical: Plan. Act. Observe. Reflect. Repeat.
I taught this for years. Graded projects. Praised rigor.
I never applied it to myself. Because applying it would have meant admitting I was not just the teacher — I was also the student. And the student was not okay.
When I finally began my martial training, I discovered Action Research is not a methodology. It is a description of practice.
You show up. You try. You fail. You notice. You adjust. You show up again.
Master Scrima called it Again.
Shifu Huang called it Your shoulder is holding tension. Again.
Shifu Liu called it Feel both blades at once.
They taught me what I had taught others — but in my body. Heart to heart. Sweat to sweat. Feet rooting.
Not on paper.
Higher Education is an art.
But the art is not in the curriculum. The art is in daily living.
Assimilating values — then questioning them.
Communicating — then listening.
Forming the will — then surrendering it.
Being and education are indivisible.
I wrote that. I believed it. I still do.
But now I understand: Being is not something you achieve. It is something you return to. Every morning. Every practice. Every breath.
They told me about curriculum design.
They did not tell me that the best curriculum is a body that has learned to stop fighting.
They told me about assessment.
They did not tell me that the only assessment that matters is: Can you stay?
They told me about values education.
They did not tell me that values are not taught. They are transmitted — hand to hand, body to body, breath to breath.
I learned this not in a classroom.
I learned it standing until my legs shook. Holding weapons I did not yet understand. Being corrected into freedom. Walking circles until the circles walked me.
And first — in a hospital room, in silence, with nothing to offer except myself.
I still teach. But not from curriculum. From continuation.
When a student stands before me, I do not ask: What do you want to learn?
What are you ready to receive?
Learning is accumulation.
Receiving is transformation.
I spent years accumulating. Degrees. Methods. Theories. I was educated — and still empty.
Then I started receiving.
From teachers who did not care about my credentials.
From a mountain that asked nothing except that I keep climbing.
From practice that asked nothing except that I return.
Not a resume. A continuation.
Not a conclusion. A return.
Not a philosophy of education. A life that finally matches the words.