We're in the dark now and we begin with an element of failure that makes it radioactive in higher education: its emotion. The feeling of failure is intense and those in an educational community often have little guidance about best practices when a student is in failure and feeling strongly.

So our guide this episode is someone who sits with student emotion all day: Cyntrell Legette, one of our therapists at Counseling Services. 

Cyntrell speaks to the confusion and pain of failure. Together, we work our way through the emotional experience of failure. We also begin to get a glimpse of grief in higher education. It's much more common than most of us ever realize and failure is at its root.

Join us to stand in the emotional aura of failure and begin to better understand what is happening and how we might better respond to student emotion and our own. 

Stream here or listen through Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

We mention in this episode that tourists in Hell need a guide. One of the most famous examples of this kind of guide is from the medieval masterpiece, The Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. Dante, in mid-life, awakes in a dark wood, which turns out to be at the gates of Hell. But just as he feels lost forever, a guide comes to him, the ancient Roman poet Virgil, who promises to guide Dante, explain what he sees, and why it is significant.

Our season on failure will have such guides: both voices from our community and voices of those who have long been considering the ideas and concepts we're exploring. Perhaps you'll become curious about some of these guides and look for more from them and see where they can take you and what they can open up for you as you explore our underworld of failure.