Want to Prepare Children for an Increasingly Uncertain World? Let Them Be Uncertain — Through Play!
“Play is training for the unexpected.” ~ Marc Bekoff Jacob is five years old. Seated at the kitchen table, he cradles his favourite box of crayons and felts to dive into yet another creative exploration. This is no project. Just discovery. What will arise from one moment to the next as is curious, heart-felt instincts direct his hand? He’ll find out! Same with Samantha, she too is engrossed in play. Four years old, buckets and shovel in hand, she communes with sunshine, fresh air, water and sand at the beach, scooping, piling, patting, allowing her moment-to-moment imaginative impulses to guide her in building her sand sculptures. Like Jacob, she immerses herself in the element of surprise! Both Jacob and Samantha learn to adapt when needed. […]
Evolving from “Early Childhood Education” to Early Childhood Attachment and Outdoor Play
When education and the raising of children aligns with the rhythms and cycles of Mother Nature, then we will have woken up. Nothing rushed, nothing forced, just enough structure to allow for what wants to unfold to happen in its sweet soulful time, trusting and respecting due order, the higher agenda of the child, and that of Life. We are speaking of a complete reorganization of society’s principles and values, such that we return to living in nature, as nature itself. What we call “early childhood education” is only a recent phenomenon in Western culture. Prior to the last 100 years, children learned through the natural impulses of exploration and engaging with family and friends. Their education was often outside, self-directed through unstructured, unsupervised play, […]
Awakening Your Sovereign DNA and Breaking the Spell of Submission
Submission is the spell cast upon humanity for eons. As it’s been before, it is today, and to amplified measure given what we see unfolding across the planet. Few are awake from this dream, inured they are by the powers that claim to have their best interests at heart. A submissive neurobiology is susceptible to this obedient ignorance. Just as the abused child grows to tolerate and normalize the abusive partner, we have accustomed ourselves to being acquiescent to corrupt systems that render us numb to our senses. Family and education are but two examples of institutions reflective of larger bodies that portray a positive image from the outside, but carry tremendous dysfunction within the walls. Like with government and the military, church and corporations, […]
The Therapeutic Power of Play to Heal Shame in Children
The nature of shame is to hide. It keeps pain hidden, the dark corners of our psyche concealed from the masses, too unbearable to share with others, too unbearable to be seen. Look at people with tremendous shame and their head tilts down, their eyes avert contact. Many even have a hard time looking straight into a camera. They must look away. The pain of shame and blame runs that deep. Children are, of course, not immune to shame. Raised in abusive, neglectful, toxic environments, shame inevitably buries into their psychophysiology. Beliefs such as “I am wrong”, “I am bad”, “It’s my fault” are common amongst children who experience chronic failures in love; who grow up not feeling emotionally or physically safe; who come to […]
A Love Whose Time Has Come ~ Healing the Disembodied Human and Our Ravaged Planet
“A person suffers if he or she is constantly being forced into the statistical mentality and away from the road of feeling.“ ~ Robert Bly We are a disembodied species, deprived of the weighted feeling of being in touch with our senses, attuned to the murmurings of our heart, the pleasures, ecstatic and intimate, that go with rootedness. We have lost touch with the once innate feeling of connectivity to strangers, the delight in a butterfly, the awe when struck by the glowing moon’s presence. We have squandered the feeling worlds of imagination and creativity born in pause and even boredom. And we’ve lost touch with the inborn capacity to feel profound sadness and anger, fear and pain, to be unbridled in our emotional expression, […]
12 Questions Kids Need and Long to Hear ~ The Consent of Inquiry and How it Cultivates Self-esteem, Trust and Respect
“Trust children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult. Difficult because to trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves, and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” ~ John Holt 12 Questions (Scroll to the bottom for 6 follow-up questions) What do you want? What do you need? What do you feel / think? How do you feel (about that)? What does your heart / intuition / gut say? What feels right / true to you? What brings you joy? What’s your dream? What would feel like fun? What would you love to do? What matters to you? What do you hope for? Jack’s story “One major study of 700 preschool classrooms in 11 states found […]
Banks of a Wild River
In play, children remain in a fluid, flexible state. Moment by moment they open to greater, more creative versions of themselves. They touch and bloom the seed of potential in their heart. Children, in their mischief, imagination and spontaneous explorations, don’t try to become someone. They are someone already. They know this without knowing it. They feel the larger instinct of life pulsating through their veins, calling them to reach and spiral into infinite potential. Be sure in educating and parenting our most precious little ones, you do not shape this natural unfolding into what it doesn’t want to be. Instead, give it space to breathe, to run freely. Let any rules and structures you use be like banks of a wild river, guiding children […]
How Better Attunement to Children Co-arises with Empathy and Care for Mother Earth
As we better attune to the needs of children, we cannot help but feel the needs of Mother Earth more deeply. And vice versa. This ripening sensitivity reveals what indigenous people have known for millennia: that children, we, are not separate from our environment. For generations, however, this awareness, empathy and care has been marginal, at best, in western culture. We’ve lived and treated our environment, including its inhabitants, as distinct from our body. And historic attachment disruptions with children have co-existed as expressions of this fundamental disconnect from the land and its manifold creatures. Colonizing hearts, minds and lands While indigenous cultures have long placed the child at the centre of the circle around which the family and community extends, western culture has built […]
4 Reasons I Take Issue With Teaching Children Meditation in School
I take issue with teaching children meditation in school, particularly when done without a wider view of the systemic causes for child dysregulation and a more thorough understanding of trauma. Yes, meditation has been proven to be effective with young ones. I know the research is there backing it up. But… Take a moment to consider the four points below, and ask yourself: What is the real issue at hand? What do children fundamentally need? And if we addressed the issues I lay out, while better meeting children’s core biological needs for love and safety, would we still need to teach meditation? Or wouldn’t the desired result of meditation—calm—arise more organically? 1. Anxious systems The problem is not the child, but rather the systems they are […]
Transforming the School System Begins With Feeling its Heartbreaking Impact on Children, Past and Present
Note to the reader: If you require a brief history of education to provide context for the first few sections, scroll further down to “A brief history of school”. “Be confused, it’s where you begin to learn new things. Be broken, it’s where you begin to heal. Be frustrated, it’s where you start to make more authentic decisions. Be sad, because if we are brave enough we can hear our heart’s wisdom through it.” ~ S.C Lourie At the beginning of many of the talks I lead, the organizer of the event takes a moment to acknowledge the traditional and ancestral territory we stand on and the people it belongs to. It’s a brief period of time in which I pay my deepest respect and […]