A Crisis of Identity: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Awakening to Truth
We must have the courage to see things as they are, not how we want them to be. That is spiritual maturity, that is leadership, and that is what these times demand. Truth is devastating to the ego that must hang on to its perceptual world in order to survive. The push from the conditioned multitude against the mounting clear evidence for mass manipulation, oppression and corruption is, at its root, existential — a crisis of identity. Accepting the hard, disturbing truths is a death blow to the limited, false self that survives by believing imaginary or false things convenient to its own survival. Akin to the submissive, don’t-speak-up child who, in order to survive, must assume his abuse is for his own good, the […]
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, […]
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 […]
Healing and Self-Love: The Courage to No Longer Diminish the Truth of Our Childhood Adversity
Listed at the bottom are 26 examples of adverse experiences you may have diminished in order to cope and survive. I’ve also included a short video to add further context. There’s a saying: “Love is a place we go when we no longer wish to hide.” The same is true with healing. Because healing is seeing and feeling something for what it is, without diminishment, which is an act of self-love. Healing occurs when we no longer diminish our childhood adversity — both what happened (verbal and physical abuse, for example) and what didn’t happen that we desperately needed (affection, for example). It occurs when we own the magnitude of the environmental failures endured. We own the stark reality that our older brother beat us, […]
COVID-19: A Call to Wake from the Perennial Dream of “Normal”
When the world pushes you to your knees you are in the perfect position to pray. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi In times like this, with the world besieged by outright panic and high levels of uncertainty, the words of ancient wisdom keepers, such as Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi, resonate loudest. Now is a good time to take in the sages whose words have so often fallen on deaf ears. Indeed, with growing fear and a collapse of global infrastructure—sporting events, conferences, schools, businesses, etc.—collectively, we are being brought to our knees. The slowing and stoppages bestow a rare opportunity to see/consider something we cannot when lost in the busyness of everyday living; when upright in our usual stance. We are being forced to uncover […]
Sacrificing Authenticity for Attachment: The Adaptive Survival Responses of Children and Their Influence on Future Relationships
“If our environment cannot support our gut feelings and our emotions, then the child, in order to ‘belong’ and ‘fit in’ will automatically, unwittingly and unconsciously, suppress their emotions and their connections to themselves, for the sake of staying connected to the nurturing environment, without which the child cannot survive. A lot of children are in this dilemma – ‘can I feel and express what I feel or do I have to suppress that in order to be acceptable, to be a good kid, to be a nice kid?’” ~ Dr. Gabor Mate As children, we learn to sacrifice authenticity for connection. Done mostly unconsciously, our body’s intelligence recognizes that if we are our full, vibrant self, we’ll lose the attachment with our parents. We […]
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 […]
The Developmental Impulse to Reach: Healing Trauma through Completing this Long-Held Survival Response
Trauma is often defined as an incomplete survival response — fight or flight that could not happen. The body had the impulse to protect or run away, but was overpowered. It could not do what it instinctively knew it had to do to survive. The vital energy driving the biological fight / flight impulse was truncated, impeding the survival response and causing trauma. There is another survival response discussed not nearly as often — reaching. Desiring or needing connection, a child instinctively reaches for her primary attachment figure. Biologically, we are wired to connect. And so we are naturally wired to reach for that connection, particularly in pre-verbal stages of development. We long to have our hand received with gentleness and love. Yet, when that […]