So our 4th year of homeschooling comes to a
close. Yes, it’s September, but we
were busy riding out the summer crowds. Now that everyone else is back in school, this is the
time we bust out and take over the parks and beaches. Even though we don’t follow the normal routine of waking up
to be somewhere by a certain time or hurry and pack up to go home at a certain
time, it’s still a good idea to take a break from what we have been “working”
on in the past couple of months.
Of course the idea of taking breaks is a purely conditioned
one that I inherited from my traditional schooling and working background. We are embarking on our 5th
year of home school and my kids still ask, “Why?” When I suggest they take a
break from whatever they are doing.
Why indeed? What is it
about our daily task-doing and learning mechanisms that seem to require
breaks? I discovered upon a theory
from our last couple of months of home schooling that may answer this.
Ever since our discovery of Meditation as a tool for health
and well-being, I’ve struggled with a contradiction. I consider meditation, and other related modalities, like
energy healing, Reiki, Shamanism, and other nature based practices, to be a really
underestimated and underutilized tool for learning and living in our modern
world. So, true to my own nature,
I set to work learning and reading as much as I could about it. I really felt that only with enough
knowledge and frontal lobe understanding of this could I be any good at it, let
alone teach it to my children.
So the past few months have been spent learning techniques
as well as history and philosophy of meditation and it’s related modalities. My
kids have totally and completely excelled. They are very good at
meditation. They are very good at
re-aligning their energies. They
are very good at visualization. I,
on the other hand, seem to be the remedial student of the bunch. I was struggling. I was supposed to feel more
relaxed. I was supposed to clear
my mind. I was supposed to feel
more energy afterward. None of
that was going on for me. I was
overjoyed that it was happening for my sons, but why didn’t it take for me?
I figured that more reading would show me the way. More research would enlighten me and I
reasoned that once I understood enough history and technique from books and
DVD’s that I’d be much more proficient at this ancient science. Then the dreams came. I started to dream and dream and
dream. At first they were memory
dreams. Scenes and people from my
past, my very early childhood, and things I had not thought about in
decades. The dreams also included
times when my kids were babies.
One dream in particular, answered my question about why I was so much
less progressed in meditation than my kids.
I dreamt of a time when Harpo was about 4 years old. He spoke late. When he was 4, he still had a very
heavy baby drawl and it was a struggle, even for me, to discern what he was
saying. This was a time way before
I had discovered anything about alternative modes of parenting or home
education, so we had set to task constantly correcting Harpo pronunciation
of various words. For example, he
would ask, “I want my lelo hey-caca, puhweez?” So I would jump in and correct his pronunciation by saying, "No. Say, yellow, helicopter, please." He would try a few times and then give up or just beg for
the toy. I would always give in to
his requests, but it became a routine between us in which some form of
correcting his speech was involved.
In my dream, we were looking out at the ocean. I think we were at The Monterey Bay
Aquarium. Harpo was up against
the rail and suddenly exclaimed,
“Mama, look! THE
OCEAN IS WAVING!”
When I woke up
I contemplated his words. “Mama,
look! The ocean is waving.” I would have jumped in with my
correction of, “No, you say, look at the waves on the ocean.” But, that somehow also seemed
inadequate to describe what we were looking at. Neither was completely accurate. The most accurate thing to say would be, “The ocean is being
affected by the wind, which causes a disturbance on the surface of the ocean
and that interaction is called, waves.”
Ugh. Really?
Then, the lesson of mediation hit me. My son and I were experiencing the
exact same scene. Our eyes were
seeing the same ocean. Our skin
was feeling the same wind. Our
noses smelled the same seashore.
It was only our words that were different. The ancient sciences were employed by people long before the
printed vernacular, so learning and teaching it HAD to employ everything else
but written language. Even as I
write this, I know that my telling of this same story using my voice and
gestures would convey the very same story in a very different way.
I realized that I was very good at telling the kids to feel
the wind on their skin, see the glow of the candlelight, and smell the scent of
the grass, but I was terrible at doing them myself. I was more concerned about completing the meditation process
and following the steps one by one to the conclusion that I completely forgot
to be in the moment.
This is where my kids succeed, and I struggle. Children naturally live in the
moment. They are less concerned
with steps or completion and put themselves completely in the process. This is true whether they are learning
something new, repeating a favorite technique or messing one up. Especially since my kids have had
nearly no experience with the production-mode environment of traditional
classrooms, they are far less concerned about completing a meditation as
instructed, as they are about experiencing it and all that they may come across
during it.
Recently we did a simple sensory meditation in which we sit
outdoors and take each sense in turn. The general idea is to first look at things around you and
notice the variations in texture, color and shadow that you see. Then you close your eyes and listen,
and time to notice the loudness or softness of each sound you hear. Then, onto the sensations of your skin,
etc.
The kids will usually never “complete” this mediation. They will become absorbed at looking at
something or listening to something.
One son will start to see tree auras from staring at the leaves of the
oak tree. One son will fall asleep
listening for the caw of the cockatiel that lives 4 houses down. One son will be lost in plucking blades
of grass. From the ancient
sciences, perspective, these are all successful meditation practices. And from a home education perspective,
these are all examples of a very productive day.
Consider this next time you are trying to read a book to
your child, but they keep stopping you to ask questions, like “…are there Wild
Things in our city?” Forget the
rest of the book. Put it down and explore
this tingly combination of fear and curiosity that Wild Things are only found
on far away islands, and even if you come across them, they just like to dance
and will not harm him. Or when
they are told to fix their beds, but must jump on it for a few minutes
first. Let them jump. It will look
no worse for wear after you straighten out the sheets.
Children naturally live in their joy, sadness, fear, anger
or excitement. They don’t shake
themselves out of it unless they are told to. Tragically, we were all taught and conditioned to stop
living in the moment to go to sleep, or get up, finish our work, or go back to
work. This continues for decades,
starting from about 5 year old, and daily until we seek help from doctors, therapists and
professionals who help us re-learn how to live in the moment.
The most important message of the dream was how I felt that
day at the beach with my son. I
was happy. I was at peace. I felt proud of him and was still and
present in the moment. I remember
noticing his jubilation at seeing “the ocean wave.” I remember that I allowed myself to forego the rules and
habits that would have called for me to stop this mode of thinking and talking
to bring him back to a more practical, mainstream and accepted way of speaking
or being. My message to you is to
do the same. Just stop. Just listen. Just see. Just
feel.
And if you see the ocean waving, just wave back.
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