Ahhhhh!!! This meme...triggers in me a long sigh of relief. Raise your hand if you were traumatized by school. 🙋🏽 Mine is high in the air.
We're grateful we have chosen a different path for our son. Or maybe he has chosen it for us. 😉 Either way, it's time...to just stop and smell the roses! We can stop trying to prove our worth now. The competition is over!!
Let's hold hands on the playground and say "Red Rover" to our inner child...who's frightened and yet determined to succeed!!! And let's all collapse in a fit of giggles and heap of snuggles. We are here...NOW!!!! Aloha!!!
Unschooling for Children
"The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see."
~Alexandra Trenfor
"Just as in the body, eye and ear develop as organs of perception, as senses for bodily processes, so does a man develop in himself soul and spiritual organs of perception through which the soul and spiritual worlds are opened to him. For those who do not have such higher senses, these worlds are dark and silent, just as the bodily world is dark and silent for a being without eyes and ears."
~Rudolf Steiner
When you get down to it, unschooling is really just a fancy term for 'life' or 'growing up uninstitutionalized'.
~Grace Llewellyn
Most of us have been institutionalized into the mental plane all of our lives. Humanity's current rite of passage is in undoing the institution experience to clear the way for spiritual ascension. In this way, unschooling with our children becomes a tool for enlightenment. Learning to see life from their perspective starts to unravel our beliefs, our fears, our programming. We get to remember what it's like to feel our emotions and be in our bodies...to trust again. It is quite a joy ride!!!
"With practice, it is possible to learn the shape of your heart field as well as you know your own hands, and use your heart as you do your hands to touch the world around you.
It is possible to entrain with other EM fields intentionally, allowing the information in these fields to pass into you in the form of information you can use. It is, after all, as natural to us as the beating of our hearts.
Ancient and indigenous peoples, locating consciousness in the heart, commonly experience aesthesis as a regular part of life. Aesthesis is a Greek word literally meaning "sensation or feeling". They know those moments when there is a blending in the soul essence of two living things, when the human begins to know the nonhuman directly from itself."
~Stephen Harrod Buhner
“Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.”
~John Muir
Physical movement plays a vital role in the creation of the nerve cell networks that are at the core of brain development. IMHO, children younger than 7 years of age should spend more time moving than sitting still. I would go so far as to say that this is true for all ages though...even adults.
In our culture we tend to emphasize the opposite of this. We reward our children for being still...we say things like, "You're being so good", when they do.
If this resonates with you...I suggest picking up the book, a Life in Balance, by Frank Belgeau. He discusses in depth the theory that higher brain centers don't develop as fully, if the lower centers aren't developed (those areas including balance, kinesthetic awareness, timing, hand-eye coordination, etc).
If your child is struggling with reading or writing...involve her/him in more opportunities to develop these foundational movement skills...and be patient. I was a very poor reader, didn't speak clearly until I was 5 years old...hated school! When I started dancing, playing tennis and singing...suddenly my language and reading skills blossomed.
P.S. "Last Child in the Woods," by Richard Louv, is another highly recommended book for addressing what he calls "Nature Deficit Disorder" in children.
Once there was a tree....
and she loved a little boy.
And everyday the boy would come
and he would gather her leaves
and make them into crowns
and play king of the forest.
He would climb up her trunk
and swing from her branches
and eat apples.
And they would play hide-and-go-seek.
And when he was tired,
he would sleep in her shade.
And the boy loved the tree....
very much.
And the tree was happy.
~The Giving Tree
Unschooling for Parents
When we seek "All the facts"......
Do we expect to ever get all of them?
Do we need all the facts to forgive?
Do we need all the facts to act out of love?
Do we need all the facts to have faith in a higher power?
Do we need all the facts to feel safe...connected to source?
Do we need all the facts to operate from instinct? Intuition?
What are the facts but distractions and diversions from feeling and listening with the heart?
Who needs facts?
Someone who is trying to prove a point?
Someone trying to convince/manipulate beliefs of others?
Who rehearses facts?
Someone who believes their thoughts enough to defend them?
Someone who is not listening?
Does the truth need facts to defend it?
How do we breathe when we are reviewing and spewing facts?
Hmmmmmmmmmm
...
...
This is how I'm being un-schooled....through direct experience.
To pretend that one human being can lead another out of the dark night of ignorance and into the shining light of truth is ludicrous. If you want a teacher...try a waterfall, a raven, a mushroom, a mountain wilderness, a decaying forest floor, a broken heart. Knowledge is provisional and we have yet to approach even the first moment of civilized understanding. The way it is to be done is by trusting yourself...trusting your intuition.
Reject authority...reject institutions...they are here to keep you under control. And to the degree that we commit ourselves to an ideology...we are poisoned. Our growing dis-ease and malaise is all because we are kept from the wellspring of experience. We are sexually repressed, we are nutritionally, intellectually and spiritually watered-down. Why? Because the completion of the individual is extremely destructive to the plan of the dominators, the government, the religious and educational institutions.
What is real is personal experience...what is real is this moment. Turn off the T.V., stop believing everything the white lab coats tell you, fuck science...turn away from all the ways we give our power away and dumb ourselves down. Experience life full on. Stop believing and start living!
Pull your head out of your ass...stop identifying with the labels you have been given...whether it's a diagnosis, degree, or an astrological sign. Take your power back...accept full responsibility for your health and well-being and your continuing education in this school called LIFE.
This is your second chance...to unlearn the dogma, deprogram from the media mania and the thing-fetish, synthetic culture. Return to Nature and what is genuine and what is true...it's not all gonna be pretty...but it's gonna be REAL!!!
Image courtesy of Alex Grey
"You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind."
~Timothy Leary
Aloha beloved travelers of the pathless path. We are all just children...walking each other home... and surviving ourselves...together as one!!!
Pachee and Family