Significant beginnings

Young children show their personal traits and characteristics from the beginning of their lives. Some of these show as qualities and some of them as faults. They both need attendance.

The qualities need to be cultivated and the faults need to be reversed and molded to reveal their creative, self-serving side.

Every child is born with a basic personality, which is unique. It is much more than the sum total of the parents' qualities and faults. 

The Self carefully chooses a long "line" of a soul-family tree, which best reveals the needs of the soul and desires of the spirit. Then, the Ego has the difficult task of "doing its best with what it has", without having all this information on the surface of the mind.

Raising consciously aware children

Teaching a child to think for herself is probably the hardest thing to do and the hardest lesson for her to learn. Raising children who can’t think for themselves is so much easier and less work.

But what does it mean to “think for yourself”? Does it mean to have your own opinion? No, we have much too many of those and people still don’t think for themselves. Does it mean to choose your own beliefs, interests, likes and dislikes? Still no! All this, only creates more wars, more greed and more injustice.

Dyslexia Today

"Embracing Dyslexia (documentary film)"

A film long overdue… Now we can really being to study the subject, in a more objective way than what we have been doing up till now.

I used to try and spot out the mistakes, the misconceptions, the myths and the lies. That’s what the system of the society we live in always did and taught me, while I was growing up as a dyslexic. Now I know better. Embracing, understanding, looking at both or all sides to a story and synthesizing the various parts of it is harder work but immensely more rewarding and mind-opening. It takes self-confidence, the willingness to shift and the passion to be of service than to remain a critic. It takes the heart's desire to make the leap into wisdom verses replacing it with opinion. Yet, this won't be an easy read...

To doubt, means to be willing to see all possible sides of a matter. But it cannot be an intellectual, theoretical process. It needs to be heart-felt, practical and courageously accepted, where security and previous knowledge seize to provide concrete answers.

Experiencing unschooling

Raising a child who has never attended any formal schooling, social conditioning or structure, is both a challenge and an amazing journey.

My youngest daughter is six years old and has never been to any day care, kindergarten nor has she started school along with her friends and peers in September.

The decision to not school (or condition) her in any way, on any level was not one that I made after “careful thinking” or long term planning. It was more an intuitive decision, one that came very naturally, according to our way of living based on my values.

Autism: talking about right brain thinking

Autism, Asperger's, AD(H)D or Dyslexia? It's time we took a look at these "inabilities" in a whole new light!

We tend to look at people searching for the negative first, based on our past education. The ego wants to establish its "place", comparing itself with others. "How are they different from me?" And then we go into categorizations and statements about what is "normal" and what is not, basically to secure our own self-worth...

What if we decided initially that the IS NO "normal" and that each person has something unique and extraordinary to offer to the world and us?

Meet Temple Grandin; an amazing woman in her own right:

“Who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. If you were to get rid of all the autism genetics, there would be no more Silicon Valley.”

Unschooling; not as unknown a concept as we're led to believe

Unschooling means you don't "have to" do anything. You just follow your heart. Then each day becomes a whole new experience, everything you do matters and you exist in cooperation with life.

Learning is about discovering life through yourself and your environment. It is not about being programmed how and what to think, do or be.

Learning cannot be separated from fun, experiment, error and experience.

There is no “normal” or fixed pace to learning. Each must follow their own rhythm.

Learning is closely related to freedom as each individual takes steps into the unknown.

Unschooling

There will be many articles on unschooling in the near future, as it is a huge subject, mostly still unknown.

Unschooling is much more than choosing not to send my child to school (public or private). Schooling in its broader meaning is everything that has to do with our social and cultural conditioning.

Whether we are aware or not of the extent that this continuous conditioning, it nevertheless shapes - without our conscious consent - who we are. There is not an area in our lives where this subconscious conditioning has not and is not affecting. It could not therefore, leave our roles as parents and educators unaffected.

That which concerns me the most is the ignorant, irresponsible way in which we are bringing up and tutoring our children. This is not about blame or guilt. It is about taking responsibility of being aware who we are and who we want to be.

Shedding new light on Dyslexia

Dyslexia is not a learning disability although all fingers point to education. Naming something and then continuing our focus based on what we have named is easy and comfortable. Yet symptoms are sometimes misleading and in this case, they are.

Sure there are difficulties but we need to leave those aside for a while to see the bigger picture or we are stuck in one very limited perception, which ultimately has no answers and no “cures”.

Dyslexics have a completely different perception of reality that non-dyslexics cannot grasp. Why? Again, I’ll use terms for lack of better ones, although they too have been over-used…