Developing love is basic reality to educate children

 

I spent more than an hour skyping with Clara and Vicky from England yesterday at my office. These two young girls, we were living together in Italy few years ago when I was nanny and their mother was pregnant of the third child. At office I did not have the microphone so could only write down everything and listening to all they were speaking from the other side. The most beautiful chat: little things: stories, laughs, sending funny emoticons, chewing candies and so on. Just in the middle of the busiest time of my schedule at work. Just at the perfect moment for inundating the heart with something strong and sane.

 

Now the attention towards how the children do spend their time is growing more and more everywhere. They are becoming the centre of our mind. There are plenty of books talking that we have to keep our kids engaged as much as possible to learn, to grow, to absorb in order to develop their skills and talents. This is false actually. I think that orientatively if they can be busy for half of their time with homework and activities they can also do nothing for the other half of the time. I grew up at this way: School, home works and dance class three times a week were all on a fixed schedule for about ten years from 6 to 19. All the left free time was spent to create things with the help of parents or friends. Painting, reading, listening to music, playing an instrument without any instructor, just alone, toys, journals, swimming in the summertime, going for mushrooms, asparaguses or cyclamens and mimosas during spring time, pic-nics, tons of free walks around the town and so on. The love surrounding was soft and spontaneous, just enough to guide explorations and personal growth.  

My birthday parties were memorable, sometimes at the central park among rocks and small animals sometimes at the beach, and aunties, mommies and friends were all enjoying at the same time. It has been going for years like that. There were no scheduled activities and we used to run free in the nature or making a volcano or a castle with the sand. Everything was really simple and familiar, the environment comfy and the people smiling. Love was developing on its own natural way… and still is.

 

Here in Hong Kong my friends-mothers tell that the schools are putting a lot of pressure on the little ones. They have to pass examinations and study hard even at night several times during the week. Plus at least three courses-activities in afternons and/or weekends. I am sure this is not the right path to educate children. I am sure both teachers and educators, parents are lovely and careful. But love and pressure do not combine nicely most of the times, do they? If a child feels he is too often forced to do something, that means he is not comfortable with this rhythm and this situation will be translated sooner or later in another problem. It is obvious. There are other ways to educate which are safer and more adapting to a child inner self. And it is in the inner self where all the talents and the skills already reside! 

Do forgive and be forgiven: a circle

I felt the lovely hug of a mother by reading the speech in English of H.H. Shri Nirmala Devi from last Sunday, Easter.

Few excerpts:

So to forgive is the biggest blessing human beings have. Even Christ said the same thing. “I forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing.” So if Christ had to say that then what about you? We are all human beings and if we have done mistakes, then people can get angry and upset with you, but the best thing for you is – to forgive.

Forgive for doing something that should have not been done. This was the biggest quality of Christ that He knew how to forgive. He forgave people who had made horrible mistakes and He forgave them, because He loved them. And that is why you should also forgive.

Today is a special day for that. A special day for forgiveness. And that is why I say whatever you would think that it is very late, but we have done a meeting, because I didn’t want to miss the time [the occasion]. Forgiveness comes from people who are very generous, who are good-hearted. You know, everybody makes mistakes and so we can also make mistakes, but that means we have a right to forgive and we have a heart to forgive.

So whatever might be your powers, whatever you have achieved in your life, whatever position you maybe occupying… but you must learn the way to forgive, otherwise you are nowhere near Christ. You must learn to forgive. That is such great quality if you can forgive, all the time forgive.

 

And that is why today I wanted to meet you all. I wanted to meet you all and tell you that today is the day to forgive. That does not mean that you sit down and think about how many people you have to forgive. That would be absurd. But something that haunts your mind and you think you have been troubled, have been in turmoil.

 

The interesting thing is that you don’t know how many powers you have and you don’t even forgive. Then you have all these powers and the greatest power you have got is to forgive.

 

Just forgive. For what? It is a practical thing. Most practical. Supposing somebody slaps you. Alright, if someone slaps me, what should I do? Should I slap him back? No. Then should I ask him, why did you slap me? No. Then I should think he must be a stupid fool to do like that? That won’t help. On the contrary, if you can just forgive, forgive that person who has done something wrong… For you it is important that you must forgive, because it has no effect on you… But if you forgive, it will have more effect. Your goodness, your righteousness…

 

 Thank you Lovely Adored Mother.

This is the Era of Forgiveness we are living at this time I think. Because everytime we forgive we are proceeding higher towards a wider opening of our top-of-the-brain. If we want to have an open mind, thing that seems so much trendy nowadays, we must forgive, no other way actually. Forgiveness is the fastest way to open the mind, the safest, the most enriching and fulfilling, the most noble, the coolest, the most natural one. There are too many points in favour of this attitude, quality.

But how to get it? What is helpful for increasing forgiveness in our lives since we are all aiming to open our mind and thus our hearts of course? (I have no problem in forgivingeither little things and disgusting things. (When I was in high school I was engaging a lot with my parents on discussions about this quality and was playing by inventing imaginary situations to test my ability of forgiveness. “If this thing happens what will you do? Would you forgive this person? And if you do not know that person? And if the person is a relative?” All these kind of questions I used to formulate and talk to my mother, my sister and so on trying to answer in the most honest possible way. It was such a fascinating game for me!! And my mother was almost driven crazy by the even crazier made-up-stories)

 

Today I find forgiveness really exciting, it s so reassuring, you feel your heart beats going in such a rythmical and confident way every time you for-give-it! It s almost the same feeling of when you give a beautiful wrapped gift to somebody and you feel joy for having got and prepared it specifically for that person. It s like giving a present and projecting the love.

 

So what is helpful to give such a gift to the others? I am considering two things which are cool:

1) Be forgiven by others and automatically absorb this action in form of vibration into yourself. I have been living these kinds of circumstances where my huuuuge naughtiness has been forgiven so marvelously by the most important people, the parents (and not only them). It felt like swimming in the pure world of comprehension, cause I knew i was so badly mistaking.

2) Meditate on forgiveness by watching how the egoistical and conditioned attitude act thru our person in all the different occasions.

the beauty of the heart
is the lasting beauty:
its lips give to drink
of the water of life.
truly it is the water,
that which pours,
and the one who drinks.
all three become one when
your talisman is shattered.
that oneness you can’t know
by reasoning.

[Rumi]

It’s not true that a new language should be taught by mothertongues to the kids

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I have two close examples which support the fact that children can learn a new language not necessarily from mother tongue teachers.

The first is a long study to which by myself I participated in 1998-1999 with a master thesis in Rome. Based on the main idea of Bruner about constructivism in psychology and learning processes we focused on children at kindergarten level living in an Italian context and being exposed to the English language as second one (L2). The research was inspired by 400 teachers and their young pupils. We eventually wrote this book comprehensive of all the work done. The cool point is that maybe only one of the teacher was a native English speaker, all the others learned in our seminars and transmitted their knowledge in the classroom. We analyzed their progress, prnunciation, improvements, diaries, workshops, a lot of interesting material…They did an excellent job and the children learnt each year more and more! Statistics and databases inclueded in the same book. Do you know why the children learnt English? The main result was that is because the teacher love them and express her lovely attitude plus interest towards them daily and firmly. A section of the project was dedicated to the expressions of her face, to her words and behaviours with the little ones. They love the L2 because they love in primis the person who is teaching them. That is why we intitled the book “The magic teacher”. This magic is nothing but pure love!

Second example is fresher and again comes from an experience in Italy which I only heard about directly and am supporting with material in Chinese language. My auntie, an experienced teacher and coordinator of seminars and workshop at a primary school, is already conducting Chinese classes in ludic form to the kids. And she never spoke Chinese before. She is using the modern Youtube way, karaoke, playful settings and real small storytelling linked to the new life of her adorable daughter (me ) Here is an example i provided her few weeks ago. It is just so much sweet:

“Children understand love more than anyone else” (Nirmala Srivastava)

Why celebrities come into our life

Celebrity worshipping is one of the train stops in this Trend Blend map for the new year. How true is it? After noticing the word “HAPPY..” in the set up message of the chat with my sister I immediately thought “oh wow she’s wishing Happy Chinese new year to everybody” when scrolling the full sentence appears “Happy birthday Vasco”: her favorite singer whose songs she listens with no interruption almost. She also went to his concert joining a crowd of thousands of thousands last year. Is it the kind of worshipping we are talking about today? Probably yes~! It’s like a battle in the human mind. We follow whom we like. But usually the aspects of the celebrities to catch mostly our attention are simply frivolous and unreal, like they last for some years; maybe also for 20 years but then they leave the place to other celebrities just depending on which side of our ego or superego we would like to worship better. It is more related to an internal oriented worshipping.

What do we do to defend ourselves from these celebrity-attacks? Are we still completely ourselves even though we are very much dragged into their creations and trends? Until which point is our attention independent and pure? Until which point we depend on these sort of gurus thru their music and art instead of depending on the guru within ourselves? How much does our centered balances still hesitate?

Globalizing our education

 Always impressed by the people who talk wisely about what global means. Thank you to Mr. De Bary, professor emeritus, to have spent the time of a life to research and understand the connection between East and West from the educational point of view.

Today I wish to amplify these points in regard to certain specific issues in contemporary education. The common denominator among all of our educational situations is (1) the challenge to sustain any kind of humanistic learning at all in the face of the extreme competitive pressures of modern technologies; (2) the need of most educational systems to reengage with their own local traditions, from which they have been largely cut off; (3) the need but also the difficulty of sustaining this effort, beyond the initial stage, to encompass other traditions so as to achieve, over time, a global literacy as the standard of what every educated citizen of the world should know in order to engage in meaningful discourse with other peoples.

 

Within each major tradition, this dialogue has taken place through a process of constant, repeated cross-referencing and back-referencing, internal and largely independent of external involvement except to the extent that, from at least the seventeenth century onward, writers in the West, great and not so great, have confirmed for themselves what important writers in the Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Japanese traditions have long held in esteem. Thus in the Islamic tradition al-Ghazali and Ibn Khaldun have based themselves on the Quran and commented on the great Sufis, while European writers, no less than Middle Eastern, from medieval times onward have recognized the stature of al-Ghazali and more recently Ibn Khaldun. Something similar is true of India, with the Upanishads and the Ramayana taking up the discourse from the earlier Vedas, the Gita from Upanishads, and Shankar from both. And it is true too of China, with Mencius, the Laozi and Zhuangzi taking issue with the Confucians, and so on.

 

Today in a multicultural education that serves human commonality as well as cultural diversity, both content and method may vary in different educational situations, but a core program should make the repossession of a given society main cultural traditions the first priority, and then move on, in a second stage, to a similar treatment of other major world cultures. Further, to the extent that time and resources allow, it would provide for the consideration of still other cultures that, for a variety of historical and geographical reasons, have not so far played such a dominant role in world history (In the East Asian context I would certainly point to Korea in this respect).

 

[from “Confucian Tradition & Global Education” by W.M. Theodore De Bary]

Career: Three elements to absolutely work on/out

 There is so much attention on career these days: books printed out, seminars organized, talks and chats at office, during lunch and at home. We are also bombarded by so many ads about self-improvements, self-growth, self-this and that. Another thing is that we also know that each and every individual cannot improve alone, he needs some good humus that only the collectivity he’s plugged in can give. This is the reason why a big part of the general attention is also on the team work, the power of the collective. I would dare to say that we still do not know anything about how to live collectively in a full satisfied way. If we would then so many problems would just dissolve because they would be disintegrated in some kind of vortex which is even bigger than the individual mind.

 There are 3 enormous obstacles which block the professional growth, followed by comments from the expert:

1) guilt:

 I think this is a modern tecnique, to feel guilty. Some sort of a modernism is in it because I dont know how it has worked out. And this modernism of this horrible thing called “guilt” is something that really [...] to clear out.

2) no pro-collective skills

So today’s understanding should be that we all should become collective from inside. We should not grudge or grumble about everything – and enjoy the collectivity.

But the second side of collectivity is this: do not try to exploit the collectivity, otherwise you’ll be in trouble…When you are collective, you have to be respecting the collectivity of others. By your presence, another person should not, by any chance, suffer or should not feel in any way insulted or inconvenienced. So when you are in the ollective, it should be such that another person should enjoy your company, enjoy you being there. That is something where there is no problem. But if you are demanding and if you are asking for things and you think no end of yourself, you cannot at ll be collective by any chnace, but you’ll suffer for that. Automatically you will suffer.

3) anger 

[...] Like anger, people always boast “I’m very angry with him”. Just make that anger into forgiveness and you’ll see the person.  Instead of you getting into problems, he will get into problems. Anger will upset you, but forgiveness will upset him, automatically. It’s the biggest weapon you have got, is to forgive [...]. And this will give you self-respect, taht you ar enot disturbed by anything you see.

Like a ship has to be seaworthy – if you put the ship on the sea and if it breaks, what’s the us of making a ship?[...] You have to be seaworthy and if you are seaworthy nothing can disturb you. 

Reading these excerpts and meditating on them, I found out they really well fit the need of people (like me) working full time for middle or big companies. Watch the obstacles out! They are some kind of viruses leading to further complications. For example they will make the person degenerate towards un-constructive behaviours, damaging not only the individual image but also the one of the company. Moreover they will provoke interminable waste of precious time and money for everybody at different levels.

Detaching not attaching

After having dedicated a post to the quality of forgiveness in the blog magazine, today morning I want to dedicate my attention to detachment. I spend most of my time in its company and I have to say it has been my saving anchor in several crucial occasions.  Going back in the memory I noticed that this mechanism has started to work quite naturally since childhood. Now I know for example that I used to live a difficulty in parallel with another girlfriend during primary school and while she was talking a lot about it involving herself and other people I was acting like a sort of stranger to the situation. I was watching the people around me playing their rule and for me it was like being in a movie, a stressful involvement being not verily expressed there. 

But this attitude which has been growing with the time with my person has always fascinating me a lot, especially during the studies in Psychology. However I never was satisfied by any theoretical explanation. It seems the same authors who try to describe it are themselves or too much detached or too much involved in the same process. Wikipedia people also do not offer a very wide and interesting idea of detachment.

Nowadays a lot of books concerning managerial modern skills like to include detachment as an ability to cope with stress and different people in a work environment.

Thinking of detachment the first thing pictured in my imagination is many people dancing together with joy and order. When I started studying and practicing yoga I discovered another meaning for detachment and it is really valid and not difficult to understand. We might be involved in our feelings and actions with other people and situations but in a deeper section of our comprehension we are aware that events, facts and human beings do not depend on us. Each has its own independence to exist and be what it is. I want to see how my detachment develops and which flowers it can bring forth to my understanding of myself and the human nature.

Enlightenment loves integration

 What’s our mind form? Do we usually tend to unite or to divide? It’s a very wide question but it can probably offer an input about personal psychology and self-understanding.For example they can ask: is it the Hong Kong people attitude the same as the mainland China’s one? The united tending mind is more tempted to answer yes and prefers to firstly enunciate a common vision of the idea.Well – would say – most of the people living in Hong Kong have at least one generation who was settled in the Mainland before spreading down to the city. Moreover the attitude of their heart is just the same, cordial, open and smiling, treating the guests with respect. It does not make any difference if they live in a small or large town. Although their lifestyle is different, the basic behavioral way of acting unites them.  Can I say that to discriminate between good and bad also requires a united mind? For example the Honoris Causam awarded psychologist Nirmala Srivastava states: “The discrimination between good and bad becomes one in your mind, becomes one of your inner temperament, then you are always very much satisfied because you know you are not doing something which is wrong”.

Healthy children: notes on memory

What to do to be sure that a child is growing well and healthy, in the proper direction of growth. First of all we all should know which one is the proper direction of growth, we need to move our (enlightened) awareness towards this issue within ourselves if it is possible. The truth is that children grow healthy when they are let to be themselves. For example if we have a seed of violet, the same seed will be happy to grow as a violet and not as a rose. We cannot change the nature of a seed. Now the nature is something very simple we have to do every day. If we do not understand the nature from within we cannot understand the nature from without. If we don’t know how to explain to ourselves how we were as child, we cannot understand the children either. If positive feelings and memories are left in our consciousness from the time we were younger, then it is easier to understand who is younger because the mechanism is eternal and is the same for everybody, age after age. If negative memories mostly guide the ship of our mind then we are not going in the proper way and we cannot help anybody else to grow in the proper way.The proper way is a path of security, confidence, love and understanding. It is the innocence, which is the source of all of these. Innocence is simplicity. It knows when to start and when to stop something. It gives complete joy and satisfaction of life. Just like a child does.