Exploring the self-transformative potential of being with children
“TEACHING obliterates LEARNING. HELP obliterates SELF-WORTH. INSTRUCTIONS obliterates EXPLORATION. KNOWLEDGE obliterates KNOWING”
DO-NOTHING PARENTING
‘Parenting’ as a deliberate and stressful activity is what prompted the term ‘do-nothing parenting’ the way ‘do-nothing farming’ was in response to the toxic farming that we established in the 20th century.
Previously, people understood the nature of life and were living in alignment with life. Hence, parents never ‘looked after children. Children just grew up in an environment of care, freedom, and trust. This is how all living beings live. If one casts a glance to few generations prior, people didn’t seem to have any problems. What seems to be happening now, is that — the ‘greater the knowledge the people have about how to do, the less they know how to be.
There is a need to reflect on this situation very deeply, as children are having the worst experience ever — both in terms of physical and psychological development.
THE CRISIS IN MODERN PARENTING
Nurturing is the very nature of every species. Parenting, i.e., the natural process of nurturing, used to be an effortless, spontaneous and instinctual process for human beings.
We are not using our instincts to understand children today, and instead are totally reliant on experts. WHY? From effortless parenting, how has parenting now become an activity that is creating anxiety, stress, and chaos?
Children evidently are the most misunderstood beings in the context of modernity.
Why have we ostracized our basic parenting instincts, which ensure the continuation and sustenance of life? Vital for any species is the knowledge of child-rearing. Perceiving pregnancy as disease & entrusting the knowledge of child-rearing into the hands of experts, speaks volumes of our total failure!
“Parenting” is a very new modern idea, being practiced by ‘the educated’. Modern parenting seems to be a stressful activity where parents don’t know how to look after their children. This is a critical crisis!
For some reason, we are not able to acknowledge our crisis in-depth, as modernity shapes us in the most unnatural way which prevents an unbiased re-evaluation. Our natural learning system gets disabled in the process of ‘being taught’ which begins from our childhood. Not being trusted to evolve ourselves, takes away our inner self-worth to be.
The foundation for true parenting is being completely misguided by ‘modern’ knowledge because it is not through intellectual ideas that we need to be with children. Instead, we need to revert to our biological roots. Bringing back the remembrance — that we are life, and that children are life; it is at this level that we need to engage with children.
CHILDREN IN ‘MODERN TIMES’
Trusting life is the nature of children, but is modernity trustworthy?
When children encounter what contradicts their natural propensity, they will try to rebel, but due to various forces at work children are forced to submit. The way modernity operates, their very nature works against them. It is natural for children to trust, as falsehood is not a natural part of their being. Modernity, however, creates environments conducive to cheating.
All the negative qualities are responses to conditioning. All the positive qualities are what is inherent.
The nature of children is to be content, to be present, to learn choicelessly. The gamut of negative emotions known to us is all outcomes of ‘modern’ parenting. What are the conditions which cause the creation of this behavior in children? Are behavioral problems like ADHD, ADD, ODD Conduct disorder, etc., the creation of modern parenting? Not allowing a child to do something or have something causes resentment and leads to them ‘learning’ to be angry.
CHILDREN IN INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES
How is it that indigenous communities raise children effortlessly?
If one looks into any of the non-literate communities there is absolutely no teaching, no ‘parenting’ of any kind. The main difference between these communities and us is that they totally trust life. They trust themselves. They seem to know without knowing how to articulate it. This knowledge is not in terms of language, but it is that their being knows what to do. Therefore, there seems to be a very important crisis between knowing and being. Among the illiterates ‘knowing’ is by being, whereas literates seem to ‘know’ but don’t know how to be!
Indigenous and/or non-literate cultures provide an environment for awakening, whereas modernity provides an environment that brutally conditions us. Almost everything that modernity provides is against the very nature of life. It creates an over-reliance on expert knowledge and methodologies — creating clones out of people, with a mechanized mindset who are incapable of responding naturally.
It is very difficult and rare to find the few, modern people who seem to have sensitively learned from the illiterate, indigenous communities. A totally different way of being with children is very evident in their writings.
The Continuum Concept — Jean Liedloff
From the Book…
…It is no secret that the “experts” have not discovered how to live satisfactorily, but the more they fail, the more they attempt to bring the problems under the sole influence of reason and disallow what reason cannot understand or control.
We are now fairly brought to heel by the intellect; our inherent sense of what is good for us has been undermined to the point where we are barely aware of its working and cannot tell an original impulse from a distorted one.
…[Determining what is good for us] has for many millions of years been managed by the infinitely more refined and knowledgeable areas of the mind called instinct. … [The] unconscious can make any number of observations, calculations, syntheses, and executions simultaneously and correctly.
…What is meant here by “correct” is that which is appropriate to the ancient continuum of our species inasmuch as it is suited to the tendencies and expectations with which we have evolved. Expectation, in this sense, is founded as deeply in man as his very design. His lungs not only have, but can be said to be, an expectation of air, his eyes are an expectation of light… [etc.]
…The human continuum can also be defined as the sequence of experience which corresponds to the expectations and tendencies of the human species in an environment consistent with that in which those expectations and tendencies were formed. It includes appropriate behavior in, and treatment by, other people as part of that environment.
The continuum of an individual is whole, yet forms part of the continuum of his family, which in turn is part of his clan’s, community’s, and species’ continua, just as the continuum of the human species forms part of that of all life.
…Resistance to change, no way in conflict with the tendency to evolve, is an indispensable force in keeping any system stable.
What interrupted our own innate resistance to change a few thousand years ago we can only guess. The important thing is to understand the significance of evolution versus (unevolved) change. … [The latter] replaces what is complex and adapted with what is simpler and less adapted.
There is no essential difference between purely instinctive behavior, with its expectations and tendencies, and our equally instinctive expectation of a suitable culture, one in which we can develop our tendencies and fulfill our expectations, first, of precise treatment in infancy, and gradually of a (more flexible) kind of treatment and circumstance, and a range of requirements to which adaptation is ready, eager, and able to be made.
pp. 22–27, The Continuum Concept, Revised edition ©1977, 1985 by Jean Liedloff.
https://continuumconcept.org/summary
Quotes from People of the Deer by Farley Mowat
“In the camps of the People the child is king, for childhood is short and tragedy often comes after. As it is with the dogs, so the early years of a child are made free of compulsion and of hard labors, for these years must always remain in the child’s memory to alleviate the agonies which come with mature years. . . . I expressed surprise that no Ihalmiut child knows corporal punishment even when the provocation is great. I spoke casually, but Ootek replied with vehemence, for it seemed he was honestly puzzled that I should not know why a child is never beat. ‘Who but a madman would raise his hand against blood of his blood?’ he asked me, ‘Who but a madman would, in his man’s strength, stoop to strike against the weakness of a child?’ . . . There was something that might have been contempt in his voice as he spoke, and I never again raised that question.
“So the children live their lives free of all restraint except that which they themselves impose; and they are at least as well behaved as any child anywhere. For three years after birth a child is suckled and by the time it has been weaned it is already aware of the general pattern of its life. I told you of Kunee who, at the age of five, was already an accomplished woman of the People, yet Kunee had never been taught what she must do. She was simply observant and imitative, as most children are, and she saw what others did and longed to do as well by herself.
“The children’s work is also their play. At night, when the adults are asleep or resting on the ledge, no voice is raised to chide the girl children, who remain active until the dawn, keeping the fire alive under the cooking pot and concocting broths and stews, not with toy things, but with the real equipment that will be theirs in maturity. No regimen or hard routine is laid upon them. When they are sleepy, they sleep. When they are hungry, they may always eat, if there is food. If they wish to play, no one will halt them and give them petty tasks to do, for in their play they learn more of life than can be taught by tongues and by training.
LITERACY: DENIAL OF EXPERIENCE AND RE-WIRING OF THE BRAIN
Effortlessness is the true nature of life — the way we imbibe our mother tongue where no one taught, no one learned yet knowing took place. Effortlessness is achieved when the doer is absent. Things happen and we are just part of that happening. This is reflected in the way we imbibe language.
Language became mental rather than experiential, courtesy- the unbridled use of ‘literacy’! The impact of literacy on the formation of the modern mind is not objectively explored due to our own biases. The main culprit could be the way and the timing of imbibing literacy and the way literacy has become all-pervasive.
In the modern context, most words become conceptual and non-contextual as well as requiring the learner to put in an effort to learn.
Literacy has brought in a fundamental change to the way we are formed.
LEARNING FROM CHILDREN
This role reversal is very difficult for us as the way modernity has shaped us, is to feel superior.
There are two things we can learn from children provided they have total freedom — the inherent nature of us as human beings and the process by which we learn naturally.
Children imbibe everything they experience and they are shaped by these experiences. If we treat them with respect, they will also respect themselves. If we treat them as capable, they will function accordingly. If they experience stress and anxiety, they imbibe it. So, effectively, what is the ‘anxious parent’ teaching the child to be?
Children, being in the realm of the unknown, are providing us with an opportunity to recover our natural cognitive system — essentially designed to discover & create knowledge. We are of the past, whereas children are of THE NOW. Children are process-oriented, whereas we are product-oriented. Children autonomously create knowledge of the real world, but we have been taught to analyze the written word.
The catch is that children have a potential that needs to be awakened. Engaging with us, children imbibe what we are. So, if we choose NOT to change, we are going to condition and, in the process, we will be creating clones out of our children.
Though de-conditioning ourselves is a very difficult process to attempt, it will enable the child to experience us as a process.
INVITATION TO AN UN-PARENTING WORKSHOP
Well, I too am offering a workshop!
– Of A Very Different Type –
The workshop is not about what to do and how to do. It is about how we can transform ourselves by being with children sensitively.
The workshop I am offering is based on my experience of being with children from indigenous communities — how they transformed me and what I did to enable this to happen.
Through my observations of indigenous children, I have been able to decode the structure of natural cognition — why, what, and how they learn, vital for understanding the formation of our ‘being-ness’. We are shaped by our experiences. In a way, victims of our context.
In indigenous communities, the child is trusted to be capable. Hence, a condition is provided for children to awaken to their inherent possibilities. DO-NOTHING PARENTING requires one to be totally present. This means discarding all stored-up knowledge and trusting the child.
The life in you will guide you.
The offering for contemplation:
NATURAL PEDAGOGY — — — Teaching without teaching
We learn by doing; Teach by being
Our biology is made in such a way that our becoming is left to the CONTEXT. We are born with potentials but our formation depends on the conditions. Either we can be awakened to our inherent possibilities or we can be conditioned and thus get distorted.
NATURAL COGNITION — — — Learning without learning
Learning like breathing is a choiceless activity. The senses absorb what is being experienced and this is what gets processed on its own and is made available to the conscious mind when required, the way we imbibed our mother tongue/s, and how words come to us without making any conscious effort.
NATURAL INTELLIGENCE — — — Effortless actions — Less is more
Natural intelligence is the outcome of the playful exploration of the contexts. The actor is absent as only action is taking place. The conditions that context makes available are what awakens our intelligence. What is not there is what enables the unfoldment of intelligence. That is why the ‘privileged’ is often the ‘under-privileged’ - the failure of success!
SILENCE — — — The forgotten dimension of language
Neither communication nor understanding always requires language. Understanding precedes language. What is required is very keen and sensitive observation or taking part in experience as one collective being. This comes naturally to children. Coordinated cooperation!
PLAY — — — The cognitive process of nature
Playfulness is the nature of children, which enables playful exploration of their context and playful recreation of experiences. Playfulness ensures openness, freedom from rules and prevents mechanization of the mind.
DRAWING — — — Adapting to the two-dimensionality of text
Drawing is the ‘play’ that children do on a two-dimensional surface. If children have total freedom, i.e., free from concepts and help from the adults, their biological qualities — instinct and intuition — will come into action to ‘understand’ the two-dimensionality which emerges from the printed page.
BEAUTY — — — Establishing communion with the world
The principle, embedded in all living beings to ensure the conservation of energy. The aptness in action.
VALUE — — — That ensures sustenance of life
Existential quality, embedded in all living beings which form the basis for action.
COGNIZE
Being Life!
Join me in this exploration. http://ekfoundation.in/
