Children and Spirituality

Are you drawn to matters pertaining to spirituality? Do you avail of courses to deepen your understanding and your practice of inner wisdom and healing? Does the notion of the supportive and loving energy of the universe resonate with you?

If your answer is yes, then do you, like me, wonder how should we engage with and educate our children in the same way that we are exploring for ourselves? Children are actually much more in tune with this perspective than we are, but lose their familiarity and confidence with it as they grow and are conditioned by the society we live in.

The education system in Ireland and elsewhere – no matter how happy we are with our child’s school – places huge emphasis and value on left brain skills such as logic, reason, language skills, rationality, analysis and so on. Of course most schools give due emphasis to the arts and creativity too, but the demands of society and the marketplace dictate the over-valuing of these useful but incomplete set of attributes and skills.

The right hemisphere of the brain is the seat of creativity, imagination, intuition, body awareness and the subconscious mind. If the exercising of this part of our brains – and our children’s brains – is neglected, it becomes rusty, we don’t feel trust or comfortable with it. Most importantly, we are failing to use at least half of our potential for intelligence, self-expression and self-realisation.

Many adults are now seeking meditative and body awareness practices, to re-connect with the richness of their inner selves, and combining what they discover with their left-brain skills to ground down or externalise their true potential. But hey – shouldn’t we be doing this with our children? Why let them lose it and go through the pain and struggle of re-engaging with it in thirty years’ time? The human race and the planet are evolving, and we need to support this generation of children to take their place in what is to come.

It is so clear to me that we should be teaching our children to meditate, to observe their breath, their bodies, their thoughts; to speak to them about their dreams, their imaginings, their sensing of things; to teach them about quantum physics in simple language – all matter is energy, seen and unseen, vibrating at different speeds; to engage with the natural world; to create opportunities for them to be still and to listen to their inner selves.