Tag Archives: fear

Wellbeing—A No Limits Approach

14 Jun

This blog is part of the New Zealand Gifted Awareness Week Blog Tour

What does wellbeing mean to children with non-ordinary minds and non-ordinary needs, and more than that—children living, suddenly, like the rest of us, in utterly non-ordinary times? The way our educational systems were, often too rigid to meet the unusual needs of the brightest students, they now face the even greater challenge of adapting to a world whose future seems utterly unpredictable. It may be true that we’ve never really known what lies ahead, but now we know that we don’t know. One thing that seems certain is that we won’t be able just to return to the way things were before. That’s both a bad thing and a good thing. Bad in that the disruption has forced us to design new ways to cope, good in that we now know that new designs are possible.

Emergencies force us to rethink, fast! This pandemic, the greatest emergency our current world has ever faced, has created limits we have never had to deal with before. As I write this my county in the state of New York is still on lockdown, and schools are closed at least until next fall. Parents have been forced quite suddenly to address the issues of homeschooling (ironically, a method that was once illegal in all 50 states) and teachers are having to rethink methods they may not even have questioned before.

In addition to the obvious stresses and changes to normal ways of doing things, we need to recognize that gifted kids have some kinds of stresses that are particular to this population. Their natural zest for information makes them unusually aware of the news, and with minds especially good at following logical connections, they may be looking well beyond the new stresses and limits in their own lives and worrying about how each one spawns limits and dire problems in the rest of the world. Many also have unusual empathy, so can’t help but feel for the populations most at risk.

Wellbeing for our kids and ourselves will depend on how we choose to focus our attention. All day every day we are “telling ourselves a story” about what’s going on in our lives and the world around us. Now is exactly the time in our world that we most need the advice Mr. Rogers says his mother gave him, to “look for the helpers.” Rather than focusing on the stresses, losses and limits, we can notice what others are doing to work around and through them, and we can focus our capable minds on ways to create new possibilities for ourselves and others. While as individuals we can’t “save the world,” everything we do changes it in some way. A small bit of help, a new creation, a thoughtful act, a moment of kindness or good cheer, making someone laugh, all make a difference and every difference radiates out in ways we can’t predict.

There are no limits to the impact of each positive story.

“How wonderful it is to think that we can broadcast ‘mental germs’ of confidence, of love, of peace, of joy, of goodwill. How wonderful to know that each one of us can so influence [their] environment that everyone who steps into it will be benefited.” –Ernest Holmes, 1971.

 

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Change Your Story, Change Your Life

6 Apr

 

I last wrote a blog post in November 2019, not long before the holiday celebrations and family visits began.

And then came 2020. Let me begin with personal experience. In a post here back on May 7, 2014 titled “No Less than the Trees and the Stars” I told of losing my husband and two of our four sons in 2013. Like that post, this one again confronts the subject of death in my own life, as my dog died in January of this year and my third (and last) stepson died on February 2. With my remaining son and his family I returned from the memorial service in Florida on February 29th, just days before Covid-19-related travel restrictions began.

Since 2013 people have often asked me how I managed to come to terms with the three deaths in that four month period. I would answer that grief can be utterly devastating, but I had found a way to cope through a philosophy I discovered in 1999 and began calling “story principle.” I spoke about it in a talk I gave at the National Association for Gifted Children conference in Kentucky in 2005. After that people began asking me if I could please expand that message into a book. So eventually, I did. It’s called Change Your Story, Change Your Life, and has been available on Amazon as both a physical book and a Kindle version since 2011. While the philosophy didn’t make coping with the deaths of 2013 easy, it did make it possible. The loss of my dog in January this year left me fully alone in my new home, and the death of my stepson took away the last member of the family that became mine when I married in 1964. Once again story principle is helping me cope.

Now, of course, the whole world is dealing with a pandemic that is continuing to bring death to every continent we humans inhabit. Kids are out of schools and families, many of whose gifted children are extremely sensitive and empathetic, are doing their best to cope with what may be the single largest and scariest disaster anyone on the planet today has ever experienced. We are told by those who study the subject of grief that we are all now currently faced with major grief caused by the sudden loss of the patterns our normal lives depend on.

 After a number of internet gatherings and email exchanges with families of gifted kids, I decided last week to make my book easily available in its entirety as a free PDF and posted the link to that PDF on all of my Facebook pages. I am including it here at the end of this post.

Now let me share some thoughts about how to connect with this material, if you decide to download it.  It was never intended as emergency help for a situation as difficult and life-changing as this pandemic. What I hoped for those who wanted to put it to work for themselves was that they could take it a chapter or two at a time, try whichever of the exercises between chapters that appealed to them, and move through it as far and as fast as seemed right for them. The structure of it was designed to bring the reader into the use of story principle one small step at a time, mainly to help them come to terms with how hard it can be to believe the principle without experiencing it personally. There is nothing like seeing and feeling it work for oneself to encourage a beginning acceptance and a willingness to experiment further.

 But now, as I think about the possible effects of the current world situation on the highly gifted, highly sensitive and aware PG population I’ve written about all these years, I would suggest a different approach to the material than I had envisioned when I wrote it. Maybe read the short introduction and then Chapter Two, “Story Principle 101” as a beginning, but after that you may want to skip around in it a bit.  Browse chapters and scan the “Putting it to Work” exercises to see what appeals to your particular interests or needs or life experience. It’s always possible to go back if you feel you’ve missed something that might help you understand more about how (or why) it might work for you.

Though with death tolls now a part of daily news broadcasts, one might be tempted to move quickly to the final chapters that focus on death, my suggestion would be that there are some pretty important chapters that come before those—especially from Chapter 9 on—to provide a more solid foundation first.

Science of Mind, from which Story Principle grew, was itself based on spiritual principles that can be found with some variation in most of the world’s religions. So some readers will immediately recognize aspects of it, especially if you come from a religious tradition that acknowledges “miracles.”

I wrote it to help people, as I had been helped, to bring more joy, more comfort, more fulfillment into their lives. I wanted people to discover the enormous power that their minds, their attitudes, and the “stories they tell themselves” have over their life experience. William James (1842-1910) wrote “The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.” It’s a discovery that has mostly been lost to later generations. This is just my way to help share it.

When my son first read the manuscript he said “Nobody’s going to believe this coming from you, Mom. Your life has been way too good. They’ll just say, ‘Easy for you to say!’”

Well, possibly they would have said it then, but not so very likely now. Nobody’s life is without losses and grief. But I couldn’t have imagined when I first wrote the book what a solid foundation it would give me for dealing with my own.

Here it is in its entirety. Feel free to download and also to share:

Change Your Story, Change Your Life

 

 

 

 

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What we see…Part Two, Perspective

21 Nov

 

 

Kids tend to enjoy optical illusions. And many gifted kids are struggling these days, like us, with images of the state of the world we are offered most often in our so constantly connected digital world. We may use illusions to help them (and ourselves) see things in a different way.

The image above on first look seems to be a two dimensional (flat) image of many pink roses. But for most people that is not the only way to see it because it is a stereogram, a computer-generated image made popular in the ‘90’s by Magic Eye books. For those with good binocular vision it’s possible to shift one’s focus to create a three dimensional image of a heart, that stands well “in front of” a background of roses. Both technology and my own eyes can change what I perceive.

Caveat:  Those with astigmatism, or some other vision problem that affects the way their eyes work together won’t be able to see the heart at all—the image remains stubbornly one of roses. So if you can’t manage it don’t keep trying till your eyes are tired. Below are other optical illusions that work other ways.

On the left you may see either a white goblet or two profiles in black of human faces–or even both at once. On the right you can “choose to see” an old woman with dark bangs, a large nose and a sharp chin, wearing a babushka and a fur coat, or an elegant young woman with up-swept hair, a fur coat and a choker necklace, looking away. Some find it easier to see one, some the other.

All three of these images are reminders that one “picture” can offer at least two interpretations, equally real, but quite different.

And then there’s the famous story of the blind men and the elephant, where touching only one part of the elephant gives each man a totally different “vision” of what he is touching. Is it a snake or a rug or a spear, a tree or a wall or a rope?Okay, so the point here is that the idea that what you see is what you get, while very often experientially and psychologically true, is far more complex than it seems.

Consider a photographer who wishes to capture a landscape scene that includes a vast plain and a jagged mountain. Where she chooses to stand creates the perspective of the photograph. Is she out on the plain, looking across and up at the peak? Is she on the peak, looking down its rocky sides to the plain below? The camera captures the image before it, regardless of the location she has chosen. The other tool the photographer has is the lens. If she changes lenses, the image the camera captures changes.

But our eyes are not the same as a camera. They’re connected to our minds. And our minds are at work all the time. It isn’t just that looking at something from one physical location gives you that location’s perspective and another location gives you another. Our minds are actually always creating both the “location” itself– the mental place we’re standing–and also the focus.

I have a Face Book page called StoryHealer, where on most days I post a quotation with an image I’ve chosen to go with the words. I am always looking for positive, uplifting quotations, because the world we live in right now is full of horror stories, fear stories, hostility, anger, threat or despair. Those stories that saturate our consciousness are busy, whether we realize it or not, whether we want them to or not, creating mental/emotional locations from which it’s difficult to see anything else. From those locations and with that focus, it can become genuinely difficult to find and capture images of joy, of love, of gratitude or even of hope.

What I try to offer to those folks who find or have “liked” the page, is a different location, a different focus, from which to see the world, even for a moment. Or possibly to remind them that there is a different perspective available always.

We can do this with our kids and help them see that perspective also comes from inside us, and that we are able to do the choosing. If we are looking through a lens of our own hostility, how will we notice kindness? If we are standing on the rock of our own sense of victim-hood, how likely are we to see compassion? Or from a platform of absolute rightness, a totally different and valid-to-the-perceiver point of view?

It can be challenging to change perspective, or even to notice how where we’re standing affects what we see. And to realize that where someone else is standing inevitably gives a different view. If we can find a way of looking that connects us to the vast landscape of human caring, helping, loving, compassion and kindness that is part of our species’ nature the world may not seem quite so dark, nor other humans quite so threatening. We don’t have to “look away” or “become blind to” the dark side of human experience. Nor do we have to accept the other person’s perspective. We can, however, choose to acknowledge the difficulties all others face, and attempt to look with kindness, with compassion, with forgiveness at the larger picture. And then, to do our best to be, in our actual closeup daily experiences, as kind and compassionate as possible so we won’t find ourselves adding to the darkness the larger landscape always includes.

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What we see… (Part I)

14 Oct


Imagine that you live in a house with a window that looks out on the view above. I suspect, whether you would prefer oceans or mountains or woods or city scape, most of you would think this view is a pretty good one. Beautiful, in fact. As you look at it, what do you notice? The mountains in the background? The pond? The trees and expanse of green? The sunset glow? How might it make you feel to be sitting in your own house looking out at that view? Would you enjoy and take comfort from such a view?

Now let us consider some of the aspects of that landscape that might not be apparent from this window. Might there be deadly-disease-carrying mosquitoes around the pond? Ticks in the grass? Poisonous mushrooms growing under those trees? Hornets nests? Snakes? Wolves or coyotes or bears that could attack if you went out, or gobble up one of your pets? Maybe a fast-moving storm with lightning that would start a wildfire in the woods? Are any of these things likely to come immediately to mind on looking out this window?

 

If you were to say yes, those are exactly the sorts of thoughts such a view would engender, I might advise you to start looking for a good therapist. It’s true that any of those things might be in the world outside that window, in fact some of them almost certainly are, but to perceive mostly threats in a view of such calm and beauty would suggest an unhealthy level of paranoia.

Now think about the other kinds of windows in our world:  television, email, Face Book and Twitter feeds, cell phones, or even, here or there a newspaper. And think about the view they show us of the world just outside, or maybe beyond (or even very, very far beyond) our immediate surroundings. There is so much focus on the threats, whether there is anything we can do about them or not, that it’s difficult to see anything else. Statistics show levels of anxiety and depression skyrocketing in many or most of what are called “the developed” countries. If every time you looked at the scene above you could see only images of ticks and predators and wildfires, why wouldn’t you be anxious and depressed?

Some years ago I gave a talk about “Good News” at NAGC. Back then it was possible, with some persistent searching, to find compilations of positive stories from around the world, in spite of the “if it bleeds it leads” pattern of news programming. One major network in the United States (I believe it was ABC then) had newly decided to end each half hour national news program with one short positive story. Others now have taken up that policy. Most of these short positive stories actually take fewer minutes from the allotted broadcast time than a single commercial break, while before that final story, almost every other segment tells of catastrophe, violence, political struggle, warfare, medical threat, injustice, accident, mass shooting, storms, earthquakes, or other horrors. And now “the news” provided by our media, isn’t only half an hour in the evening; it’s 24/7 and very difficult to avoid.

Parents who attempt to limit their children’s exposure to this kind of news coverage are fighting a losing battle once the kids start school or get their own phones. And the brighter kids are the earlier they begin to take an interest in what goes on outside their own homes or neighborhoods. It isn’t that this is an entirely new phenomenon. When our older boys were kids, one of them came into the living room one night when we happened to be watching an old war movie. He started to tell us something and then said, “Never mind, I can tell you after the news is over.” During his whole lifetime the evening news had devoted much of its air time to the war in Vietnam.

But now it is next to impossible to escape being deluged with the worst of human experience, no matter where it is happening in the world. I remember when parents were advised to tell their children, when there was shocking news from the other side of the world, “Don’t worry, it isn’t happening here.” And I pointed out to parents then that gifted kids know that much of this isn’t happening here, but it isn’t themselves and their own families they are worried about. They worry about kids wherever they may be threatened, even on the other side of the world. And they worry about the apparent depravity of the human species, especially when that is very nearly all they “see” out the technological windows on the world.

And of course, now, they hear about every school shooting and instead of the “duck and cover” nonsense method my generation was given in school to protect ourselves from a nuclear bomb, they are given “active shooter” drills from kindergarten on. In addition, along with Greta Thunberg, they worry about the fate of the planet they are going to inherit. “Will there still be a world for me to grow up in?” many of them are asking. And it can be especially scary when they see that much of our culture goes on as if none of this were happening.

If “what you see is what you get,” we need to consider not just what we see, but how we look. It is possible to focus more attention on what is going right. We can begin the effort to see beauty and caring and the willingness to help.

Instead of focusing on how much school violence there has been, we could, for instance, use the resources of the internet to estimate how many schools there are in this country and consider how many kids, therefore, have not faced gun violence in their schools. It doesn’t diminish the tragedy of what has happened, of course, or the need for positive change—it just helps change our perspective. We’re told it is foolish to say “It can’t happen here,” but it’s also foolish to allow every child to set out for school expecting that at any moment it may happen here,

Both parents and schools can make a constant, serious, and determined effort to find and report to our kids (and show them how to go looking for) stories of the massive efforts on the part of real humans to counteract the threats that exist in the world. Focus whenever and wherever possible on the other aspects of the view through our windows. There are organizations formed to work on most of the problems we face. As Mr. Rogers’s mother told him, watch the helpers. For every story of catastrophe there are more stories (though not always as easy to find) of individuals, organizations, often massive nationwide efforts to help. Encourage kids to find ways they, too, can get involved.

Studies were done back during the Cold War when the threat of a Russian nuclear first strike made the possibility of nuclear winter and human extinction seemed very, very real, that showed children whose parents had themselves become involved in organizations working for peace were less likely to be afraid than children whose parents only watched the news and talked about it. Any actual action, no matter how small, gave their children a sense of hope and possibility. Often, now, it is kids who are pushing the adults to do something! We need to encourage that and join them when we can.

How we choose to look has a great deal to do with what we see, of course. It is not denial to change our focus to find the best in humanity, and more often than not turn off the news that focuses on the worst.

Part II of this post will come soon…

P.S. New addition: Here is one of the “good news” sources: https://www.findhorn.org/programmes/an-introduction-to-project-drawdown/

 

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Competition to Cooperation—The Roads Are Diverging

27 Sep

Because I recently uncovered an old “boom box” from my garage, I suddenly have a way of playing cassette tapes (yes, those old things) in my bedroom while I’m doing my morning exercises. I’m feeling vindicated for saving them all when I moved 3 years ago!

I’ve been speaking about the gifted since 1982, and at some point most of my talks began to be recorded on cassettes. So I’ve been taking a stroll through my own history. The last two days I’ve been listening to a talk

 I did for the Hollingworth Conference in 1999. The title was When Two Roads Diverge, How Will They Choose? The Hollingworth Conferences were created for the families of profoundly gifted children, and this talk was for the adults—parents and/or educators (most were parents). When I began the talk I told the audience that it was going to be my “sermon” for the conference, so if they wanted practical tips I’d be okay if they ditched my talk and went to hear somebody else.

Not being a preacher, what I meant by calling my talk a sermon was that it would be philosophical—a “why are these kids here and what is their evolutionary value to the human species?” sort of talk. Imagine my surprise, given that I’d just written a blog about competition, to discover that my twenty year old talk’s most central theme was the negative effect of our vison of “life, the universe and everything” as based on competition. If profoundly gifted children might actually come into the world with the capacity to think in new ways, I suggested back then that parents consider giving them a new way to see the world—new to our current culture, though very, very old in human history—as based on cooperation.  

Consider the human body, I suggested. What if the cells were designed to compete with each other rather than cooperate? If we ate a piece of cake, with its heavy load of sugar (especially important for the brain) imagine what would happen if, once the cake was broken into its essential nutrients, the first organ to encounter them grabbed most of the sugars for itself, using what it needed and hoarding the extra in its own cells. The negative impact of such a design would not only harm the organs of the body that would be deprived of necessary nutrients, but also the organ storing more than it needed. Obviously, such a design would soon leave the Earth without our species. Our bodies are designed for cooperation. So is our planet.

But Darwin!” someone might say. “Survival of the fittest! Nature red in tooth and claw.” Years ago I learned that before he died Darwin had backed away from that interpretation (though apparently those who had bought his original view dismissed his new awareness by suggesting he was getting senile). Even though we humans need to consume other living things (both animals and plants) to survive, we are powerfully prejudiced against death—at least our own. So Darwin’s original version of the predator-prey relationship perceived it as competition. One lives and the other dies. One wins, one loses.

But the natural world is balanced by the fact that prey animals reproduce in far greater numbers than predators, so that there are enough individuals to preserve both species. Plants are involved in this balance as well, but humans tend to identify with animals far more than with plants, so for thousands of years have mostly missed the plant/animal balance—while disturbing it massively in favor of the plants that we (or our prey) like to eat. And, as with the buffalo, and many kinds of fish and birds, we have often killed vastly more prey animals than we needed for our own survival. We have tended to think of ourselves as the only living beings with absolute value. Thinking in terms of competition we accepted our right to “win out” over every other life form that might in some way harm us. (Though we are willing to share our well-being and status with the creatures we like best.)

Even among other humans, however, we have mostly chosen competition rather than cooperation in exactly the way our own bodies do not. Just as with animals, we tend to value some humans more than others, and so often are willing to sacrifice the well-being of some in favor of the ones we value more. We as a whole “thinking species” haven’t managed yet to consider and treat all of humanity as our “friends and relations.”

As I write this members of our species’ younger generation around the world (those who are hoping to still have a habitable Earth to grow up and raise children on) are demanding that we recognize and address the ultimate damage to ourselves and our planet that our competitive (humans-at-the-top-of-the-evolutionary-pyramid) view of life has created. They see and say what so many of their elders don’t yet, that we need to make a major change because “our house is burning.”

Meanwhile some rich people in the USA are having to serve at least a little jail time for having used their personally amassed wealth to cheat their kids into “top schools” in the race to get to the top of our society’s pyramid, whether their kids have the ability to get there themselves or not. But consider this:  whether kids get into “top colleges” by cheating or by profound intelligence, what they will find there is the “upper” end of an entire culture based on and still mostly teaching, competition. My last blog was about my personal discovery that I, who have known about Darwin’s revision, and who have been “preaching” about the need to change our world view from competition to cooperation for more than twenty years, have been unconsciously just as motivated by competition in my personal life as I was taught to be! That’s more than a little scary!

The roads are diverging in front of us, and we as a species are running out of time to make a choice of which road to take—the one that has led us to where we are, or the one that will begin a massive change.

At the time I gave that 1999 talk many people were already aware that the planet was in danger (the first Earth Day was in 1970!) and efforts to change direction were being implemented, surely, if slowly. Weirdly enough now, 20 years later, as storms and wildfires and rising sea levels and droughts (and floods) and volcanoes and the extinction of great numbers of species become impossible to ignore, our own country is being taken literally backward by a leadership focused entirely on competition. Most of the world is still governed by systems based on modern humanity’s failure to see, understand, and value cooperation.

If we look closely at the issues that make the headlines and grab the most air time in our news broadcasts (immigration, me too, black lives matter, voting rights, political battles, health care, rising poverty rates…) it doesn’t take much to see the operation of the “winner take all” mentality that a culture based on competition creates.

Of course it will take a change in behavior to move to a new road and many people are afraid we have run out of time or can’t muster the courage and commitment or even know-how, to “take the road less traveled.” But the change in consciousness required is not only possible, it is happening.

Consciousness is energy, and each of us, as we change our own consciousness, has an energetic effect on the whole. And we are doing it! Once we begin to focus our attention on the real changes that real humans are making in the old pattern, we can see the “good news” about how many of us are already at work in this direction. Rather than being seduced into believing that all the news is bad, we begin to see that each one of us has real power. I’m not among those who think that more technology will solve the problem or that “artificial intelligence” will save our planet or our species. Nature’s intelligence is now and always has been superior to that of even the most profoundly gifted human individuals. So if we as a species can get over our need to feel superior in order to compete successfully, we may yet learn to cooperate our way into long term survival.

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On Authenticity

7 Aug

A while back I titled a blog post Deep and Deeper and my last post, Who Are We?, led me to return to the intention that motivated that earlier post. Death (along with individual identity) is certainly a subject that can be described as deep or yet deeper. So deep is the subject of death, in fact, that many, perhaps most people in our culture, do their best to avoid talking or even thinking about it altogether.

Back in 1992, when the five women who began the Columbus Group, gathered at my house in Columbus, Ohio to try to come up with a different definition of giftedness than was currently in vogue (a definition centered on academic achievement) one of the very first examples of the qualitative difference between highly or profoundly gifted children and other children of their age [the difference we would soon name Asynchronous Development], was the case of Jennie–and death. Four year old Jennie was traumatized when her grandfather died. Extrapolating a principle from one subject or event to another, as profoundly gifted children tend to begin doing even as toddlers, she began to worry that her mother or father might die as well. Her mother, doing her best to comfort this very little girl, told her that she didn’t need to worry. They were not going to die, she assured Jennie. “Grandpa died because he was old. I’m not old. Your father isn’t old.” Jennie was not in the least comforted by this story. She watched the news on television, after all. “Other people die,” she said. “Even children die!”

The problems very young children have with asynchronous development is that their minds outdistance their emotional maturity, so the simple cushioning stories that adults often give young children to soften the impact of painful truths don’t work well with them. Not only do such stories not provide the cushioning the children need, the stories’ simple platitudes, so obviously untrue, are likely to be taken as adult dishonesty. Jennie had not long been identified as profoundly gifted, and her mother didn’t yet realize that she needed to deal with such issues as the inevitability of death on a much more adult level with Jennie than she had expected.

The deep and deeper human issues need to be addressed with super bright kids both more honestly and earlier than we might be prepared for. Examples of these issues—our inhumanity to each other and other life forms, our predilection for violence and warfare, our failure to protect the planet that is our only home—the list is long and more and more “in our faces” these days. Which means, of course, that we have to face these issues ourselves on a deep enough level to address them honestly from our own perspective when we talk to these children (or even when they’re within earshot). As Stephen Sondheim reminds us in a song from “Into the Woods,” Children will listen!

Many of us got our first stories about such issues from the religions of our parents or grandparents or our ethnic culture. Or from other kids, or science text books or the “mass media.” Often, as we grow up, whatever we were told from whatever source, begins to feel wrong or untrue. For myself, I long ago rejected the version of reality that was provided by my religious education—some of what was labeled wrong no longer seemed wrong to me, and what was right sometimes had begun to seem distinctly the opposite. Even worse than the loss of religious certainties in some ways, was the realization that what I had learned in school as undisputed fact (history, for instance, or even science) had too often been either purposely distorted to support a kind of cultural propaganda, or just an error that had continued to be taught even after it had been superseded or at least challenged by new information and new theories.

For myself, various “truths” began to disintegrate when my own personal experiences contradicted them. As a fiction writer, I had always intended to write “realistic fiction,” until the line between imagination and reality or between what could be and what really was could no longer be firmly drawn. There were things I experienced that I didn’t talk about in public because, except when I was talking to children, my audiences didn’t seem to me ready to hear what I would have said.

But when I was speaking to an adult audience dealing with kids at the far right tail of the curve, where unusual experiences become more common, I began to stretch the boundaries a bit. Back in the days of the Hollingworth Conference for the Highly Gifted, I explained in a keynote, for instance, that becoming a Reiki practitioner—I wasn’t yet a Reiki Master, able to teach the method to others—had ended my problem with seasonal allergies. (Reiki is an energy healing modality that originated in Japan.) All these years later, I still don’t have those allergies! One year someone wrote on a conference evaluation form that I was “too far out.” (The next year I titled my keynote “On Being Too Far Out.”)

I had, of course, found those “far out” things well-supported in books written by leading edge scientists, some of whom I knew personally, though the ideas hadn’t yet shown up in school text books. What had once been labeled “New Age” and outside the realm of rationality, began to fill the shelves at book stores even before the internet had made them readily accessible to anyone with an interest. I still find it odd that after nearly 100 years of challenging the certainties of material science and Newtonian physics, quantum physics is apparently still not a standard offering in most high schools.

Between 1992 and today, my thinking about “deep and deeper” has moved from the need to be willing to honestly talk to super gifted kids about the difficult emotional issues of human life, to being willing to honestly address questions of consciousness, reality, values and spirituality (which may or may not include religion) with them. The most important word in that sentence is “honestly.” About these issues there are seldom certainties for us other than personal experience. Being honest with them, of course, means admitting that there is “mystery” involved—as with the orbs (mysterious and sometimes colored “balls of light” often with internal mandala patterns) that show up all over the place in photographs taken both indoors and outside at Camp Yunasa—so in talking to campers about them I make no effort to explain the phenomenon. This tends to drive the campers a little crazy. All I can say is that none of the “standard explanations” involving dust particles, moisture, or the closeness of lens to flash in digital cameras, explain them either. During my “orb slide show” last year kids got out their cameras and began taking photos and sure enough, a few orbs showed up at first, and the more photos they took the more orbs appeared. Photo above taken as two of Yunasa’s Fellows walk back to our bunks after Spirit Journey–August, 2017.

 

I don’t usually write—or talk—to persuade people any more (though I used to, for sure). I write to share my thoughts, and usually some of the reasons I think them—especially when they aren’t mainstream, or not mainstream in the gifted realm. Ernest Holmes, author of Science of Mind, said, “The child-like mind is more receptive to Truth than the over intellectual.” He suggests this, I think, because children tend to be more open to mystery than those of us proud of our very good intellects. We tend to have minds stuffed with facts we’ve learned and beliefs that we think of as true, but Ernest is after something larger (and deeper), something (Truth) that he dares to capitalize without defining. And since one of his principles was always to “stay open at the top,” I’m pretty sure he would have said that Truth for us changes as we and our perceptions change. And change we humans do, if we allow it.

When I started The Deep End Facebook page  back when I was new to social media, I hoped the page would encourage discussions of some of the nonrational capacities and experiences of the highly gifted that are quite common among this population (which those of us with long experience know, even though many parents are hesitant to talk about them, for fear of disbelief or ridicule). As soon as such discussions began on that page, however, some folks who limit their ideas about consciousness to the purely rational, and apparently about science to the purely material, launched attacks that closed those beginning discussions down. It can be psychologically dangerous to talk about nonrational experiences among hyper-rational gifted folk all too poised to attack. So okay, this is a blog instead, and I write it. I get to choose what I write about.

After I posted “Who Are We?” I heard from some folks that they appreciated my honesty. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in this “gifted biz” for a long time, or more likely it’s because I believe what Anita Moorjani (author of Dying to Be Me, a book about her amazing Near Death Experience) says about the need to be one’s essential self. It is that need that led me to share with Yunasa campers last year (my final year with the camp) the “evidence” I have that there is life after death. There, too, I didn’t ask them to share my interpretation of that evidence. They have to make up their own minds, as do we all. But unless we share what is deep and deeper in our own lives and experience, how will openings to new perceptions and awareness come about?

For me, it is easier to talk about death these days now that I am totally convinced by my own experiences and some astonishing evidence that it is illusion—transformation not ending. But I don’t try to convince people. I believe that honesty and authenticity have real and lasting value, no matter how others respond. (Also, I’m old enough not to care so much what people think of me as I used to.) But I must also add here that while taking the fear of death out of the picture is astonishingly liberating, it does not save us from the grief of such loss. Believe me, I know.

TolanMemorial 16

Tolan Memorial 2013

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 “The flowers and the candles are for protection.”

18 Nov

flowers-candlesI myself was protected last weekend by being out of touch with television and the social media at the NAGC convention in Phoenix.  I was lucky enough to see not a single image from Paris until I got home on Sunday night, by which time memorials had sprung up at every site of the violence.

The title of this post will be readily recognized as a quotation from a video interview that went viral—with more than 14 million views on social media. In case you haven’t seen it, a father and his very young son were being interviewed in Paris at one of the sites where those lost in a bombing on Friday were being memorialized with banks of flowers and hundreds of candles.  The boy was very much afraid of the “mean people with guns.”

“We have flowers,” his father told him. The boy began to protest about the effects of mere flowers, but the father assured him that they were protection. Flowers and candles. The boy looked for a time at the banks of flowers and candles, and gradually his face relaxed. “For protection,” he repeated. When the interviewer asked if that idea made him feel better, he nodded. “I feel better,” he said.

In a powerful way, that father was right. The purpose of the terrorists is to spread fear, and at first, for that child, as for so many others, they had succeeded in their mission. The little boy wanted to move to a new home, a place safe from mean people with guns. “Paris is our home,” his father told him, and said that there are mean people everywhere. But in telling him that the flowers were protection, he showed his son the absolute truth that there are many people—vastly more than the paltry number of terrorists on this planet—who care.

Fred Rogers (of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood) said that his mother told him when he was a child and upset (as so many sensitive kids are) about news from some disaster, that instead of paying attention to the disaster, he should “watch the people who come to help—there are always people who come to help.”

A great many of the children we work with and care about are deeply empathic, feeling the pain of others, and easily overwhelmed by news of man’s inhumanity to man, of images of what “mean people” do in the world. How do we help them (and ourselves) deal with the chaos we see around us? Far more dangerous to a child than the possibility of a terrorist attack is an ingrained fear of other humans and a world of random violence. How do we protect them from the terror that is being purposely unleashed in our world today by people who themselves are terrorized by what they perceive to be massive world powers ranged against them?

By seeing, really seeing, under, over, past and around the images of death and destruction that the media insist on pouring into the atmosphere of this interconnected world.  By focusing on the vast majority—on the helpers, on those who bring candles and flowers.  We can think of every candle as “the light of truth” and every flower as a symbol not just of love and caring, but of the beauty of life itself.

When fear is being ratcheted up around the world not just by the terrorists and their guns and bombs, but by the news media that continually push those images on us, warning us that this sort of horror could happen anywhere at any time we can focus differently, and use our very good minds to support us. The numbers are on our side!

There’s an Allstate ad that says, “Man-eating sharks live in every ocean, but we still swim. Lightning strikes somewhere in the world, but we still play in the rain. So many things can happen. However, bad things in life can’t stop us from making our lives good. People live for good…”

While we tend to think of insurance companies intentionally frightening us to get us to buy their product, consider for a moment the principle on which that industry was created in the first place—that there is more “daily life” than catastrophe.

At this time in the history of the world our countries still respond to guns with guns, to bombs with bombs, to killing with killing.  But that father, pointing his son’s attention toward the flowers and candles, was giving him more protection than any gun or bomb ever could, by showing him that there are more people who care than who kill.  More people who help than harm.  He is giving his son faith in the deep, natural tendency of humans to help each other, and softening his fear.  It is fear the terrorists want, fear that becomes a deadly viral infection if we can’t look away from the killing and focus on the caring.

When parents ask me how to protect their super sensitive children in a chaotic world, I tell them to focus their own and their children’s attention on what there is to be grateful for, to notice every sign of life, of love, of caring. The more we look for it, the more we see. We need to know that what we pay attention to expands in our world. Yesterday in an article written long before these most recent attacks, I encountered a quotation attributed to Plato:  “Even the God of War is no match for love.”

Notice the flowers and the candles.

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