​Are You Alone? Me too.
"Our Treasure is the Great Integrity"

"While most people are obsessed with superficialities, we feel empty.
While most people feel they know so much, we feel simpleminded.
While most people believe they live happily in the best of all possible worlds,
we are depressed to witness this world!
It is so painful to know that we will always be outsiders, endlessly moving like the ocean, aimlessly blowing like the wind.

While we fear what others fear, we don't treasure what others treasure.
Our treasure is the Great Integrity.
However, until it is shared, it will not be the Universal Integrity,
for we are part of them, and they are part of us."

(Laozi, Tao Te Ching,  circa 500 BC, Verse 20, The Sadness of Superficialities and of The Unfulfilled Great Integrity)
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Language Reduces Experience

Language Reduces Experience. The way it does that is because you give a name to something that is more than its name. If you give a name to a person or a tree, it’s so much more. If you say in language, "I fell in love," does that say it all? So, there is no way, completely, to explain experience with language. It's always a reduction.

But it's worse than that. We have to go a little bit farther to understand what we are going to do for our exercise to reintegrate our lives. Our lives come apart when we use language. If you go back to the earliest languages, they didn't take things apart and have a subject and a predicate to a sentence - "The light flashed." They would say, "flash" - one thing. There wasn't a light and a flash, they saw "flash." It's a noun and a verb. So, not only is it a subject and predicate, they also blended what we have as tenses. But they didn't blend - for them it was together - they were in the present.  ...

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Coming soon ...
20 Opportunities to Transform Yourself While Teaching​

The Bears and the Pendulum

There  is a  fable about  three bears coming upon a  pendulum that hung near a cabin in the woods. The first bear pushed the pendulum and it came back to hit him in the head. The second - seeing this - pushed the pendulum away with more force, only to receive a more powerful blow. The third bear, determined to overcome this new fangled pendulum, pushed it with such   might that it killed him on the inevitable return swing.
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This brings up the question, "Can we transform ourselves to learn when it is prudent to move toward a problem and when to move away?"

- Read "Moving Toward and Away"

"20 Opportunities to Transform Yourself While Teaching"   
- soon to be available on this website and on Amazon. 

Congratulations … Intuitive Teacher!

[Have fun with this exercise. Read it to yourself whenever you need to re-center.]

Meditate.
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Start from your Heart.
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Have fun.
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Learn something from your student that changes you in the moment. Then, show your gratitude. Now, you are truly teaching … you are the grateful learner you wish your student to be.
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Distinguish between your intuition and your intellect.
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Know when you are observing as opposed to when you are analyzing.
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Demonstrate several ways to be the adult in control, yet let the students provide intuitive wisdom.
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Read the book of nature … which means letting interpretations of natural processes speak through poetry, history, science, mathematics, and common experiences.
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Run discussions that allow students to turn expository (descriptive) lessons into didactic (instructive) ones.
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Be alert to the aspect of a lesson that might awaken in students their purpose in life.
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Encourage students to make psychological connections to ordinary factual material.
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Convert teaching information to transformation.
(Tobin Hart, 2001)
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Use context: facial expressions, tone of voice, body language, eye contact, posture, gestures, big picture, feel of an experience, images, emotions, get personal, gut feeling, heartfelt sense, autobiographical references, move parts of your body below your head.
​(McGilchrist, 2009)
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Some Ways to Lead with Your Head … analyzing, articulating, solving, being logistical, planning, being right, quick to respond, intensity, heaviness, seriousness, “stop that or else”, “you’re wrong”, “don’t even tell me your way”, “because I said so”.
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Some Ways to Lead Your Heart … intuiting, observing, connecting, feeling, pausing, centering, touching, empathizing, eye contact, slow to respond, keep it light, playful, humorous, “let’s go another way”, “I see what you’re feeling”, “do you think that will work?”.
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Some Things Wrong with Education: left brain dominance (McGilchrist, 2009; Siegel, 2018), 1800s factory model (Skinner, 1953; Thorndike, 1913/2010), children are little adults (Piaget, 1929/2007), too much testing (Darling-Hammond, 2010), people are not machines (Dewey, 1916/2005), assumed separateness (Kuhn, 2004), right answers, restricted resources, working alone vs. collaboration, trying to build something with one tool, no help, and no questions (Dintersmith, 2018)
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​Some Things ?Coming? to Education: The spiritual child (L. Miller, 2015; L. W. E. S. Miller, 2021), awareness and mindsight (Siegel, 2010, 2018), belief (Dispenza, 2017; Lipton, 2005, 2006), mindfulness (Lantieri, 2008), emotional and social intelligence, presence (Goleman & Boutsikaris, 2006; Goleman & Senge, 2007; Goleman & Whitener, 2005), maker projects, students-only, community-centered, not tests, not algebra, not control, not norms, education does not equal school, integrated disciplines, inspirational, repeatedly failing so they are allowed to iterate (Dintersmith, 2018)
- from Heart Thought Exercises

Abstract for the Intuitive Education Workshop

Recent research in neuroscience highlights both horizontal integration of the brain as well as vertical integration of the body, brainstem, limbic areas, and cortex. Horizontal integration means connecting “our left hemisphere’s narrator function with the autobiographical memory storage of our right hemisphere” (Siegel, 2010, p. 74).

A great joy for me is that the time we live in embraces the intersection of spirituality in education through the research being done on the integration of right and left brain and the parallel integration of heart thought and head thought. In other words, the right hemisphere uses our intuitive abilities for observation while the left hemisphere uses our analytical abilities to narrate what we have observed. My experiences with students for over 50 years is that they seem to have a window into their spiritual values when they start looking at themselves first with the heart, then follow with the intellect. Other research suggests that humankind, in the far distant past, used to lead with our naturally intuitive heart, then pass information to our head for the purpose of analysis (Dispenza, 2017; Dispenza & Boyce, 2016; Dispenza, Knight, & Encephalon, 2005; McGilchrist, 2009).

This is why we need intuitive education - a way to let children remain in an intuitive state of observation before they engage their analytical ability to narrate and reflect. To be completely honest, I think that education is often facing 180 degrees in the wrong direction and the youth know it. Education needs to lead with the right brain. We need to replace exclusive left brain thinking that basically says, “To have a good life, you must get things – and school is the place to learn how to be successful at getting,” and integrate this with the right brain tendencies of including and giving. Also, we need to replace the habit of exclusively having the older generation teaching the younger. The very fact that the new kids already know that the only hope for humanity lies in learning how to give is evidence that we need to learn from our students – now more than ever. At this crucial time in history, we need to leave certain habits behind and re-learn the truly ancient way of giving to each other – to the earth – and to other beings.
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“There is nothing either good or bad,
​but thinking makes it so.”

- Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) , Hamlet, Act 2 scene 2

Awakening

What  happens in a spiritual awakening?

When the Wall Street Journal interviewed Dr. Lisa Miller, she explained that “Spirituality is innate,”.  She noted that “Some of us are more predisposed than others to feeling spiritually connected. And how a child is engaged shapes and forms his or her spiritual core. But we can all cultivate this natural capacity and build our spiritual muscle.”

She presents scientific data that shows one way to view spiritual  awakening in her book, The Awakened Brain. “The data has also shown that character strengths and virtues such as optimism, grit, commitment and forgiveness go hand-in-hand with strong spiritual awareness,” Miller explains. “It helps us be more creative. It also leads to more gratitude and more resilience. There is a sense that things will work out.”