Kitabı oku: «The Journey for Kids: Liberating your Child’s Shining Potential»

1 Discovering Our Shining Potential

I recently received a heart-rending letter from a deeply concerned mother of an eight-year-old boy, Matthew. Carla wrote that the school board had come to her about her son. He wasn’t keeping up with other students in his class. He couldn’t focus or pay attention, and often he appeared withdrawn from the other kids. He’d been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and dyslexia, and his teacher was apologetic and regretful, but she believed Matthew was too dysfunctional to continue at normal primary school. He needed to go to a school for children with learning disorders, as he was beginning to hold back the rest of his class.

Carla was stunned, horrified that they considered her son not only incapable of functioning in a normal school but so disabled that he needed to go to a special school. She just couldn’t and wouldn’t believe that her son was ‘stupid’ or abnormal. There must be some mistake, some explanation. She pleaded with the school board and begged that Matthew be allowed to stay at school just one more term. She promised to get him daily tutoring after school and, being a physical therapist herself, she would do regular therapy with her son. She’d also look into getting other alternative therapies that might help.

Reluctantly, the school board agreed, but with the proviso that if Matthew’s grades did not improve significantly by the end of term then, regrettably, they would be compelled to let him go and would recommend alternative schools which might be more suitable for him.

Carla gave Matthew her all. In addition to daily tutoring following school, she tried other therapies, including her own field, kinesiology. Matthew’s grades began to improve marginally … but not enough. Carla became desperate to reach her son, to find out what was really going on. She just knew in her bones that he was a beautiful and intelligent soul. He had always been a bright child. Even though he had been diagnosed with dyslexia, it did not mean that Matthew was inherently stupid. She just knew that there must be some emotional blockage that was holding him back. He was full of potential – she’d seen it from the time he was a toddler; sometimes that potential, that brilliance, would come out at the most unexpected moments. Yet she’d also sensed that there was something holding him back. She had noticed that often Matthew seemed quiet and isolated, shut down and emotionally unavailable. She just didn’t know how to get through to him, but with all her being she wanted to help him take this lampshade off his light. She was determined to do whatever it took to help her son find himself, to liberate his true nature, so that he could shine again.

Carla began to pray fervently to find a way to get through to her son. It was at this time that, by chance, she came across The Journey. She read the book from cover to cover – she could not put it down. It spoke deeply to her own wisdom. It detailed simple and powerful processes for opening into our true potential, and gave down-to-earth step-by-step tools for clearing emotional and physical blocks that might be obscuring that natural potential. In her heart of hearts Carla knew that Matthew could benefit from the work, if he was willing to participate. And she was thrilled when she turned to the back of the book to find in-depth instructions on how to work with children. She thought, ‘What have I got to lose? It’s worth asking Matthew if he’d be willing to give it a try.’

Carla briefly explained to Matthew that the Kids’ Journey is like a magical fairytale or inner adventure that carries you inside your body to emotional blocks that are stored there. She explained that it would be gentle and healing, and asked if he’d like to give it a go. Matthew shrugged his shoulders. ‘Sure, why not?’ He wanted to please his mum, and perhaps secretly he hoped it might help. And so Carla turned to the back of the book and began to read the process outlined. Part of the process involves getting access to specific ‘cell memories’ – limiting patterns which get stored in our cells. For Matthew, The Journey was surprisingly simple. He had no problems focusing or paying attention, because it was like listening to an exciting adventure or a really good bedtime story. Everyone likes a good story, especially kids.

Matthew’s own inner wisdom seemed to guide him perfectly to the exact place where his emotional block was stored. It guided him to the specific cell memory of when the initial ‘shut down’ had occurred – when he was only five years old and had just begun to learn his ABCs. In his memory Matthew was newly at school, and what neither his mum nor his schoolteacher knew was that he had an acute problem with his eyesight. He couldn’t see things clearly up close. Ever since he was a young child, when something was put directly in front of his eyes it would go all blurry and out of focus. He never told his mum because he thought it was normal, that it was just the way things were. He had no idea that others could see close things with crystal clarity, and it hadn’t really been a problem until he started school and was required to write his first letters on a page.

Matthew desperately needed glasses, but no one knew: not his mum, not his teacher, not even Matthew himself.

Matthew kept trying to write the letter ‘A’, but couldn’t figure out why it seemed to come out all wrong on the paper. Across the room, a friend of his held up his paper – his letter ‘A’ looked perfect, just like the one on the blackboard, but when the teacher came around to check on Matthew’s writing, she kept chastising him, telling him to do it better, more accurately, more carefully.

On the third day of learning ABCs the teacher, who was new to the kids and serving as a substitute, grew frustrated with Matthew. Why wasn’t he even trying? All the other children could write the letter ‘A’. In her frustration, she grabbed his paper out of his hand and marched him to the front of the classroom. Holding up his paper so all the other kids could see, she exclaimed, ‘Look at this page. Matthew is so stupid he can’t even write the letter “A”.’ All the kids laughed, and for Matthew time stopped. He froze. He looked into all his friends’ faces, laughing and ridiculing him, and the humiliation burned. His face got hot, his stomach began to churn; he couldn’t bear it another second. Something inside him shut down. A wall came down: he shut everyone out. The laughter faded into the background, everyone became a blur and he turned his face away and ran out of the room.

That afternoon when his mum picked him up from school he was unusually quiet, and when she asked him, ‘How was school today?’, all he could reply was, ‘OK.’ He felt too ashamed to tell her what had happened. Everyone thought he was stupid. Everyone who mattered had laughed. And now he felt numb to it all, incapable of finding his way through it. A wall had come down internally. He found himself shut down and shut out.

After that he could no longer focus at school. He didn’t care what the teacher said and didn’t want to hear. It didn’t matter anyway – he was stupid, so why bother?

Three months later, it was finally discovered that Matthew needed glasses, but by that time the damage had already been done and there would never be any way for Matthew to truly connect with and be part of school fun and learning in a healthy way again … not until he did his first Journey process.

Like Matthew most of us have had childhood experiences where we have felt unable to cope. I’m sure you can imagine how easy it would be to shut down in the face of such humiliation. Matthew’s story could be any of our stories. Maybe for you it wasn’t a paper being held up in front of the class; maybe it was being ridiculed in the playground or not making the sports team. None of us were trained in how to deal with these issues, and so often we found ourselves withdrawing or pretending it didn’t matter, losing ourselves in our colouring books or refusing to play with the other kids, all the while feeling desperately alone, alienated, excluded and not knowing a way out of our own pain or a way into the ‘in’ crowd.

During Matthew’s Journey process, not only did he access this old memory but he finally faced, released and let go of all the pain of the humiliation that he had carried for so long. He came to realize that his teacher didn’t really think he was stupid; she was just frustrated. She didn’t know he needed glasses; she just thought he wasn’t trying hard enough. Now that he had finally felt and expressed all of his stored shame and hurt, he found he was able to forgive easily. His mother did the ‘Change Memory’ process with him, where in his mind’s eye Matthew revisited the old memory, played it out on a video screen and then played it out a second time, but now seeing how it would have been if he’d had access to a whole host of more supportive and healthy emotional resources at that time. (More on this in Chapter 9.) He received a lot of imaginary balloons which gave him the internal emotional resources he would have needed at the time of the humiliation. His mother gave him a balloon of self-confidence which he breathed in until it filled his whole body. Then she gave him a whole series of balloons: courage, a sense of humour, the knowledge that the teacher was just frustrated, the knowledge that his friends all loved him and that they were only laughing because the teacher had made fun of him. He received balloons of self-worth, self-love and the ability to understand what was taking place. He also got a crystal dome balloon that allowed him to be inside a protected space, so any ridicule would roll off of him and he could just be at peace inside. Finally, he got a balloon of innate intelligence and the ability to reach out to his friends. He breathed in all of these beautiful qualities.

When he played the memory again, this time with all his balloons, he was able to see how it would have gone if he had had all those internal resources at that time. He found he was still hauled to the front of the class, but when the teacher criticized his paper it just rolled off him – he realized his teacher was just in a bad mood and frustrated; she didn’t know he needed glasses. When he looked into the faces of the other children he saw that they were laughing with him, not at him, and he himself broke into peals of laughter – laughing at his own paper, saying what a mess it was – and later he joked easily with the other kids as they played together.

Matthew realized in his Journey process that the teacher just didn’t understand that he needed glasses – neither had he at the time. Realizing that it didn’t matter anyway because all his friends liked him, glasses or no glasses, he forgave his teacher and the kids. When his Journey was over (after about 20 minutes) he opened his eyes and looked at his mum with a clarity that he hadn’t had in ages.

The Friday after his first Journey process he got his first ‘A’ and over the next several months became the brightest student in his class.

Carla was overwhelmed with joy when she wrote to tell me that Matthew was performing healthily at school – no more Attention Deficit Disorder, no more dyslexia.

So often we seem to label our children, giving them labels for behaviour we don’t understand. We pigeonhole them into a dysfunctional syndrome and see them through the filter of that syndrome, forgetting the beautiful, radiant souls that they really are. These days it has become almost fashionable to label kids and then put them on drugs – as if narcotizing them could possibly get to the root cause of their problem. It really is a crime, and very sad indeed that in our ignorance of how to cope with behaviour we can’t understand why we try to put that behaviour to sleep with drugs, mood-altering chemicals that change the very character and personality of these innocent souls, when all that is really needed is to uncover an emotional block and buried emotion that is part of what co-created these supposed ‘syndromes’ in the first place.

Matthew’s story could be your story; it could be mine. Recently I was in South Africa where The Journey is being used by teachers in primary schools. After I gave a school assembly programme to 800 shining, beaming children, I walked out into the school car park. There, two parents were standing in their Sunday best clothes, clearly having taken time off work to meet me personally. They stood there patiently waiting in the hot African sun with their three beautiful children, all in starched white shirts and school uniforms.

When I approached the mother, she had tears in her eyes. She simply said, ‘Thank you for giving me my son Daniel back … He’d been so withdrawn and aggressive towards his brothers and sister and had become so anti-social we didn’t know what to do with him. He was failing at school. Our doctor said he had ADD and put him on Ritalin, and his behaviour had become a little better. But I hadn’t really seen my son in three years. Do you know what I mean? It was as though he was under a dark cloud and I couldn’t reach him. But after Jayshree, his teacher, worked with him with The Journey – she did four processes with him – he became so joyous and loving towards his brothers and sister that we took him off the drugs. Now he’s thriving at school and playing with the other kids in the playground. Recently he won an academic award for excellence in all his subjects! Thank you, thank you, thank you for giving us our son back. That’s all we wanted to say to you – thank you.’

I was overwhelmed. I simply looked into her son’s eyes and said, ‘He shines like a diamond! What a beautiful being. Jayshree is an amazing teacher – she really cares about her students. She genuinely wants to bring out the best in them. I’m so glad your son opened up and let her in. And thank God he let himself out.’

Later, Jayshree shared with me that when she was teaching a class about geography and gold mining, she asked the kids, ‘Where do you think we find gold?’ No one raised their hand. Then Daniel jumped to his feet, hand in the air, and said, ‘I know!’

‘So, Daniel, where do you find gold?’ Jayshree asked.

‘In your heart, ma’am. That’s where the real gold is,’ he replied.

Jayshree was blown away by the answer. The simple, innocent wisdom of children can, indeed, take our breath away.

Here is an excerpt from the letter Daniel’s mother subsequently sent to me:

… My only hope was that he would take the medication, which controlled his attention in class so he could at least finish some work and barely pass. The medication helped him to keep focused and not daze off into his own world. He also managed to write in a straight line when on medication. However, he became very quiet, withdrawn and silent. He never laughed or played like the other kids and always looked so serious.

Then his teacher suggested that he try something new called The Journey, which had helped her family. And I thought that no harm could be done, so let’s give it a small try. She worked with him in the class and then at her home for ten minutes at a time. She also gave him special notes of motivation and encouragement, which he read all the time and kept in his top pocket. Two weeks later, I took my boy off the medication! He was answering questions in class, participating in sports, laughing, running – he was a normal child again!

Because The Journey is so widely used in so many countries, I hear these kinds of stories every week. Yet they never cease to awe me. The courage of the human soul, and the ability of the body and being to heal, no matter what our age, is astonishing.