For many children school is a fun and easy experience. They have good friends, they enjoy the specific learning environment, they like the routine and timeframes, and they feel safe. School is a place where they can thrive.
For other children, school is a place of their greatest stress. Peer pressure, stressful social interactions, difficulty learning through the prescribed education models and rigid timetables can all lead to school being a place where a child feels stressed and continually under threat.
These children are daily thrust into an environment where fight, flight and freeze is their living experience. They simply survive each day, with no ability to relax or thrive. No matter whether you are are coming from a bio-medical or an energetic model of education and health we can all agree that this is anything but the best environment for a child’s learning or creativity to flourish.
So what can we do about it? Firstly, we can hold a vision for a different kind of mainstream education system. We are at a time where many old models and institutions are reassessing the values and assumptions they were created upon, and education is one of these, with schools such as Montessori, Steiner, Forest schools, the unschooling movement all asking questions that parents and children are helping create the answer to.
I’m going to add a few energy specific approaches that I see as invaluable to the creation of healthy schools where children can learn to learn in safety and gentleness.
Each space within the school is regularly cleared energetically
Classrooms, the cafeteria, meeting rooms, corridors; all of them can get so congested with energy that they can carry a legacy of restriction or oppression. I have seen children walk into a classroom looking energetically coherent and vital, but within a minute or two, slumping into disorganisation as their energy systems become scrambled and depleted. If you are a teacher reading this blog then clearing your room can take less than a minute and can change the atmosphere in the room so profoundly; you can find more information on how to clear a room here.
Each teacher looks after their own energy coherence
Blessings on the women and men who step forward into the administrative and social chaos of being a teacher. Many that I know are overwhelmed with the administrative and despite doing their incredible best for the children, are feeling like they are pulled in too many directions at once to be the effective teacher they wish to be. Teachers can help themselves stay resilient, energised and clear-headed by simply knowing how to ensure their own energy systems are crossing over; you can watch me demonstrating this in this video.
Teachers help children stay energetically, and neurologically organised
Brain Gym or energy exercises interspersed throughout the day can help children stay energetically, and neurologically organised. We don’t have to be able to see energy, or even to understand it, to see the great difference that doing simple exercises can bring to a group of children. The individual and group dynamic changes immediately back into organisation and coherence. Tensions lessen and the edginess that being in fight, flight, freeze produces can dissipate. Brain Gym is well recognised within many schools now, a great article can be found in this article.
There are many energy approaches to helping children stay resilient in the current educational situation. One of the most important energy systems for a child to work with is their aura, which is the energy field all around them that helps to protect and connect them, and carries information through all of their energy systems. When repeatedly in stressful or perceived threatening situations at school a child’s aura will become more and more depleted. This leaves them increasingly vulnerable. Self-esteem can become a real problem, which in turn feeds into insecurity, weakening the aura all the more. You can find out more about the aura on the Energy Anatomy page on my website. You can also help them to learn the Shield of Strength exercise, which works with the aura to help it stay strong and resilient.
Here two routines you can do regularly with your child to help improve their resilience and reduce stress.
If your child is struggling with the environment at school and feeling low - this can be done before going to school, when coming home from school and before bed time.
Zip up slowly and several times
If your child is frustrated and angry with school
Zip up slowly and several times
And lastly, know that we, as parents, can help so much with simply being present to our children. A hug and a listening heart are two of the very best medicines in our energy toolkit. If you are a parent of a child who is struggling with the environment at school then make sure that you look after your own energy too. If your child is struggling, then one of your biggest ways to help them is to help yourself be energetically balanced and centred. The same exercises that I suggest for your child will also be great for you to help your aura stay resilient as you all move towards greater health and vitality.
With love, Prune