Last week, during one private session with a client, I was working with her to uncover the underlying fear patterns or her blind spots she has been carrying. She shared that she has a deep fear of being lonely in her life and old age after a recent failed marriage. She aspires to have a family life with children but she was not sure if she would be able to attract the right guy in her life.
I told her aloneness is not loneliness. Aloneness is all in oneness, aloneness is our inborn nature. I shared with her the timeless truth which I learned from my Guru, Paramahamsa Nithyananda (lovely known as Swamiji) which fundamentally made a cognitive shift in me. Now I am very comfortable with my aloneness, I enjoy being with myself, sitting with myself for hours sometimes.
This week, as I was finalizing with my teamily (team and family) all the preparations and publicity materials of the coming workshops and training programs in Malaysia, I had an amazing click. The click was about the space of a yoga instructor vs. the space of a living yoga teacher of Adi Yogi (first Yogi – Sadashiva)!
See, in June I had developed a platform called Parents Kids Home Yoga to enable parents and kids to enjoy the benefits of yoga at the comfort of their home as well as to improve the bonding time between parents and kids. This training module aims at existing yoga practitioners and yoga teachers who are interested to let children experience the amazing Science of yoga at a tender age of 3 years old and above; and give parents the time and space to relate with their children. Many working parents especially the mothers are running behind their jobs such that they are not spending enough quality time with their kids to listen, nurture and play with them. The role they are supposed to play as a nurturer does not happen, many times children are feeling lonely at home and they start to seek entertainment or distractions such as computer games, virtual fantasies or wrong company. No wonder kids are getting irritable with short attention span as well as aggressive in their behavior. This starts a slew of social problems such as poor physical health like obesity, diabetes, behavioral problems like violence, withdrawal; and mental disorders like anxiety, depression when children are not given the right ambience during the growing up phase.
Have you noticed that kids are getting very violent these days?
Has your child been bullied in school?
How you do handle violence in your children?
I am seeing a worrying trend in children – that is – an increase in violent behaviors amongst children in school. When my son was in Primary school, he had been bullied a lot by his peers who couldn’t tolerate his bubbly joyful demeanor. He shared with me that his classmates would kick and punch him in different parts of the body. During that period, every night before sleep, I would spend time listening to his daily experience in school and helped him bring completion within him. I also taught him the right context of violence and self-defense as a form of protection. The same bullying continued after he entered into Secondary school, but the only difference was Kai is now capable of protecting himself and he responds from the space of completion. When I came back from India this January after a 3-month spiritual program, I was called to his school by the discipline master and his form teachers regarding an incident which involved my son being bullied in Mandarin class and he retaliated out of self-defense. In that meeting, it was very clear to me that his school has no clue how to handle violence in students effectively at its root and they can only request parental assistance and the so-called student counselling dictated by the Ministry of Education (MOE). In that session, I questioned the system and gave them solutions from spiritual understanding.
How do children develop such aggressive and violent tendency at a very young age?
See, by their nature children are not born violent, this pattern is a learned behavior – meaning they pick up from society in the process of growing up. In the first few years after birth, they live in a pure awareness space called Space of a Child where there is no mind only deep listening and awareness. However, many factors, layers of conditioning from society and incidents started to shape their cognitions about themselves, life and world which are the root cause of a violent pattern. These influences include