Natural Learning

Thanks to grandma, we did a little school shopping at our local Montessori shop last week.  Some of the fun things we found there include Wildcraft: An Herbal Adventure Game,  a Peg Loom, CitiBlocs, and, a card game called Yoga Pretzels.  On the back of each card are step-by-step instructions for getting into the pose and additional insights about the pose's health benefits.  There are even breathing cards to help us, "slow down, increase awareness, and make non-reactive choices" and fun games like "Yogini Says!"  A. is really enjoying yoga this week and I'm amazed by how many poses this kid knows.

We're also enjoying the new cooperative game, Wildcraft... and I'm realizing just how much A. learned this summer.  After tragedy struck in early June, all my plans for doing a summer lesson block on healing herbs came to a crashing halt.  What kept going though was our little healing garden and actual use of the herbs found there.  Without any formal instruction, worksheets, or boxed-curriculum, A. has learned to identify herbs and edible flowers including elderberry, calendula, violas, sage, nettles, oatstraw, catnip, and peppermint and can explain a little about how each is used for healing. 

I've also been reading the California Content Standards for Kindergarten through Third Grade and dreaming up creative ways to cover this material this year.  While I won't adhere to the standards completely (that would take all of the fun out of homeschooling!), I do want A. to keep up with her peers in the event that we transition to traditional school at some point. 

I'm hoping that we can learn some of these standards the same way that A. learned about healing herbs this summer.  By seeking out teaching-moments and cultivating an open and curious attitude, we can encourage natural learning and avoid some of the resistance and stress that squashes creativity and takes the fun out of education.

The Goddess Thing

Recently, while discussing our spiritual paths, a friend of mine admitted that she just didn't get "the goddess thing."  I understand that her path is not my path... and I love and honor our differences.  Still, I'd like to shed a little more light on the subject by sharing a few questions here...

What would happen if, instead of growing up with popular male images of divinity such as these dominating our mental landscape,

we were also given just as many images of divinity that looked like this...

 and this...

 

and this...

 and this...

 and this...

 

Would we see ourselves in the same light? 

What if creation didn't look like this...

but looked like this instead...

How might our consciousness be transformed?

Those patriarchal images take root in our mind.  They effect how we view ourselves, how we treat one another, and how we treat our planet.  When we see that all things are sacred, when we honor both the feminine and the masculine and see that the life in us is the same life that causes trees to grow, the sun to shine, and the earth to spin on her axis, we liberate ourselves from dualistic thinking and become free.

Sue Monk Kidd writes in The Dance of the Dissident Daughter:

"Walking into the sacredness of the female body will cause a woman to "enter into" her body in a new way, be at home in it, honor it, nurture it, listen to it, delight in its sensual music.  She will experience her female flesh as beautiful and holy, as a vessel of the sacred.  She will live from her gut and feet and hands and instincts and not entirely in her head. The bodies of such women, instead of being groomed to some external standard, are penetrated with soul, quickened from the inside."

When this new consciousness takes root within us, we also begin to experience every blade of grass, every drop or dew, as infused with divinity.  Kidd writes:

"Divine feminine imagery opens us up to the notion that the earth is the body of the Divine, and when that happens, the Divine cannot be contained solely in a book, church, dogma, liturgy, theological system, or transcendent spirituality.  The earth is no longer a mere backdrop until we get into heaven, something secondary and expendable.  Matter becomes inspirited; it breathes divinity.  Earth becomes alive and sacred.  And we find ourselves alive in the midst of her and forever altered."

Would we treat Mama Earth differently if we felt that she was a living, sacred, thing?  Would we still spray our strawberries with poison?  Would we still fill our oceans with plastic?  Would we still genetically modify our crops so they were "pestiside ready" or support the corporations who did by buying their products?  Would we still value material wealth over spiritual abundance or wage war against one another?   

Would we treat ourselves differently if we honored the sacred in feminine form?  Would we dance and play and honor our bodies regardless of their shape?  Would staying home with our kids be as valued as pursuing career goals?  Would our little girls grow up believing they were just as strong as their brothers?  Would we see ourselves in a different light?  I certainly think so... and for reasons like these, this mama is loving every minute of her journey into the collective feminine soul.

A New Beginning

We've been on a pretty long hiatus, haven't we?  But Om School is not closing its doors.  We're making room for a new student, actually.  

I've been absent from the blogosphere because we've been sitting on some exciting news for about a month now.  I wasn't ready to share with the entire universe until after that first sonogram... and having a little life growing inside me has been just about the only thing I can think of -- so the blogging had to take a back seat.  Until now.

We're due in late May and happy to report that Baby Om is growing strong and healthy right on schedule.  I'm focusing more on the magical, natural, and spiritual aspects of childbearing this time around.  I put down "What to Expect" after the first few pages and instead read Deepak's, Magical Beginnings, Enchanted Lives from cover to cover in just a few days.  Instead of buying into the medicalization of childbearing, I'm emptying my mind and embracing my inner-wisdom.  Our bodies know how to do this.  Like with so many other things in life, often all we really need is to get out of our own way.

Our schooling has already taken on a new shape... with first trimester challenges like morning sickness and pregnancy fatigue cutting into our usual program, we're learning to be more flexible with our schedule -- a skill we'll certainly need to have mastered by the baby's arrival.  We've been embracing our creative energies and looking at impermanence for our October mindfulness unit.  Am's added the soprano recorder to her musical repertoire, continues to enjoy piano, and has advanced a belt in karate.  We've been painting, counting by 2s, 3s, 5s, and 10s, and invented a new character, the Can Can Fairy, to help us with the four functions (of math).  We've read some amazing books lately -- our favorite being, Old Turtle and the Broken Truth which I hope to give a full review to here soon.   

I had all but forgotten what a magical time pregnancy is -- it's a time when our connection to Mama Universe is even more evident... a wondrous time when we're smack dab in the middle of the universe creating itself.  In Magical Beginnings, Chopra writes, "With the birth of every child, the universe chooses to look at itself with fresh eyes."  I hope you'll enjoy sharing this new beginning with us.  Many blessings to all.