“The key to growth is the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness.” Lao Tzu

This morning I showed up. I know you need a bit more context than that, but I am starting at the most important place.

Like many of you I’ve been on a spiritual journey for a while now and am past debating about what there is or isn’t out there; each of us has our own understanding of that. I’m also past wondering whether I’m nuts or not when it comes to my own abilities.

Allowing the introduction of higher dimensions of consciousness into my awareness has opened me up to things I would never have dreamed of, far less believed. If you have never experienced your extra sensory capabilities beyond perhaps the socially acceptable intuitive sense, but would like to, perhaps it is time to ‘show up’. You will never know what you are capable of unless you try.

It’s not that I have always seen or heard things that others might think aren’t there. While I was always interested in the why of everything, the upbringing I had was pretty ‘normal’ and I didn’t hear, see or feel anything unusual so far as I was aware.

In my twenties I was all about exploring my personal potential, but that was limited to the realms of psychology and was more mainstream. My thirties were the beginning of exploring my spiritual beliefs and my forties appear to be defined by the exploration of more paranormal capabilities.

Our human potential fascinates me, opening up to the nature of reality I gape in wonder and awe at its limitless potential. What we call progress is more of a marker of how far from our true nature we are.

If we truly understood our potential, the internet would never have been necessary; the capability to connect and communicate with anyone and everyone at any time exists within us all. We would never have invented metal tubes that fly through the air taxing our bodies; the capability to move our consciousness through time and space also exists for everyone.

The first time I really experienced anything strange was in a guided meditation aimed at resolving old emotional wounds. It transported me back to times where these hurts began, I had to “look down at my feet” to get a sense of the age I was when whatever incident took place that had sparked the thoughts and feelings that were holding me back.

Once, when doing this, I looked down at my feet and just knew they weren’t my feet, neither was it within my lifetime. I got the sense the feet belonged to one of my grandparents back in the 1940’s. It was weird, but the message it came with was reassuring me about emigrating, so I accepted the reassurance and didn’t analyze it; I just put it down to my imagination.

To be fair, I often think any of the extrasensory experiences I have could be simply my imagination. Then I realise it doesn’t matter whether it is or isn’t, what matters is whether what I hear or see helps me or others in some way. I just take what resonates and tell others the same.

Years later, talking with a friend after the death of her sibling, I found myself spontaneously telling her what her dead sister was saying about the way she was feeling. It was a strange sensation, we were sitting in the middle of one of those noisy indoor play parks for kids (not the setting I would have envisaged) and I got this tingly feeling, then I remember saying “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this but…”.

We both had Goosebumps, but it felt great. Then my next thought was “Who am I?”

Over the next few years these kinds of messages popped up more and more often when I was talking to people. In fact, at one point, it was a daily occurrence for people I hadn’t seen or connected with in years just appearing in my head and I’d have a message for them. I would always pass the message on with the caveat that it was being given in case it was of any help, and they should be sure to take only what resonated,

Then I started more deliberately exploring the different types of abilities people have and trying to figure out if there was a calling in there for me anywhere. After listening to many intuitives, psychics, channels and mediums, I got a much better feel for what I was interested in, and not interested in.

I couldn’t see myself developing a career as a psychic or medium, what interests me is accessing broader intelligence and learning and growing from the different viewpoints that exist beyond just those in people’s heads today.

Then I heard Teal Swan talk about her frequent participation in non-physical forums where various forms of focused consciousness simply share perspectives with each other. This instantly grabbed my attention; it felt like this was the kind of interesting and enriching way of spending my time I’d been looking for.

Now I conceptually understand this is pretty much exactly what we do each night when we are sleeping, but that is an unconscious state. I want to deliberately and consciously shift my awareness in my awakened state to other dimensions to converse with entities who can broaden my view of life within this existence.

I have regular experiences of channeling – some of the stuff that I’ve written sounds far wiser than anything I might say; in fact it is always what I need to hear!  I have no doubts that the ‘me’ I think I am, is much broader than the portion of that consciousness that is generally occupying my body.

While this is great, what I would really like to do is consciously separate (temporarily) from my body in order to experience that broader part of me.

There is no need to convince me that this type of out-of-body experience is possible, in fact it’s more common than I would have believed at the outset of my journey to explore our potential. What I had convinced myself of, was that I lacked the time and space to experience it.

I imagined having to wait until the children were a bit older and going on a lengthy retreat somewhere to be able to really focus on it. A mentor of mine recalled her first experience of this as she taught a Merkaba breathing class many years ago, not that I knew what Merkaba breathing was, but I have since Googled it.  That is indeed the kind of practice I had envisaged doing on a retreat somewhere.

But then she suggested I just show up. Instead of waiting for this moment in the future, just make space for it and sit down at a certain point in the day and imagine myself sitting at the table awaiting to meet with those who are there to share perspectives. Call it my higher-school, and let spirit/life/guides direct me to towards it.

To just show up, that really resonated. I could wait for some point in the future and go on a retreat somewhere to learn about it, but that actually feels a bit contrived. With all that expectation on it, it would unlikely reap what I am looking for. Just showing up for 10 minutes each day felt better, more casual. I decided I’d just do it after my daily meditation.

So the first time I tried I’d gotten a bit caught up in the activity of the day and, by the time I did my meditation and then switched my focus to ‘show up’ for my higher-school, I fell asleep.

The next time, yesterday, I meditated early before any activity had gathered momentum, then I sat afterwards to show up for higher-school again. I did a short practice that I had learned from Alberto Villoldo’s Shamanic teachings to encase yourself in the light that resides in your eighth chakara/ higher heart just to set the intention.

What would this look like I wondered? I tried to decide whether I should be imagining myself in a lecture theatre or at a table, and had decided on a table as it is more interactive. Then, as I pictured myself sitting alone at the table, wondering if it would just be me on my own opening up to a new space, I heard a "hello".

I got this sense of talking to an older man and an image of someone with grey hair and a beard popped into my head. “Richard Bach!” I thought incredulously. Now it’s been a few years since I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull and, to the best of my recollection, it hasn’t come up in conversation lately. So this companion at the forum was rather a surprise.

Feeling awkward, I asked him what he was doing there above the clouds, and he chuckled and said “where else would I be?” This had all thrown me a bit as I don’t think I had actually been expecting anything to happen or any entities to appear, far less one I knew of. I became aware that the point of this whole exercise was about sharing perspectives to expand my views and felt suddenly ill prepared.

So I then asked him why he left the fourth part of his book out first time around, he replied that he didn’t think people were ready to hear it back then. Personally it was my favourite part. Then I asked whether he connected here with others often and he does. I asked who shows up to these things and he said sometimes people like us, sometimes entities from other dimensions; sometimes it's busy, sometimes not.

Then I got the sense he was becoming disinterested, it was – after all – the kind of conversation he could have at a book signing somewhere. I began to feel overly conscious that I wasn’t really contributing anything to this exchange and started to feel more awkward again, wondering what to say next. That is when I sensed things fading away and I felt myself drop back downwards into my body.

Whether what I experienced was in the realms of higher consciousness, or simply an over-active imagination, it less relevant to me than what I got out of it. It was a confidence booster that I can just start to show up in the small snatched moments I have, and see what answers arise to the questions I do have.

There are many questions, like what could the evolution of our monetary system look like? What could the evolution of any of our ‘systems’ (healthcare, education, governments, businesses etc) of society look like?

What does the evolution of our species look like with conscious awareness? Is our potential in human form limitless? What’s Earth’s significance in the Cosmos?

I’d like to understand the answers from an anthropological perspective, and what we have to learn from previous cultures that were more advanced in certain ways (not from books, but from the broader consciousness).

I’d like to understand from other forms of consciousness that reside in physical worlds that may be more advanced. I’d like to understand for those forms of non-physical consciousness that are there to guide and help.

These are all things that interest me, they add meaning to why I am here now, having this life experience. But that is just me. Each of us has our own interests, unique and important. And we each have limitless potential to explore these.

The question is whether you will show up? To show up just means making yourself available. Whether there is something specific you have in mind, or whether you just have this general sense of what you’d love to explore, start somewhere – anywhere. 

I once heard someone ask whether life can be defined more by its potential than its limitation. To show up is to believe in the possibility of your life being more than it is now. Believe in your potential and you’ll be amazed at what you can achieve.

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Marcel Proust
They came to my door, interrupting a quiet meditation, brandishing their leaflet. “No thank you”, I said, “I am a spiritual writer, my beliefs are my own and well thought through.” “Ah”, she replied “with the breakdown of families today we are trying to encourage people to look to the Bible for answers.”

Not that I have anything against the Bible (or any other doctrine) per se, it is just that my own experience would teach that I look outside myself only for inspiration, rather than answers.

I figure that since I am the very essence of that which created me, and would be hard put to argue the miracle and magnificence of life in its creation. I therefore have every confidence my answers are already within, rather than being left to the chance I read something written by another’s hand.

The last time they came to my door, it was on the pretext of what terrible things are happening in the world. It just does not resonate with me that a creator who has given me the freedom to create, think and feel as I please would talk through fear. Fear and judgment, these are human emotions, that I have felt in response to withholding myself from the love that is always there.

As unique as I am, there is nothing that leads me to believe my answers can be anything other than just as unique.

The question is how to find those answers. I found an amusing, yet enlightening, pointer in a novel I was reading recently, set in the eighteenth century. A young Scots girl talking to another about her life in a convent recounted “Sister Xaveria says we should try to be silent, I think so we can better hear God talk. But I’ve never heard him yet, I’m no sae good at keeping silent.”

Now life in the twenty first century does not always allow for a lot of silence, so it’s something I prioritise and carve out. It’s rarely in moments when I am interacting with the world that I can fathom answers, more so it is in the moments of contemplation about them.

I make a point of doing absolutely nothing, except observing my thoughts and letting them go, for fifteen minutes each day, you could call this meditation. I also make a point of getting out in nature and taking walks by myself.

I find life is full of clues to the answers I’m looking for, but it is also true that we rarely see the things we don’t expect to see (that was another piece of wisdom shared by Sister Xaveria with the wee lass in the story).

When I am upset over of another’s judgment, it’s hard to swallow that their judgment is something I wouldn’t even notice if it weren’t mirroring back a judgment of my own.

“Our eyes only see what we need to grow from, so what we see in others we have in ourselves.” Those wise words of Annette Noontil’s resonate, there is no denying the truth of it in my experience. All I need do is look in the mirror of life and see what’s annoying me and – ta da – that is an area in which I have a lot of opportunity for growth.

Like saying no to things that I feel are expected of me without making it a crusade (something I have been guilty of as a defensive tactic in the past), I get the opportunity to regularly practice this as part of my children’s school community. I want to be liked, I want people to think well of me, but I also have to honour my own needs and that can often mean saying no to others.

Having grown up in a world telling me how I ought to behave and feel, where ‘unselfish’ behaviour is extolled as virtuous, I learned that I should put the needs of others before my own and to make a defense if I wanted to do otherwise. Yet how can I be everything to everyone if I am nothing to myself?

Just this week one of the parents gave birth to a new addition and the call went out to fill a two-week roster of meals for the family. I’m not someone who finds joy in making meals, or pretty much any other housekeeping task, quite the opposite – I find it stressful. So I didn’t respond, passive in my no, and felt a bit guilty; though the guilt is getting less the more I practice.

It’s rarely easy to change ingrained patterns and behaviours, but when there is a voice within encouraging me, and outward signs of stress, it is as well to heed what being said. Ignoring it can only lead to later regrets, at best, or illness and ill fortune at worst.

It’s not that I don’t like to help people, on the contrary, I love making a difference in people’s lives. But I also know it’s my experience, intuition and perspective - rather than my lasagna - that is my forte; that is where I find a win-win.

Yet it’s a fine balance to be self accepting enough to put my own needs first and to still be self aware enough to look for areas of growth; and to do either without defense. Being willing to take a hard look at myself is something that has therefore taken a long time.

Sometimes I manage look at what is happening in my life with an objective enquiry as to its occurrence and opportunities, sometimes not. But I never stop trying to be the best version of me and lead the best life I can, following the yellow brick road by seeking only clues outwardly and answers inwardly.

And how do I know when I have found my answers? That is easy, the answers just feel right, they feel good. I feel proud of myself when I’ve taken action based on my answers within, rather than feeling like I’ve survived something.

So how often do you look within for your answers? Are you able to keep silent enough to hear them? Test that they are there and, if they feel right, trust they will lead you to your best life.

Other related articles of Shona’s you might enjoy:
​
Find Your Light and Let it Shine
Meet Challenges with an Open Heart and Mind
Each to Their Own – Finding Your True North
Meditation – You’re Cornerstone to Success
The Most Honest Feedback You Will Ever Get - Dream Messages

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.

Feeling Trapped? Know this: Circumstances change; this is not forever. You have to trust that, in time, solutions will present themselves. Read here for the full article on Tiny Buddha

“Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” Mother Teresa

I will never forget the feeling of loneliness, though it is something I now rarely feel, but those memories are still etched on my heart.

There is no one memory, more a series of them, as people in my life came and went. Yet I was brought up in a loving family, by parents who were very much together in their game of life. I was surrounded by a large extended family who were also in long running relationships, it seemed like the thing to do was find that person to partner with.

Happy ever after is what was fed to me through the very fabric of the society I was brought up in, and people leaving my life was something I felt acutely – and took personally.

Being a sensitive soul, I like to go deep with people, so I’ve always tended towards a small group of close friends rather than a large social circle. Having moved around and moved through different relationships though, I will acknowledge that small group has changed and grown over the years, but with each chapter there can only be a spotlight on a few.

So those few who hold my heart and attention in the present moment are always the ones most acutely felt when they exit my life. What I feel now when this happens (something I am largely at peace with) is massively different compared to my earlier years. I will try to describe what has made the difference.

First though, a few of those earlier memories.

I remember bumping into an old friend at university one day, a day when my usual circle of friends were not there and I was feeling like a spare part hanging around between lectures. It had been hard adjusting to university, it was so completely overwhelming in its size and culture compared to anything I’d experienced before and there was real no sense of belonging.

My old friend had been one of my closest in our early teenage years, and we often stayed at each other’s houses. But I had let that friendship slip as my focus was drawn into a relationship at the age of sixteen. So bumping into her at university made my heart lift, but as we stood and talked it became obvious how much she had moved on, and she had someplace to be; there was no welcome to join her.

My heart sank as I watched her walk away. There was no malice in her actions, but I felt terrible none the less. I became acutely aware of how she must have felt when I had left her to pursue other interests. That is the hardest part of friendships and relationships, letting go when I’ve outgrown them.

Yet I have always let go, the calling inside me to move on stronger than any regret about staying. Sometimes, though, the call to move on has not been mine.

I can vividly remember sitting in my room at my parents’ house one Saturday night, looking up through the street beyond, and watching a neighbor head out for a night on the town with his friends.

I’d been in a relationship with a guy I met at university and, in that summer I graduated, he had left me. He’d had the whole of my heart for almost a couple of years by then, and I just felt so totally rejected and worthless.

On that Saturday night as I watched my neighbor, I felt utterly alone and sad and wondered how to get past what had happened. Having been so involved in that relationship and, having just left university, I really had no circle of friends that I could even ring up and go for a drink with. Even my younger brother was out having fun with his friends.

Slowly, starting with a girlfriend of my ex’s friend that we used to socialize with, I built another circle of friends and life moved on.

In later years I can then recall – in another relationship – my partner going off out with his mates one Sunday evening. I had moved cities and pretty much had our relationship and my work, that was enough to keep my attention fully occupied, so I hadn’t really cultivated a group of friends to socialize with and didn’t much feel like doing that anyway.

It was a strange thing to be faced with an empty space, scary even. But there I was, his Sunday night out became a regular thing. At first I felt lonely, then I started to fill my time with things that interested me and quickly began to look forward to ‘my’ time.

That might sound so obvious, but living in constant company had gotten me used to compromise. There was freedom in watching the kinds of TV shows that only I wanted to watch, listening to – and dancing to – music only I liked, reading books and having time to reflect and contemplate.

But being on my own with my thoughts was not always an attractive concept in days gone past because I was completely identified with the thoughts rather than simply observing them. Talking to a friend the other day about this same topic, I was sharing a memory of being in a motel with the kids and waking up one night about 4am, hearing a loud bang in the neighbourhood.

Wherever my thoughts had started, they quickly spiraled to a bad place in that half awake state. I was soon imagining a mad gunman on the loose and had carefully planned an escape route in my head that included waking the kids up and getting them well away from danger without alerting the gunman. Thankfully I caught those thoughts, observing how they were making me feel and reasoning the unlikely nature of them.   

While I had learned the ability to ‘talk myself down’ from a highly anxious state many years before, it was actually during the time my partner’s social life had left me free each Sunday evening that I began to take more regular notice of my thoughts and how they were making me feel more generally.

I read a book by Brandon Bays called The Journey, recommended by a friend. The Journey was Brandon’s account of self healing, fully recovering from a large tumor with no medical intervention.  

It was the beginning of the journey to me, the journey to my inner world that included no one else.  You see, up until that point, it had always taken another person to explore the depths. But this was all me, figuring out who I am, life and all that I and we are capable of.

That was about 15 years ago and it has, by no means, been an easy journey. There have still been moments of the good, the bad, the downright ugly and the amazing. But loneliness? Not so much. Every since Brandon took me on a guided meditation and showed me how to find the peace within myself, and how connected to everything else we are, loneliness is no longer there to be felt.

The single biggest shift in that conscious awareness of my thoughts, and of the much larger part of myself behind those thoughts, has come through regularly meditating. My whole concept of how who I am, how the world operates and how to get the best out of it all has completely changed for the better. I feel more in control, happier and – most definitely – not lonely.

So have you met the most important person in your life – you – in this way? If you’ve had glimpses of it, I’d encourage you to regularly practice observing what you’re thinking and feeling, the connection between the two and your power to change it. A more balanced and contented you leads to a more balanced and contented world; a world in which loneliness will be a thing of the past.

Other related articles of Shona’s you might enjoy:

Who Am I Now?
Great Relationships Happen When You Put You First
Saying Goodbye
Meditation – You’re Cornerstone to Success
Keep Growing: Don’t Look Back - Don’t Look Down

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog.
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As a proponent of finding one’s inner power and expressing our authentic selves, being called into the Assistant Principal’s office at my children’s Primary school at the age of 46 - and getting told off for booking a family holiday in term time - was an interesting experience.

I know this issue comes up time and again in the media, I know some countries – like the UK – actually fine parents for doing this, and I know there are arguments on all sides, but I feel like the arguments are happening at the wrong level.

What is the purpose of education? I’ll start with the dictionary definition; it’s a process of learning new skills, values, beliefs and habits. It’s fair to say that government-run education systems are about indoctrinating children into society.

The question in my mind is therefore what kind of society do we want to create?

For my part, I am not concerned about our future generations, as my recently published article Our Future is Bright – Why Worry? attests; it may be worth a read for a different point of view if you hold any fears about it yourself.

I'm certainly not worried about a breakdown of society and the traditional constructs and systems as we know them, they are long overdue and inevitable in my view. I'm excited to see the changes brought about by these new generations. So how can we best support them in that?

In our country, by law a child has to be in a system of education between the ages of 6 and 16, or the parent has to have been granted an exemption (usually for home schooling). There is no choice in the matter and, as I was taught, we are to feel that having an education is a privilege.

Now compared to some of the historical alternatives, and perhaps even some of those we see in countries today, I can see why the educational process I went through myself was an improvement upon those.

However, in my lifetime the rate of change on this planet has accelerated and, with the ushering in of the technological era and meteoric rise in consumerism, I believe the resulting constant and overwhelming bid for our attention is birthing another era – the age of meaning.

With knowledge at our fingertips, there is less thirst for it.

My daughter said to me just the other day “why couldn’t we just be born knowing how to read and write, then we wouldn’t have to go to school?” I’m going to come back to that thought later in the article. First let me tell you what happened.

My kids attend a school we chose primarily for its setting and general philosophy. I love the natural environment in which it resides, the fabulous adjuncts (like a programme that develops children’s auditory processing skills) and the fantastic teachers my children have had the good fortune to experience.     

The school seems to attract quite a contingent of those of us who have moved here from other countries, so it has quite a multi-national demographic in terms of the families being taught there. New Zealand itself is a country of immigrants; even those we might call indigenous are thought to have arrived perhaps only as far back as 800 years ago.

Thus most people here can track their ancestry to many other places in the world, and so wanderlust is part of the culture. The ‘big OE’ (overseas experience) has been a part of the Kiwi way of life for a long time.  Whereas when I worked in the UK, it was unusual for companies to grant an employee an extended leave of absence for an overseas trip, it is quite commonplace here.

And this has been reflected within the school culture too, travel and experiences oversees were encouraged.

However, last week the school announced a new process for planned absences. Given we are about to embark on a family holiday (that the teacher has known about since February), I found the new process includes being invited into the office and told not to book such a thing again.

While, certainly in New Zealand, there is no discrepancy in the Ministry of Education's eyes between persistent absenteeism and an absence due to a holiday, I feel there is a huge difference in the two in terms of developing a child's will and the effects on their education.  There will also be quite a difference in overall actual attendance across the year.

It is quite one thing to take measured absences, another to just decide not to bother going to school.

​In the past the ministry hasn’t published individual school absence rates on their website, but perhaps there is a move to push up attendance levels? I was not given a clear answer.

However, neither the intent nor content of the conversation with the school about our family holiday has dissuaded me from the choices we have made nor persuaded me that it's actually my child's interests that are really of concern. 

My children will have a wonderful opportunity to spend two unadulterated weeks in nature, spending their days with parents more fully present than they can hope to have at home with the demands of school and business.

With the way school weeks and terms are currently structured, intense blocks of weeks followed by similarly intense weeks of holidays, quite aside of any financial implications, would any of us really choose to go somewhere at a time (in school holidays) that is likely to be ridiculously busy and full of frazzled people trying to let go of overwhelm?

Now a road paved with less intensity and burn out, shorter school days, shorter weeks and less holidays, more of a natural rhythm and balance, this is something I would support for children and teachers alike.

That said, I can well understand the challenges for a teacher constantly having children absent, having experience myself in the realm of adult training and having managed hundreds of staff for many years. I know it is a rare thing to have a ‘full house’. Absenteeism in the workplace is as prevalent as it as at school, and – I think – for the same reasons.

We inherently feel our freedom within, and are less and less willing to conform to systems that do not allow us to express this. I see people now in swathes quietly and passively rebelling against that which we could call authority, so it was interesting (and perhaps somewhat unfortunate) when the assistant principle mentioned a book he’s been reading The Spoilt Generation: Why Restoring Authority Will Make Our Children and Society Happier by Dr Aric Sigman.

Although I suspect my views and Dr Sigman’s do not differ as substantially as one might think, it’s the deliberately controversial use of his chosen terminology that would set many of my generation against it. The inference is that we’ve ‘gone soft’ in our parenting. While I would acknowledge that we are a generation of parents now having to figure out ideal boundaries for things that were not even thought of when I was a child,
I’m not so sure Dr Sigman’s terminology would attract us to his methods.

In fact, if you’ve read any of my articles you will know I am not an advocate of blindly following any particular system or method for anything. I advocate for people finding their own power, their own answers, within themselves. I therefore hold a vision for an evolution in our education systems (and society more broadly) that would seek to guide a child to look within for their answers.

Much of the help I offer is to people who – like me - are trying to retrieve that sense of authentic self, and have no idea after years of effectively being told ‘others know better’ how to even hear their own inner voice. And I watch as those who've suppressed it are consumed by cancers and other diseases that arise from being so detached from the essence of who they are to even see the connection to the causation, which is usually years of suppressed emotions. It is a fascinating topic.

As to where this leads, I'm not so sure about a spoiled generation, over-stimulated yes. Hence we are now seeing generations of children being born with sensory processing sensitivities and disorders.

But if I circle back to my daughter’s question, about wishing to have been born knowing how to read and write, I think this is a topic worth exploration and research. I had a grandparent exclaim to me recently their awe at their infant grandchild quite obviously being able to understand so much despite not yet being able to talk.

This is well known in child development terms. But what if it goes beyond this? I have read enough accounts of human capability over the years that would lead me to believe that is is quite possible that all that has ever been thought, said or discovered to this point is held in our collective consciousness, and therefore does not need to be retaught again and again, it simply needs accessed.

As I wrote in What We Wonder About Creates Our Future, I am left to wonder at how technology has increased connection significantly yet decreased presence just as significantly. I wonder when people will begin to understand that technological connectedness is a crude replica of the connection that exists to everything when we are able to be fully present within ourselves. And I wonder when the masses will tap into that state of presence and connection, which is infinitely more powerful.

I also wonder when we will treat education as a lifelong journey rather than an obligatory 10 year slot that one should see as a privilege. I wonder when we will wake up to the inherent intelligence in our newborn and help them to access it rather than thwart it each step of the way?

And I continue to wonder at the magnificence of a world that allowed me to bring this conversation to the table, it is a beginning. For all that you might agree or disagree, I believe our systems of education hold far more potential than we are allowing.

Rather than focusing on attendance or methods and a curriculum that perpetuate a society ill equipped to meet the present, never mind its future, we should be taking a huge step back and asking questions that lead to an evolution of the whole thing.

If what you read here resonates and you’d like a fresh perspective (and only that, it’s not advice you have to take or act upon) on a situation in your own life, feel free to contact me or click here for further information. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog