My first reaction to the title of this section was a sinking feeling. I am by nature a pragmatist, always accepting the darker side of life as a constant and not trying to fight against it. The possible down side to this trait is that I often feel that I give up to easily, and obviously when life is on the line giving up is not an option. Once I read the section though I realized that my acceptance of death as a part of life is not a negative trait. In fact, it might be extremely helpful throughout my career and my life. I have learned how to do this through first hand experience, as I have lost several very close matriarchs on both sides of my family. Starting when I was about 10 years old I was brought into the adult world of mourning and celebrating a life that has ended. For this I am so grateful to my parents.

Five years ago I had my closest and deepest experience with death. My great aunt Maimie was ill for 2 years, and I was with her at least twice a week during this time. She remained steadfastly independent, never wanting to take more help than she absolutely had to. Looking back, I wish I had given more gentle help anyways. More times of just sitting and listening, more talking and asking questions, and more touching. When Maimie’s illnesses became even more severe and it was presented to me as time to make a decision about whether to continue to treat her body. By scientific standards this body was ‘failing’, though the heroic treatments had been tried and the body had been treated in several separate operations to ‘fix’ this system or that one. It was time to decide now what was best for the whole person who lay in front of me. I called together my mother and aunt, the closest family members and together we decided that Maimie would not want to continue this way. Soon she was able to confirm for us that she wanted to go home, and I could tell with certainty that she knew it would mean her death. Bringing her home was not welcomed by every member of the family, some people believe in letting the hospitals take care of the ‘messiness’ of death. I was lucky though to have my own mother understand that Maimie wanted to come to her home, to be with us. At least this I did right. I brought her home.

The next step though, I not ready for. Though I had given birth twice, I never knew how much the dying body came to resemble that helpless newborn body I had held joyously against mine. It is not nearly so pretty and easy with a seventy year old body, or so I thought at the time. If I could do it over I would sit there every minute. I would hold her hand longer. I would moisten her lips more often to ease the cracking. I would have laid in bed next to her and held her the way she did when I was sick as a child. I would not have let her slip away quietly during the few minutes she was alone without being sure I whispered to her how loved she was. I did try, but my youth got the better of me. I shied away too much and allowed myself to escape to the calm of the kitchen with my 6 month old on my hip, distracting myself with any other task I could whenever I could.

The remarkable part to me is this: I learned. I now feel the loss of people much more removed from me than Maimie was. I allow the sadness to be with me and I look for ways to enjoy the lives around me right now. I hope that when the time comes to sit at that doorway with someone again that I have even more strength, that I can bear witness fully to their suffering and their transformation. I will hold their hand and sweep the hair back from their face without fear or repulsion. I will see the newborn in them. I will not regret the moments I am given.

I imagine it’s the same reason one might choose to run a marathon or surf a big wave.

It’s not just so I could say I did it, though that feels good to do so.

It’s not because I had to, certainly no one was pressuring me to go natural.

It’s not even because I wanted to be the ‘natural’ type.

I chose natural childbirth because that run or that wave is never going to exist for me any other time. I had one opportunity to ride it all the way to the top and see what it was like. To feel the pains and rushes of the climb, the sweat on my brow, knowing that I am doing hard work and my body is capable of completing the challenge.

Was it easy?

No, not for me. I have heard stories of easy births, but even my ‘easiest’ birth was a huge challenge. My longest birth was like running a marathon, my shortest birth was also like running a marathon. The body feels the whole experience and when it comes to a close, your body rejoices in the rest. Perhaps that is why I am so attracted to distance running now, when I have never run before in my life. Each run is similar to a birth in some small way. Meeting each hill large and small with as much energy as I can muster. Using breathing, stretching, music, support people and music… I use all of these in both my births and my running. Then the feeling of finishing, not necessarily just a race but any long run, I feel that sense of completion. It’s only a tiny fraction of what I felt after each of my births, but it’s there.

How do you learn?

            Some people say they learn best by listening to oral instructions, others say they like to read something for it to really stick. Other people say they learn by doing, and some need to hear it, read it, AND do it before it becomes ingrained knowledge. Most studies that analyze this sort of thing say you really learn how to do something by teaching it.

            As it turns out, they are all wrong.

            None of these methods actually provide the ideal learning experience.  Sadly, most of them are the only option given a child in a school setting with lots of other children vying for the single teacher’s attention. How often did your teacher have the time to do anything but lecture, assign reading, or assign an occasional writing assignment? I didn’t get the chance to teach a topic to other students until I was in college (an experience I enjoyed so much that I decided to get a master’s in education).

            No, we are not empty vessels that need filling—we are developing minds, bodies and spirits that need constant feeding, and we are hard-wired to seek out whatever knowing we need to become full fledged, self-actualized beings. It would be so nice and simple if having that knowledge handed to us on a silver platter all neatly packaged, illustrated and summarized got us to self-actualized adult… but we all know it can’t be that easy. And it shouldn’t be!

            The knowledge that means something to us and that sticks with us for a lifetime is the knowledge we acquire in our own way at our own time.

            Though we cannot learn for our children, we as parents serve an extremely important function in all this, albeit a constantly challenging one!  We provide circumstances that provide learning opportunities, who feed tantalizing bits without giving anything away, who avoid giving a straight answer to any question, and who seek new understanding ourselves and model the process for our children.

            I have to say, as someone who grew up in a public school setting where the teachers were supposed to know everything (and often claimed that they did), I’m having some difficulties following this path myself with my own children.   But I know the rightness of this way of teaching, and I experience justification for it regularly. I teach a writing circle with two eleven-year olds and a ten-year old, all girls, and we all write narratives together telling stories from our lives. As new writers, their stories tend to be full of “telling”, descriptions of what happened rather than having the action happen in the story. Over the last few weeks, I’ve hinted in various ways how their writing would be served by writing action, including dialogue and such. I was uniformly ignored… until today when I had them bring in their favorite books, read the opening pages, and discuss what made those pages draw in the reader. I said very little, but all of them on their own soon realized that the books described the action using rich detail and snappy dialogue, while their own writing simply told the reader what happened—the old “show, don’t tell” issue. One girl rewrote her opening immediately and read it for us. It was beautifully done, and we all told her so.

            And I KNOW you can’t tell anyone anything, but I keep trying it, not because I think it’s the best way, but because I haven’t quite figured out the sneaky way. But what power we give our children, when we leave them to discover the world for what it is—and then they can teach their newfound knowledge to US! How rich an experience for all of us!

I am a huge fan of “to do” lists.  My lists keep me organized, on task, and able to make sense of a seemingly endless parade of tasks and chores to be completed.

So imagine my surprise when I came across the following idea in an by Alan Cohen.  http://www.spiritsite.com/forums/columns/others/part2.shtml 

Just think of us mothers all over the world making our “To Be” lists.  We have the power to change the world, one list at a time.

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
~ Gandhi

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Deborah Donndelinger, EFT-ADV 

Heart based healing with a bit of fun

New Site Name:  www.SageEnergetics.com 

www.youtube.com/DeborahDonndelinger 

When I look back on my childhood, it seems relentlessly Americana, but in the bad modern way: grew up in a suburb’s raised ranch, worked hard in high school so that I could pay lots of money to go to college, tried a career, found a better one, got married, bought a house, two cars, a timeshare and two cats, and called myself successful.  And then, somehow, the bottom fell out. It all started with the birth of my first child, and before I knew what happened, was reading philosophy, eating organic foods, choosing to homeschool, and joining the Back to the Earth movement. What the heck happened??

            I believe over the last few years I have perfected a process by which you, too, can fall completely out of the mainstream, just by following a few simple steps.

            Step 1: Be mainstream long enough to discover that it’s REALLY boring
            My husband and I got good jobs—computer programmer for him, high school teacher for me—worked our five-day work week, made plenty of money, bought all the required stuff (car, stereo, TV, computer, DVD player) and ate out a lot. That’s pretty much it. You rent movies, you go out hiking or biking or kayaking once in a while, but generally speaking, life in the mainstream is pretty dull.  I guess we could have added video games into the mix for extra fun, but even we weren’t that far gone. So what DO you do with your time?

            Step 2: Have children
            You want to shake up your double-income, just-you-and-me complacency? Have a baby! There is nothing like a bundle of cute little embodied responsibility to make you realize how easy you had it. Now life is hard, but that is a good thing—life was so boring before that because it was too easy. Children certainly challenge all previous certainties you had about your life… such as that you were remotely competent at anything. But you will be, eventually, and it’s easier if you …

            Step 3: Stay home to raise your children
            This step is not absolutely required to fall out of the mainstream, but it definitely helps in a myriad of ways. The simple act of staying home immediately removes you from an enormous segment of the mainstream crowded with people who run the hamster wheel juggling two incomes, their household, and their children. Another benefit is staying home allows you to abandon your old, complacent, easy life and convenient friends and really dive into your ignorance. The plus side? When you’re home parenting every day, it’s a very steep learning curve,: you have to get a clue or you’re dead. Finally, having less money allows you to really abandon comsumerism and redefine your true needs. If you don’t have the money to buy X-Boxes, ATVs, I-Pods and Blackberries, you automatically put yourself further out of the mainstream than you would believe. Can you imagine spending every day experiencing the world as it is, and not shielding yourself behind constant externally generated imagery and noise?

            Step 4: Read books
            No, not Danielle Steele, at least, not right now. Read books by people both of the mainstream and those trying to break it open for deconstruction and discussion. Daniel Quinn and Thom Hartmann were two authors who definitely opened my eyes to new ways of thinking about mainstream culture.

            Step 5: Make friends with people who have already left the mainstream
            I was lucky—this turned out to be one of my easiest steps because I found one friend and then sidled into her already-established community of macroculture rejecters. It is not usually this easy, but you gotta do it. You need that group of people around you who will reinforce your new perceptions of the macroculture as well as introduce you to more books and more ideas that will expand and consolidate your new view of the mainstream and your place out of it. My friends and I like to call it our “bubble”, our little world that we have established full of families who have the same sensibilities and goals, who choose to stay home to homeschool their children, limit media, and tread lightly on the earth as much as possible.

            If you haven’t found these folk yet, don’t worry, we’re out here, so keep looking!

            I know there are lots of other possible steps to help families out of the mainstream:  have terrible experiences with mainstreamed kids who watch too much TV and play video games ad nauseum (it helps when they’re your in-laws’ kids), discover that your own children lose their minds and exhibit frightening behaviors when exposed to various media outlets, and the like. There seem to be so many reasons to leave the mainstream, I often marvel that anyone would choose to stay.

            So I would love to hear the paths other women followed to find their own way out of the mainstream, dancing their own dance, drumming their own drums. One thing is certain—when you’re out of the mainstream, life is never boring!

Did you know that our bodies can give us immediate feedback on whether something is right for us?  On which path to take, which decision to make?
Our bodies can give us a clear yes or no — and it comes from our gut.

Have fun!
Deborah

            Community is difficult to construct in our modern culture.  We tend to manage little mini-communities—the adults we see at work, the parents of our children’s friends, our chosen friends we see in our free time. But these groups rarely intersect unless (possibly) you choose to step out of the modern culture and stay home with your children, or work at home, or homeschool, or all of the above. Trying to form and mesh with a consistent community is a skill I constantly work to acquire, and as I continue my work I have become aware that many people have this same problem—and no wonder! What are our models for forming community?

            My dad often bemoans his poor childhood “on the block”. He lived in a blue collar city where everyone’s dads worked all the time to make ends meet, and when he wasn’t in school he was on the street with his friends or in his friends’ parents’ houses. He didn’t leave a two- or three-block area of his city, because all his friends were right there. But my dad doesn’t really value that experience—he only remembers that his family struggled financially, and that he didn’t want that experience for his own children.

            Now I struggle to find community, not money, for my own children. I live on a “block”, though it’s a suburban version with quarter-acre lots of raised ranches and the like, and when I moved here I looked forward to my child making friends with kids who lived on this block. Except, he hasn’t, because there is no one here. Oh, many children live on this block, but they all go to public school and after that, they all attend after school programs. If we go out on block at around 5:30 pm, that’s when the kids are out playing for their few minutes before they have to go home for dinner and homework, if they even make it outside at all.

            So instead, I have been trying out various groups that the local homeschoolers have formed in the hope of finding a community (albeit, one I must drive to) for me and my children. I’ve tried out three or four groups now, and I’ve discovered one of the keys to a group’s success: the number of takers versus givers within that group. You have the people (usually moms) who give their energy and time to making the community work, and you have the people who simply wish to benefit from the community without any significant energy expenditure on their part. But, like most things, it isn’t that simple. We’re a bipolar culture, and I think we tend to see things as either/or, but giving and taking, like gender and sexuality, are on a continuum. Some takers truly absorb energy from those around them, giving absolutely nothing in return. Some are more savvy about it, and give just enough to keep the other community members from calling them on their lack of involvement. But on the other end of the spectrum are the givers, the people (again, in my communities, usually moms) who give and give and give and don’t expect anything in return. Some of these moms, have been burned before and assume that if you want something done, you must do it yourself. Others, I think, derive their sense of personhood from how much they give, and you giving back to them both confuses and frightens them. And some, like me, simply bought the cultural edict, hook, line and sinker, that that’s what mothers do.

            But nothing I have learned has taught me how to find that balance between taking and giving. But oh, when we find that balance! When we give to our communities, offer up our energies and our insights and our well-wishes, AND we take and enjoy the energies our fellows have to offer us…  The synergy, the exponential growth of energy and zest and accomplishment that happens when everyone is right there, giving what they have, relishing the gifts we all offer each other—it is an experience beyond anything.  And I believe it is our birthright, this kind of community. I have had groups that approach this, and it has been (and is!) such a fulfilling experience for me and my family. Can you imagine if every day, all our lives, we were fed like this by our communities?

As the mother of a boy and two girls, I find it easier to get along with my daughters than my son.  I hate saying this and yet it is true.  I understand my girls and share similar interests with them.  I find my son to be abrasive and rude at times (my judgements ….) and it’s not easy being with him.  Even with my understanding of Law of Attraction and how our perceptions affect our reality, I haven’t been able to shift this (yet).

With much love and gratitude for all the moms and all the children,
Deborah

I do much better away from home.  I thrive on being busy and interacting with others, having things to do and places to be.

Being home can be challenging for me; I get bored with the housework and find myself restless.  And yet I know that if I am truly at peace with myself, then I can be at peace anywhere.  I know that my distraction of busyness away from the home is a mask and that my greatest challenge is learning to find peace during the ordinary moments of life.

Because of this busyness I have in me, meditation is a great comfort for me and I yet don’t always find the time to make it happen.  However, it is the most important of all my self-care activities.

I was talking with my mentor yesterday about my feeling bogged down by the mundane.  She suggested, and I’ve heard it before, to think about transforming my mundane chores into a meditative practice.  By merging with the task at hand and seeing the work as an essential part of life rather than a thing to get done, I can reconnect with the calm center inside that is accessible to all of us.  She really got my attention when she told me that by doing this energetic practice, I am also helping others — that I am changing the vibration of my world and that is positive for others as well.

I’m thrilled - here’s a chance to get the meditative calm I need and a way to reframe the repetitive task of housework that’s been bogging me down ….

So last night when I got home and there were dishes to be done, I was happy.  I was looking forward to the chance to practice this working meditation.  I paid full attention as I filled the sink, I paid full attention as I started washing one cup …. and then 10 minutes later I realized I had started thinking and planning and was totally not engaged with my task.  As any person who meditates knows, when trying to get clear, it is easy to get caught up in thoughts …. and it’s about the practice not the perfection.

Luck for me, I will have plenty chances to practice …

<http://www.youtube.com/DeborahDonndelinger>

I subscribe to a daily email from an amazing parenting coach, Scott Noelle (http://www.enjoyparenting.com/get-your-daily-groove).  His Daily Groove writing offers profound insights into how to be with our children in a collaborative way.  He has great insights into the Law of Attraction and other loving and empowering truths.

–

Deborah Donndelinger, EFT-ADV 
www.energeticmothers.com 

As we parent our children, we change the world

Find me at www.youtube.com/DeborahDonndelinger