Focus-Pocus - Earth Alchemy

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Focus-Pocus - The magic of learning to Focus

Now that school has begun again for children all over the northern hemisphere, invariably I hear of the trials for those students who are newly beginning their full day school career. In the American school system, the alphabet is taught in kindergarten, yet the bulk of real learning skills are begun in first grade, and this is usually the first year of full-day schooling for most children. This transition of being away from home and having to suddenly develop focusing skills to cope with the various information they are expected to learn, is often traumatizing for the children. The inability to cope with this transition either emotionally or intellectually usually causes the children to be signaled out and labeled, thus creating further trauma for them and their families.

As an example of this, only four weeks into first grade, I recently heard this is a remark from a concerned, caring mother. "Yes , my son is in Special Ed class for reading. They feel he is not able to multi-task normally .” It is a scenario I am personally very familiar with, recalling the difficulties as my sons went through their first full year at school. I was faced with some decisions and awareness’s that catapulted me into a new world of understanding, about myself and about what truly gives the capacity to go through the standard school system with a certain level of comfort.

If you wish to read a fuller account of my personal story, it is detailed in the article titled "Our Children are Our Mirrors". With this article, my intent is simply to provide new perspectives that may not be apart of your dialog with the school system, as well as some tried and true techniques for aiding your "special" children.

Sensitive children usually end up being "Special Ed children". Especially boys. I have yet to meet any such child in person that I did not immediately sense to be monumentally gifted with a heightened sensory faculty; to have a wonderful memory; to be extremely intelligent; to make connections that show high initiative and imagination. In short, just about everything we are looking for in Earth's future caretakers and visionary leaders are evident in these special children. They also have the capability to move through the school system just like everyone else, but with one exception, there is SO much for these very sensory-aware children to focus upon and analyze in full, that they have a more difficult time to place their focus on mundane matters when asked to. They have a difficult time trying to get down to the business at hand when it with subjects they may personally find unexciting.

What I have learned through my own experiences is that this could well be simply a matter of learning how to focus on uninspiring subjects. It is not that we need to aid them in overcoming memory problems, slower intelligence or an inability to perform normal multi-tasking, it is that we need to empower ourselves.

We must remember that what we know of our child through life experience with them, can not be displayed in one weeks association with their teachers. If our son knew the 20 words the school had asked us to help him learn over the summer and yet didn't get one word correct on his test, where did that knowledge go? Did it go anywhere? It went the way of his focus. As I was to discover with each of my own sons, they did settle down and learn to focus, but each in his own way. One had the aid of a Special Ed teacher, but this did not facilitate his ability to focus, according to the Special Ed teacher herself. He only settled down and learned to focus when he was ready to. He settled down when his flow with "focus" was actually flowing and not locked as a burden upon him all the time. This was certainly not the case on his first day of school and it was not even the case during his first year of school. My younger son turned his flow on focus power around to a constructive bent even faster, and without the Special Ed, but with my own personal attention to this dilemma in as many ways as I could provide it. Logically, my second son should have taken far longer, since his initial test scores were so much worse and his freeze-up at school much more severe. He was promptly picked out by his teacher and sent to Special Ed for further testing. Within week one of beginning first grade, I received a letter informing me that he was in dire need of special classes. As a parent who has watched my child through all formats in his young life, you'd think I would have known and agreed without a doubt that he was in dire need. However, after sending my eldest son dutifully through a program that didn't change his overall focusing ability, I felt this labeling was an error based mostly on jittery "just starting first grade-isms".

If you too, feel there is something a bit quick about your child's diagnosis and program streamlining, there IS something you can do! Instead of the school program, I decided to try something else: to try it my way, even though I didn't have "a way" so much as a heart felt nudge to be more empowered about this. I reasoned that if within a given time span, things seemed to be going nowhere, we would follow the standard school ideas. What I found was that we both blossomed incredibly! It is likely that the empowerment I took responsibility for, allowed the petals to unfold gracefully.

When I made the decision to do something myself, I took back my power and something deep within me was unknotted (it was likely a knot that was tied back at my first year of school). There was some real pain for me - and for my husband too! - shoved down deep inside us from our own childhood experiences with school. Do you think we passed this pain and powerlessness on to our children? Of course. We didn't do this consciously, but it happened through osmosis. Ask yourself what kind of a two way flow you, personally, have with the energy of "school". I don't mean how well you did in school (I did very well, once I learned what was wished for, it was easy for me to provide it, like a dog learning to do tricks!). I am speaking about subtle energy flow and that which moves from our subconscious, into our conscious and into our life patterns. An example is: If your child is having a hard time in school or is ADD, then it is highly likely that YOU have subconscious or conscious issues that need to be dealt with relating to both focus and to school. Speaking gently from the space of one who has been there, “the apple does not fall far from the tree”.

My son and I worked on his ability to focus. We worked on my ability to focus. I thought I was already fairly good at focusing on any task, yet I found room for improvement. My improvement helped to fire my son’s ability to focus. For his fidgety hands while reading, I would ALLOW him to be fidgety with his hands by giving him a small ball of play dough and letting him work with it while he read. I was holding the book, of course. There is no mistake that WE are the prime ingredient in our children's successes!

There is no coincidence that as the parents of children in Special Ed, we are the ones who will live and breathe this dilemma with them. We need to. We have flow facets that need to be reshaped more constructively, so that we can then pass those on to our children. Our ease gives our children ease. I have personally discovered that it is as simple - and as excruciating - as this. Excruciating? Yes, for our children, but not so much for us. Most of us have long ago placed this emotional stress deep within ourselves and never allowed it to be perceived in the polite society of our logical mind. Also meaning, we have not yet likely built the truest, most joyful connections for our own unique learning capacity. We each have a wondrous spirit though, through which we have learned a multitude of sideways techniques that are adequate to good. They are not the brilliant brain constructions that would make us fly, but they've served well enough.

I am so very thankful that through the stress my son’s experienced, I could go back myself and learn the focus I'd never learned before. We learned together, as families tend to do! I found time and again that allowing his hands to get into the act of reading worked wonders for allowing him to focus. And whenever he could truly focus, he could do absolutely everything, and in a very impressive time frame.

Do you have a child who has a difficult time remembering a certain word or words even though you've repeated it with them dozens of times? Maybe he or she needs to read them through their hands first ! You might try writing the word in very large format, as in 5 inch tall letters, then having your child place their finger on them and trace these large letters. Let them decide whether they want to trace and speak the letters/words at the same time or whether they want to wait till they've traced the whole word out one time first.

Our children KNOW how they make their own connections and find focus, even if they don't know how to put that knowledge into words. Our job as parents is to watch their body language and listen to the unique communication they are relaying to us. Our job is to get empowered enough to help them construct those initial bridges, to find those ways by daring to explore the possibilities with them. In my opinion, this is something only we can do for them completely. It takes dedication and the type of intimacy that really only comes from living with a child moment by moment, to see how s/he reacts to the constant stimulus that is "life".

There are many ways to help stimulate a flow with Focus. Perhaps drawing letters and words in a Zen garden sand table. Perhaps in shaving cream on the kitchen table. What is their favorite game or toy? How can you use that to spell out words? The possibilities are many to be more tactile with communication. I would recommend Not using school-related items such as flash cards or chalk boards. Use their Tinker toys and Legos instead. I have found that once the connections are created, they do not need to be used indefinitely. It's as though that first important bridge must be laid down for them. My son only needed to fidget with play dough for a short while till he could construct the neuro pathways that made sense to him.

I have found a remarkable Hand to Head (Hand to Brain ) flow relationship that seems to be commonly important for sensitive children to solidly have flow with, in order for them to be able to truly focus. The more we can embrace this, the more techniques we can use which honor this, the more we will aid our children in claiming their ability to focus when asked to at school and throughout life.

I have heard of children who love to touch their Mothers' hair while reading, including my sons. I see many children who play with their own hair, including my sons. This is yet another example of this hand to head, tactile formatting at work. Something that we may have thought related more to comfort, also allows them to ease their hand to head energy flow snags. This is what I have seen according to the energyflows I have looked at. Using their hands to play with hair or squeeze a ball is not as powerful a focus tool as having their hands in their eye’s sight, as when they are working with large motor skills in the creation of letters and words. (Note...as opposed to the fine motor skills of writing small letters on paper or boards, which is practiced at school.) Yet it still helps, as I've seen some evidence that the more senses we can engage at once, the better the focus and the stronger the neuron pathways that are created.

Have I seen children struggle all the way through the school system trying to do things the standard way and then live as adults without the ability to focus? Absolutely. My sons were only said to be "borderline ADD". There are many children and adults that are formally so. It is never too late to build those bridges, to gain ones' sense of focus.

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