My (atypical?) motivation of becoming a mother January 1, 2013

It’s not a secret that today many young women in the West are not keen on getting children. There may be various reasons for this trend and probably we will never find out the true one. The governments of the “dying out “countries are making efforts in order to motivate their women to have children. For instance, in the UK they allow to have a Cesarian upon a wish if the reason for avoiding birth is the fear of labour pains. In Austria they motivate well-off working women by the 75% maternity leave payment in the first year. In order to increase the birthrate in Russia the government grants a “reward” of about 9.200 Dollars for the second child. Obviously these methods motivate some women, but the general trend of a childless life is ongoing and shows no end.

I thought of sharing my experience of motherhood motivation hoping to inspire some women for the fantastic primordial female role.

To be honest, I never wanted to have a child. In particular, a child “of my own”. A desire of giving birth to someone who would resemble me and be the “flesh and blood” of mine seemed totally strange to me. I was ready even to adopt some children if necessary because I believed that “own” or not “own” child makes no difference –  every one can and should be loved the same way… After my husband and I have been happily married for 5 years we decided to think of a child, but not because “it was time” or surely not because “everyone gets children at some point” . We had somewhat different reasons.

I decided to go for a child for several boldly rational reasons, such as

1. Good genes

My husband and me have good health and good psychological nature. We both come from happy families with strong pedagogical background. No alcohol, drugs or crime records 🙂 .

     2.  Life comfort

Having good jobs and living in the city of the highest quality of life in the world  we can offer a comfortable birth and life for a child.

     3. Strong value system

Having a solid value system of idealistic and humanitarian values we can offer a strong base for a happy and stable personality. A healthy mix of material and spiritual life secures a succesful and enjoyable substance of a future Earth citizen.

Having all that – why not share, why not pass on the bliss of a happy life?

However on top of my decision for a baby was something else: I wanted to raise a child as a global personality who would make this world to a better place. I wanted to welcome and lovingly host a soul of a high caliber who would actively participate in the current collective transformation of mankind.

Our daughter is 1 year and 9 months now and is a true delight. Interestingly, even now many people point out to me the unusual social skills of the baby. Already now it looks like she will grow into the personality I was desiring to give birth to. 🙂

LOVE
axinia

Sufism on educating an Infant April 29, 2011

A highly insightful and interesting not only for parents read from Hazrat Inayat Khan.

It is never too soon in the life of a child for it to receive education. The soul of an infant is like a photographic plate which has never been exposed before, and whatever impression falls on that photographic plate covers it; no other impressions which come afterwards have the same effect. Therefore when the parents or guardians lose the opportunity of impressing an infant in its early childhood they lose the greatest opportunity.
In educating the child the first rule that must be remembered is that one person must educate it, not everybody in the family. It is a great mistake when everyone in the family tries to train the infant or to take care of it, because that keeps an infant from forming a character. Each one has his own influence and each influence is different from the other. But most often what happens is that the parents never think of education at all in infancy. They think that is the age when the child is a doll, a toy; that everyone can handle it and play with it. They do not think that it is the most important moment in the soul’s life; that never again will that opportunity come for a soul to develop.

Should the father or the mother educate the child? A man’s life demands all his attention in his work; the mother is born with the sense of duty towards her child, and therefore the mother has the first right to educate it. The mother can also quiet the child in the first days of its life, because the child is a part of the mother, and therefore the rhythm of the mother’s spirit is akin to the rhythm of the child’s spirit. The soul that has come from above is received and is reared and taken care of by the mother; and therefore the mother is its best friend. If there is anything that the father can do, it is to help the mother or the guardian to educate the child. If the child in its infancy were given entirely into the hand of the father, there would be little hope that it would come out right; because a man is a child all his life, and the help that is needed in the life of an infant is that of the mother. Nevertheless, later in the life of a child there comes a time when the father’s influence is equally needed; but that time is not in infancy. As the Brahmin says, the first Guru is the mother, the second Guru is the father, and the third Guru is the teacher.

There are five different subjects in which an infant must be trained in the first year: discipline, balance, concentration, ethics, and relaxation.

Changing Education Paradigms – another brilliant insight on education! January 6, 2011

The video in my previous post was showing severe problems the global society is facing,  and here comes  one of the solutions. I found this animation very well presented and highly insightful.

Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.

Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity,” Robinson says. It’s a message with deep resonance. Robinson’s TEDTalk has been distributed widely around the Web since its release in June 2006.

The most popular words framing blog posts on his talk? “Everyone should watch this.”

A visionary cultural leader, Sir Ken led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.

LOVE, axinia

A new approach in self-teaching – the future of schools? December 16, 2010

Some of you may know that pedagogics is one of my favorite spheres of interest, although I don’t blog about it much. I have a dream of opening a private school that would be based on the principles, more relevant to the evolutionary level of the upcoming generations than whatever we have now.

Today I would like to share with you an interesting TED video about a new experimental approach in teaching – helping school children in self-teaching.

I find it very insightful, especially the point of collective learning – something which is missing quite a lot in the modern concepts of education.



LOVE; axinia

Highly insightful: why it’s so hard to become happy, what is dramatically wrong in our child-care and how to overcome it June 23, 2010

There are very few books that can deliver some truly fresh, insightful information. Most of the things have been repeated for ages. One of this rare, uniquely insightful books is “The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost” by Jean Liedloff. (1975)

 

Jean Liedloff, an American writer, spent two and a half years in the South American jungle living with Stone Age Indians. The experience demolished her Western preconceptions of how we should live and led her to a radically different view of what human nature really is.

And that is:

• the aggressiveness is NOT in a human nature, and even children may never fight! “Not only did they not fight, they never even argued. This is not at all what we have been taught human nature is — boys will be boys. So I thought well maybe, boys won’t be boys.”
• every human being is born as a happy, confident, stable personality. “Society is unpleasant, dangerous, unhappy, alienated, and unstable because in childhood our nature — being confident, joyous and loving — has been undermined and we simply live the way we are expected to. What we believe is what we make our experience into. And what we believe is what we have been taught to believe by our parents and our experiences.”

Jean Liedloff claims that it all our problems can be traced back to the general misconduct of child-care and upbringing. We’ve got disconnected to the natural/true method ages ago, no wonder the evolution has taken a somewhat weong track…

She discovers that the basic difference in what the indigenous people do and we don’t – is the so called “in-arms period”: from the birth till the baby starts crawling, a mother carries it 24 hours a day on her body (including sleeping in one bed). A child gets an enormous dose of security and happiness, since there is nothing more important and beautiful for it than the mother.

 

 Let’s have a look at the common practice in the modern Western childbirth and child-care. A baby experiences:

A Mathematician’s Lament – or why I hated math at school May 10, 2010

Mathimatics has been always a horrow subject to me. My brain blocks when I only see numbers and formulas… It’s a wonder how I could have survived so far with such an attitute towards maths!

Renecetly I came across an amazing article on mathematics, which literary has blown my mind. A Mathematician’s Lament, is written by Paul Lockhart in 2002. Paul is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York. His article has been circulating through parts of the mathematics and math ed communities ever since. His point is that much mathematics education is hijacked by people who know nothing about it.

Here are some quotes:
“The first thing to understand is that mathematics is an art.  The difference between math and
the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. 
Everyone understands that poets, painters, and musicians create works of art, and are expressing themselves in word, image, and sound. 

In fact, our society is rather generous when it comes to  creative expression; architects, chefs, and even television directors are considered to be working artists.  So why not mathematicians?
 
Part of the problem is that nobody has the faintest idea what it is that mathematicians do. 
The common perception seems to be that mathematicians are somehow connected with
science– perhaps they help the scientists with their formulas, or feed big numbers into
computers for some reason or other.  There is no question that if the world had to be divided into the “poetic dreamers” and the “rational thinkers” most people would place mathematicians in the latter category.
  
Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical,
subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.  It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or
physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe).  Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.
 
So let me try to explain what mathematics is, and what mathematicians do.  I can hardly do
better than to begin with G.H. Hardy’s excellent description: 

A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker
of patterns.  If his patterns are more permanent than
theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. 

So mathematicians sit around making patterns of ideas.  What sort of patterns?  What sort of
ideas?  Ideas about the rhinoceros?  No, those we leave to the biologists.  Ideas about language and culture?  No, not usually. 

Traditional Hindu families – compare to the Western family makeup! January 26, 2010

I’ve just finished an awesome book on LOVE: “We: understanding the psychology of romantic love” by Robert A. Johnson. I tell you, it’s a bomb. And a must for any Westerner!

The things the author (himself an American, lived in India and Japan) reveals about the nature of the so called romantic love and where it leads us are terrific! I am preparing the post on the book and its highlights. And in the meanwhile please check Johnson’s insight into the nature of traditional Hindu families  – I guess it is pretty much same today, although the book was written in 1983:

“One of the most striking and surprising things I observed among traditional Hindus was how bright, happy, and psychologically healthy their children are. Children in Hindu families are not neurotic; they are not torn within themselves as so many Western children are. They are bathed constantly in human affection, and they sense a peaceful flow of affection between their mother and father.

Why a marriage works or not January 17, 2010

One may view a marriage as two people standing back to back , each protecting the other in a particular way.

It is the feminine task to protect not only herself but her man nad  her family from the dangers of inner world; moods, inflations, excesses, vulnerabilities, and what used to be called possessions. There are the things a woman’s genius can manage much better that a man’s. Usually he has his own task in facing the outer world and keeping the family safe.

There is a particular danger in the modern attitude in which both people face the our world, both spend their time in outer things. This leaves their inner world unprotected and many dangers creep into the household through this unprotected quarter. Children are particularly vulnerable to this unprotectedness.

When a marriage begins the partners are like two discrete circles overlapping a little. The division between he two is great and each has a specific task. As the marriage partners grow older, each learns a bit of other’s genius, and finally the two circles overlap more and more.

found in “She” by Robert A.Johnson, a Jungian analytic

Why innocent people have less problems October 4, 2008

“Children have no problems” goes the common saying, for children are (normally) taken care of, they (normally)  don`t need to work or basically do no face that cruel big world outside. It is the power of innocence that protects children from most of the troubles. As children grow up, the problems seem to grow with them. Or at least with most of them.

There are people who, like they say, never grow up. I do not mean those who, being adults have “childish” hobbies or behave like naughty children. I mean those, who never grow old with their innocence, who are children at heart.

What I noticed is that such people indeed have less problems, in any aspect of life.  Are they so careless and do not bother? Are they not serious enough? Are they just silly? Let me share with you my observations and conclusions on this topic.

Where is your attention? June 12, 2008

 image by axinia

Our attention is that part of consciousness which we direct at specific things around us. When we are listening intensely to something, we can say that we have our full attention on it. When we are focused on looking at a small object, the same applies. Our attention usually suffers in our day to day activities. It suffers because it is being pulled, jostled, screamed at, and battered by the world in which we live.

WHERE IS OUR ATTENTION DURING THE DAY?

 – As soon as we get up in the morning the breakfast TV or radio starts screaming for our attention, which a stream of salacious news stories, beguiling adverts and a constant flow of general trivia… Stores fronts scream out their aggressive sales messages at us, offering blandishments and signs for Final Sale, 50% Off! or New Season bargains in a thousand attempts to attract our already battered consciousness.

– This constant bombardment fractures our attention in a very subtle way. In fact we suffer more than we know, because after a while we lose the ability to settle down and find peace anywhere. One of the first signs is that we may have trouble sleeping, our mind racing with the events of the day.