How to Unschool Yourself from Societal Conditioning
To my fellow humans,
I took the first steps to dis-embark from my old life and into the world of unschooling and most of the experiences I have had, has got nothing to do with the children, but more so about my own personal inner world.
In order to walk on this unknown path into a complete new paradigm, I found that I had to re-evaluate so many of the beliefs that I have accumulated over the years in my society.
My husband and I were blessed with the tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming to help us effectively deal with these beliefs, but I have to warn you, it takes dedicated daily evaluation of your thoughts to navigate yourself out of the conditioned schooling pattern of thinking.
In other words, before you can successfully unschool your children, YOU NEED TO FIRST UNSCHOOL YOURSELF.
As we progress as a species to take more and more responsibility for our state of being, we discover that we have complete control of our thinking, our health, our actions and our future state.
It is now estimated that up to 95% of all diseases have an emotional origin (Strydom, 2013).
In the last few centuries we have dedicated our focus to develop our minds into scientific and technological masterminds, however, in the process, we severely neglected our emotional lives, even to the point of outright condemning children and men to show signs of emotion.
We have learned to successfully deny all our ‘negative emotions’, to push them aside so that we can ‘get up and go on’. In the process we have repeatedly altered our reality to accommodate a CONTENT state of mind, and often now, we find that we have completely lost touch with our inner world.
These emotions, albeit they be anger, broken heart, guilt or fear, they are our internal feedback response system to help us learn from our experiences. It compares to people that have been on anti-depressant for a long time: while the rest of us are all daily learning from our emotions about how we perceive the experiences we create for ourselves, anti-depressants successfully dull this emotional feedback system so that our emotional intelligence remains undeveloped.
It is not the pure emotional response that you experience in your day to day living that creates problems with your health, attitude or behaviour, but rather, the thinking patterns we have established over the years that accompany these emotions.
Let me clarify with some examples: If you experience anger towards someone, you can learn to protect your well-being against similar persons or similar situations so that you can avoid feeling such intense anger. This anger can move you into action to make a different choice next time. But when you attach your thinking mind to the anger, you will experience repeated thoughts of how you hate the person, of how you resent the person, of how you can’t believe what a pig the person is. Now that your mind is spinning into an overthinking frenzy, your whole state of being is affected by these lower vibrations. The chemical fluid through which your neurological connections connect, actually change in chemical structure so that different messages are sent to the cells. In the case of cancer, repeated thoughts of resentment will change the chemical fluid so that the neurological connections sent message to the cells to differentiate exponentially, thus a tumour forms.
Let’s take the example of experiencing a broken heart. The intense feelings of pain, sadness and longing for your beloved, can be directed to create the most beautiful art, poetry or music piece. The problem comes in when you are not in control of your thinking mind and allow your mind to ‘eat you up’ with thoughts of ‘not being good enough’, ‘never being able to find love’, ‘I don’t belong anywhere’ etc. These overthinking patterns of destruction can lead to a variety of symptoms directly linked to the hearts ability to operate in full health.
Now to come back to the process of unschooling yourself successfully: If you do not deny your negative emotions, but instead allow them to surface, you can ask: What is this feeling I am experiencing? Remember, stress and anxiety is not an emotion, it is a group name for all thinking patterns that spin us into an overthinking frenzy. You cannot deal with stress or anxiety; you have to break it down into the real emotion you are experiencing. What is this feeling, you ask, is it fear, is it regret or is it guilt?
Now, to successfully break free from the thinking pattern of let’s say fear, you have to ask yourself what kind of fear this is: Is it fear of the future? Is it fear of failure? Is it fear of making bad decisions? Or is it fear of thinking you are not good enough? It might be a pattern that is so deeply engrained in yourself that it will shock you with the realisation of its origin, for example, the ‘fear of not being better than everyone else’ which is deeply engrained in our masculine, competitive attitude of the previous century.
Unschooling is about the parents taking actions to deliver free-thinking, emotional mature and ethical creators to our world. Children imprint thinking patterns from their parents and other people they are surrounded with. If you have the vision to be in control of your mind so that you can co-create a peaceful and abundant existence here on this very planet, then I suggest you consider unschooling your children.
In the famous words of Kahlil Gibran (often fondly named The Prophet):
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you
yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love
but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies
but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of to-morrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward not tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the Archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Post Script: It is said that CREATIVITY IS THE NEW CURRENCY (Hunt, 2009), if you aspire to prepare your children for the economy of the future, their creative thinking will spring from a well nurtured emotional inner garden.
Sources:
Gibran, K. 2007. The Prophet. 18th ed. New Delhi: Rupa & Co
Hunt, J , 2009. The Art of the Idea. 1st ed. South Africa: Zebra Press
Strydom, Dr MK. 2013. Healing begins with Sanctification of the Heart: No disease is incurable. 4th ed. South Africa: Eagles Wings Ministries
