Blueprints for Change

More on Writing

2011-06-20T08:53:00.000-04:00

Excellent Fiction Curriculum

I've actually come across the National Novel Writers Month ("NaNoWriMo") and decided to participate both this summer, if possible ("Camp NaNo") and in November when the "official" NaNoWriMo kicks off. For adults, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. You are allowed to do pre-writing tasks before the event, in fact it's encouraged (and helps you write a quicker, much more cohesive project). There are no prizes, although winners might get special offers from sponsors.

They have NaNoWriMo YWP (young writer's program) where you (the instructor or parent) helps a child set a word-count goal that's within reason but still a stretch for them, and they can also set off and write along side you (if you participate).
There are "curriculum guides" -- under "Resources for Educators"-- and workbooks for the children to print out and use for pre-writing. I plan to use this as Sept-Oct curriculum with my son because I think my whole family may be participating in either Camp NaNo this summer or NaNoWriMo. I've decided my son's goal should be a 25,000 word novella, and I don't think my daughter has decided whether to participate as an adult or as a student yet -- at 16, that's a choice I think she's ready to make on her own.

This weekend I went out on a limb and purchased the Kindle version of Writing Fiction For Dummies -- and I'm wildly impressed. I'm going to write a more thorough review on Amazon.com, but Randy Ingermanson and Peter Economy really really outdid themselves on this one, and it's a real bargain. I discovered Ingermanson through mentions on writers websites of the very popular writing technique called "The Snowflake Method" which he created as a method of writing non-fiction, research reports, etc. I decided to look at his For Dummies work, and when I saw the reviews and the Kindle price, I figured it was worth a look.

Like most "For Dummies" books, it's very well laid out, the language is clear and relatively concise, but it's the level of detail in this book that's most fascinating for me. If you can string together a few paragraphs, know how to construct sentences, and have even the vaguest glimmer of desire to write a book, this is a terrific guide. I recommend using it after using the NaNoWriMo youth-program workbook at least once, whether you're an adult or a teen, because it might be overwhelming if you've never analyzed a fiction story before from the writing perspective. While we all analyzed books in school for content, theme, meaning, plot, style, etc. there's a difference in analyzing a book and analyzing a writer's style to determine what you wish to emulate in your own.

From there, Writing Fiction for Dummies gives a very detailed high-level overview of the components of story writing, zooms in on each level down to the paragraph overview of how to construct your story, then also goes on to describe how, as a general rule, to get your book published. Phew! Note this is a very top-down oriented book, much like his Snowflake Method. If you're one of those people who prefers to write first, think later, this may be less helpful immediately, and more helpful during revisions and editing, writing a proposal, seeking publishing -- i.e. when you're looking at the big picture view.

In either case, if you or anyone you know has a yen to pen -- gift this book. It's a hit.

I use an application called Scrivener for almost all my creative writing efforts now including serial blogging. There are templates for fiction, screenplay, lecture, etc. in the program, with some setting & character development forms. I'd already started making my own templates, but now I'm adding tons of information and cheatsheets to my fiction template, most directly inspired by Writing Fiction For Dummies, and several other articles I've found online. The application is amazing for writing and organizing your information. On Windows? Either you can wait for Scrivener for Windows (forthcoming, there may be a public beta) or you can get Ingermanson's Snowflake Pro software, which looks awesome and is discounted 50% (i.e. it's $50) if you purchase Writing Fiction For Dummies which I really think you should -- whether you get his software or not. His software looks awesome, I'm hooked on Scrivener and just recently purchased it, so I'm not looking for another writing software package.

(And while I get a small commission if you purchase a book I recommend or mention through Amazon, I get nothing for Scrivener or Snowflake Pro -- I just want everyone to know about great software when I find it!)

Related Posts: Creative Writing Remedial Writing

Fruits of his Labor

2011-06-17T21:53:00.002-04:00

Photo by Jo Christian Oterhals via Flickr

When we were discussing homeschooling, my son's father gave him an assignment: write a 1200 word essay on the pros & cons of homeschooling.

This is the same 13-year-old-boy who would write exactly 3 5-word sentences if that's all he was required, whose IEP writing goal in 8th Grade was to write 3 paragraphs. His main problems being a huge reluctance to write due to handwriting issues when he was younger, years of handwriting remediation, and having convinced himself (and others) that he "can't" write. His paper comes out with approximately a 10th grade readability level!

Obviously I'm a writer, and I did coach my son to start with on how to organize his thinking, gave him some recent articles to spark his interest in pulling current events into the paper, and I did help him edit his work. However he put in a great deal of research effort, expanded the original premise for his paper to a comparison of public school, private school, homeschooling and unschooling, including some critical thinking that he's never been able to express in writing before.

He's given me permission to distribute the fruits of his labor. After years of pointless school assignments, one of the things that excited his passion was the idea that what he was compiling would actually be useful for someone in the future. So I thought it was important to share, on this eve of him finally being homeschooled.

Please grab a copy from my dropbox link below! Note, the contents are copyrighted, but you have permission to distribute it in its entirety.

Right-click to download - PDF

I live in a Pig Palace

2011-04-25T19:41:00.002-04:00

I don't remember how young I was. Much too young, I'm sure. I was probably caught between the trap of being a preschooler, an only child, having a "pack rat" father and a tidy mother, and never having been taught how to declutter and purge.

Inevitably I got to an age, probably 5 or 6 at most, where I was expected to have developed cleaning habits and skills in the face of a daunting amount of STUFF in a room much too large for someone my age to be fully in charge of.
I was commanded to clean my room and left to carry out my marching orders, and being a typical young child, I had no way of determining exactly what that meant. Being born of a pack-rat I'd come across favorite treasures or long-lost companion objects or books and get distracted from the task-at-hand. Eventually a parent would come to check on my stalled progress and instead of redirection and coaching or instruction, I felt like I was getting blamed for having missed something important even though the instructions were never specific.

Deciding that the expectation was unreasonable and unattainable, cleaning became a game of shoving as much STUFF under whatever objects I could get away with. Beneath the bed behind the dust ruffle, in the back of the closet, in drawers, under or behind furniture. Much of the time these ploys didn't work.

Never did anyone sit with me and help me make decisions about my items. No one asked where an item belonged. No one helped me determine whether an item was still useful. I was still playing with my preschooler circus train set with my barbie dolls when I was 9 or 10 years old. It's a testimony to my imagination, and that I wasn't too spoiled (never had the Barbie car or the Barbie house, so I made do with what I had).

I'm not sure exactly when the name-calling began. I know I was very young. Keep in mind that the younger a child is the more impressionable they are, and the stronger the commandments of the parents. "Your room is a mess" is a holy decree when you're young enough. It's a statement of fact. It's indisputable. It's reality as proclaimed by someone who is omniscient. And this statement gives no hope or promise of the possibility of change.

Name-calling is even worse. "Your room is a pig sty." Whether they say it directly or not, if I live in that room I must be a pig. "You're a slob." As sure as you are male or female, you are also a slob. It's just something you are. It's neither something you have control over nor anything you can aspire to change.

I've tried all my life to do better in keeping my environs clean, but deep down inside I have what I'd call a "High Mess Tolerance." Once I reached puberty, occasionally my mother's side of my gene pool reared it's head and I'd get into a compulsive cleaning kick. I'd stay up until all hours and rearrange my room and do something miraculous. But this work is so exhausting that it doesn't last and is far from a habit of being tidy. The rare appearances of my tidy binges can't combat the pack rat mentality.

And I realized why the pack rat wins over the neat-nick. Because I've invested myself in living up to my parents' expectations. You simply can't fight your parents when you're very young. I had no idea they were wrong for saying those things, and no way to fight back, so I did the only thing I could do to maintain my grip on sanity: I gave in. I believed it. And over 30 years later, I realize that I still believed it. No matter how often I tell myself that I can clean now, that I can take care of the mess and keep it at bay -- I prove myself wrong by burning out.

But they talked about the mess, me being a slob, and disgusting. And I watched enough Odd Couple to know what they meant, and they even compared me to Oscar Madison. So when left to my own devices, I would turn into Oscar. With one exception.

They never ragged on my organizational skills. It's ok to have order in your sloppy chaos of a house. It's ok to know where everything is within the "Your room looks like it was hit by a tornado!" So I have made an art of staying very organized inside my mess, to the point of organizing information in binders, having and using a file cabinet, etc. It's amazing, despite being proclaimed a doomed pig, I can still see some of that Felix Unger, some OCD in my pack rat mentality, in my inability to purge and let go. If I marry the pack rat and the tidy neat-nick, I'd possibly be functional.

Even when I really tried to clean, I was never complimented for the things I had accomplished, never given kudos for the effort or for maintaining my focus in cleaning. My teenage 3am cleaning binges got jaw-dropping astonishment in the morning, but no real pat on the back or celebration or acknowledgement of the inner neat-nick who was dying for a breath of air.

So now I'm entering a new phase of awareness with myself, tackling something that never was in my waking brain before, and digging deep at the roots. I'm doing so right now with the help of http://flylady.net - a website for people immersed in CHAOS (Can't Have Anyone Over Syndrome). I'll be working on purging the triggers and self-image issues using EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), too. Soon I will be living in a Pig Palace instead of a pig sty, after all there was never really anything wrong with the pig; it was just the pig's choice of accommodations.

Autobiography

2011-04-02T17:03:00.001-04:00

I think I'd like to use this absolutely brilliant "Portfolio" assignment for an 11th grade writing course (following a creative writing course), although I'm considering working it in sooner rather than later and doing the assignments for myself alongside my son working on them. The end-product of this year-long assignment is a publishable autobiography. The teacher who created this curriculum packet has had a great amount of success with other teachers adopting it as well, including foreign language teachers, and has used the assignments in literature classes as well (where you write the portfolio assignment "as if" you are a character in a book).

There are dozens of possible assignments and teachers usually assign between 25 and 35 of them, some as "free choice" of the student where the student can write in any style or choose an unassigned assignment from the list. One thing I like about this assignment packet is that it works well with a quality school philosophy; a teacher could assign a minimal number of pieces and give the children more freedom in selecting the bulk of their assignments and the pieces are worked to publishable perfection -- true quality work -- including designing a cover and creating a table of contents so that the book may be bound.

I would potentially use my self-publishing resources and create a perfect-bound version of my child's "High School autobiography." It would be an amazing gift to him, and to his friends and close relatives, as well as an amazing college-entrance piece.

Even more interesting would be if I could get both of my children to work on it and all 3 of our works were published in a single volume. However, since I'm not homeschooling my daughter that might be too much to ask; she'll probably be starting college or working while my son and I are working on this project.

Creative Writing

2011-04-02T16:50:00.003-04:00

Hamlet on the Holodeck

If things in homeschooling, assuming we homeschool, go the way I plan, then my son's remedial writing will focus strongly on expository writing skills. Thinking far ahead, in ways I probably shouldn't, I think the follow-up would be dedicated creative writing. I took creative writing twice in High School and again in College, and I believe it strengthened my overall writing abilities tremendously. My son's reading interests are very close to mine back then, and I can explain to him the importance of having the skill of creative writing. It doesn't hurt that he's read some of my own fantasy stories and liked the style and thought it was good.

There's a direct benefit for my son's chosen vocation too. My son wants to be a game programmer/designer and eventually own his own computer(?) game company when he's older. His favorite types of games are role-playing games, and I think storytelling is the cornerstone of good role-playing games. So I'll explain this to him and emphasize the importance of developing his story-writing skills and what it will mean to his future in game development. He'll need skills in developing scenes, plot, settings, characters, descriptive language, visualizing, etc. This is the core skill to creating great games. I assume he will have a team, however large or small it is, and conveying the flavor, the scenery, the characters of the game world is exceptionally important.

So to this end, I've been collecting some creative writing resources. However, I'll be looking more into this while developing a plan for his "10th grade classes."

In addition to all my creative writing classes, I took an interesting college course titled "Digital Storytelling" which had 2 off-center books that I think my son might get value from. One is Hamlet on the Holodeck and the other is The Power of Personal Storytelling. Hamlet studies the idea of interactive fiction, potentially also covering role-playing games, but talks about collaborative storywriting, make-your-own adventures, text-games (like Zork and it's ancestors), and more, where The Power of Personal Storytelling creates fiction-like storytelling from one's own real-life experiences. I wouldn't base the curriculum the same way it was in my Digital Storytelling class; my class project was a hyperlinked story (called a "multiform story") where 4 characters & an omniscient narrator tell the same story from different viewpoints and is archived on one of my websites. The reader is invited to move either linearly through one person's point of view, or to switch between points of view at any time. The story index is here, and I never completed every chapter. I might invite my son to create some type of digital storytelling project if he were interested in it, but I want to use these resources to show him the possibilities of using storytelling techniques, especially ones that are unique to modern platforms, to create new types of stories. Who knows, maybe he'll come up with an entirely new genre of electronic games!

Related Posts: More on Writing Remedial Writing

The Myth of "Socialization"

2011-04-02T09:06:00.000-04:00

How much "socialization" does a child get in school? How much does a homeschooled child "miss out" on this so-called socialization.

First, the term "socialization" makes it sound like something deliberate, like animal husbandry. You pair kids in the corral for purposes of "socializing them." Anyone who has been to a school knows this is simply not the case; the schools group children together based on their classes, which are usually based on their abilities and at the starting level children are grouped simply based on their chronological age. If we were to purposefully socialize our children, wouldn't we pair or group them based on common interests?

I grew up in a big city and I used to walk to High School, which was a considerable distance, with two or three of my closest friends who I happened to go to elementary school with. One thing I noticed as early as grade-school, is that the kids who picked on me in 1st or 2nd grade were the ones still picking on me in 6th grade. When we all transitioned to different Junior High Schools, the class split amongst 2 or 3 schools. So a portion of my "new" Junior High School class was from my elementary school and with them came some of the same kids who hadn't tired of picking on me yet. The same thing happened when we transitioned from Junior High to High School, with the exception that many children in my classes went to specialty High Schools and I went to my zoned High School. Even though there was a new mix of kids, some whom I'd known for 6 years, some whom were entirely new to me, all the other children had the same experience. Let's see if I can explain this:

We enter school at about 5 years old at Kindergarten. With the exception of our teachers, with whom we presumably do NOT socialize, we are corralled with 5 year olds and bring our vast different backgrounds and experience, and perhaps some small variety in social maturity levels into our Kindergarten class together. We are in a school that goes up to 6th grade, around 11 or 12 year olds, but we don't really ever interact with children outside our own grade level. We go to recess with our age-mates, we go to gym with them, we are even required to sit at the same tables in the lunch room with them. Come the end of the year, we get our new class assignments. Those who have done most poorly may be moved to a different class while one or two children from other classes may move into our class, but for the most part our entire posse moves on to the next grade together. Throughout the 6-7 years of K-6 our class of 25-35 kids becomes an insular group where we are forced to come to our own pecking order, and when doing so children can be quite vicious.

We start off as 5 year olds with the social skills of 5 year olds in an insulated group of 5 year olds with only a 2 month break during which to attempt to mature into 6 year olds, then we're put back into the corral to "socialize" with the same age-mates again. The landscape hasn't changed. We're still basically 6 year olds with the social skills of 5 year olds and the only change was our teacher and the curriculum. We might luck out and have some children with older siblings in our class, maybe a little maturity filters in somehow, but emotionally, mentally, socially, we're not much better off than kindergarteners.

This continues throughout the K-12 experience. With the regimented segregation of children along the lines of age we've lost the age-integrated socialization of the 1-room school where 12 year olds would help 5 year olds with their ABC's and role-model older more mature child development and confer on the 5 year old the skills of dealing with older children (and vice-versa). This segregation is quite on-purpose in the name of pouring out people who can't truly think for themselves from the system. Thankfully we're still human and all this contrived nonsense doesn't really work as well as The Establishment might want it to, but whenever they talk about extending the school year, or when they punish children for failing by giving them extra months worth of schooling or keeping naughty children after school with detention, they're making maneuvers to cut children off from influences that can give them autonomy, maturity, and true rich experiences.

So our children are locked in a room for at least 6 hours a day with children who are essentially 5 years old for a span of 12-13 years. Where is all this socialization taking place? In most cases, children are not allowed to socialize during class. If you pass notes, talk, or even so much as look at each other you can be the brunt of the teacher's negative attention and be punished. So obviously it's not time to socialize during classes. Seeing children is not socializing. Between classes, maybe you can have a rushed 3 minute conversation while navigating the throngs to get to your next assigned seat -- or perhaps you get snarky remarks from the jealous kids in your class during class changes, or get called out for a fight after school. If you're lucky you have a locker and a friend wrote you a letter during their last period and stuffed it into the air slots of your locker and you have something interesting to read during your next class. You do possibly get to talk to kids during recess. My recess was a time of retaliation against the children in my class, something that doesn't resemble socializing at all and makes me feel like K-6 was a whole lot more like Lord of the Flies than I'd usually care to admit. Then there's lunch time, and the time before school when we'd line up in the schoolyard playing before classes lined up. I mentioned pecking orders? Children took every opportunity to exert their will on the pecking order in our school, shoving the undesirables as far down the rungs of the ladder as possible while jockeying for position with the more power-hungry at the top.

During inclement weather, recess was indoors and far more structured. The girls would often go to the auditorium and we'd socialize -- ah! there's some real socialization -- while some of us danced to disco tunes on the stage. I was one of the dancers, because my need for so-called-socialization was nearly non-existent. I guess the boys went to the gym or stayed in the lunchroom and shot hoops or played dodgeball or something. Whenever our recess was taken up by these arranged activities, no real socialization took place.

In my experience, this so-called socialization paled in comparison to the small-group interactions and one-on-one interactions I had with my peers on weekday evenings, weekends, or over the school breaks. I could have real conversations with people I wanted to be with. There were plenty of fights and crises to learn some troubleshooting skills or "Don't do this, it hurts when you do this." I actually got a good bit of my social skills from the parents and siblings of my friends as well; I got to see behaviors outside of what was going on in my family and decide what type of adult social skills I liked and disliked, what parenting styles worked and didn't work because I knew how screwed up -- or not -- my friends were. These were very important social interactions for me.

Enter homeschooling. So the homeschooled child misses out on this age-segregated nonsense, the furtive and rushed conversations between classes, sitting with the same kids at lunch as at every other time of the day and being picked-on and singled-out, being called out for fights after school, getting in trouble for passing notes, etc. In exchange, the child has more time to pick their friends, spend time on evenings and weekends with age-integrated friends and their parents & siblings, go to special homeschooler meetings during the day while others are in school, go on more field trips, meet real-life people rather than socialize with people with the social skills of 5 year olds all the time. There will still be plenty drama, and plenty lessons about being social to learn, without it being a deliberate case of being penned into the corral to socialize with one's peers.

I had a funny thought today about how school socializing would look in the workplace:

You're sitting in your cubicle getting your work done and someone passes by and whispers "Psssst!" and tosses a hastily scribbled and folded up note on your desk. As you're turning to grab the note to read it, the boss bursts into your cubicle and grabs the note. "No passing notes during work!" and he opens the note and reads it aloud, loudly. "'Meet me at the water cooler at 2 o'clock. Jim.' Well, Sue, you're not going to meet Jim at the water cooler! You've got detention for passing notes during work!"

Then it's time for recess. Everyone gets up from their cubicles and convenes around the water cooler for 20 minutes. It's noisy and loud, everyone's really busy getting the kinks out of their neck and stretching their legs, getting drinks of water, having loud and quiet conversations all at the same time. It's quite chaotic. But you have detention, so you're stuck sitting outside the boss's office. When 20 minutes are up, the boss chases everyone back to their cubicles and demands that everyone stay in their seats and be quiet. On the way back from detention to your cubicle, the person in the next cubicle points and laughs at you while you walk by. You can't help but get really pissed off, because you're already humiliated enough, so you lean into their cubicle and whisper, "After school, by the mailbox. Just you and me."

You sit down and get back to work, but just as you're getting back into the "flow" the person in the cubicle across from you raises their hand and starts moaning "Ooh Ohhh Ohh Boss!" The commotion breaks your flow and the boss pokes their head out of the corner office: "What is it, Randall?" Randall whines, "Can I go to the bathroom?

I honestly think that the idea of socializing in school is highly over-rated, and does very little to prepare us for the real world.

Child-Centered Teacher in UK Sacked for Saving 5 Boys' Education

2011-03-27T19:34:00.001-04:00

Here it is, another anecdote from the good-teacher vs. bad-system movement:

5 students that are completely beyond help, and one teacher who decides to put them first. So much so that she uses their first names and their group nickname in a fictional tale about how people in a downward spiral can turn everything around if they want to. The boys identify with the characters, I'm sure it's partially because their first names are in the book, and they actually read it. The students do so well, are so inspired to learn and straighten their lives out, that they all go on to post-secondary education. The teacher is given promotions and kudos.

The teacher's husband, without her knowing, puts the book up on the Internet and the teacher gets canned. Read more...

This is how we reward the world's best teachers.

The importance of missing the mark

2011-03-27T17:21:00.003-04:00

Pay for performance. It's currently a pretty hot issue. There's plenty articles telling us how poorly it's working, too. A great summary of US and UK tests on pay-for-performance is at the Telegraph. Basically, giving teachers incentives for improving test scores of $3000-$15,000 is not effective in increasing the children's test scores.

I'm sorry, but everyone's completely missing the mark here!

What exactly does an incentivized teacher do to improve test scores? The teacher either tries harder to teach more or tries harder to teach better, or gets more stressed out about teaching harder or better, or ...? What? What makes these people think the problem is how hard the teachers are teaching?

Pay-for-performance works fine on an assembly line. Man vs. Machine.

Pay-for-performance works fine on performing services. Man vs. Himself.
[And all examples I can think of where pay-for-performance impacts Man vs. Nature (which in all the cases I can think of the pay results directly from the conflict so pay-for-performance is inherently rampant there) are simply messy and perhaps require their own rant.]

But didn't the science people thinking up these messed-up experiments pay any attention in class -- ANY class other than strictly hardcore science? This is a Man vs. Man problem. The teachers are NOT the end worker in this situation. Students are unpaid workers in the business of producing test scores. The teachers don't produce the test scores. [Note: by no means am I saying the students SHOULD be unpaid workers in the business of producing test scores. This is the simple fact of No Child Left Behind and its precursors in the American public schooling system.] The harder the teacher works to try to coerce, force, threaten, bully, force-feed information and skill to the students, the more pre-test drills, the more the teacher gets anxious and sweats bullets because their precious bonus is on the line -- the less likely the students are to perform to their expectations.

And most teachers are smart enough to know this, because basically you don't become a teacher if you didn't pay attention in anything other than hardcore science classes. Most teachers are quite aware that they try hard enough, thank you very much. You may not see negative effects on this study in a real classroom because the teachers say "sure, we'll try" and then they actually go do what they do best, which is really try the hardest the system will let them, because they already try really hard. So many teachers out there give their all. They accept pressure from the President and from the lawmakers who create ridiculous bureaucracy in doing what teachers do the best -- inspire children to learn. Those who aren't there to inspire children to learn would have gotten a better job. The longer the teacher is in the system the lower their rewards. Oh sure they need money like everyone, but they hunger more than any money for a single adult they taught to turn to them and say "You know, YOUR class REALLY made a difference to me. Thank you."

What happens on the shop floor if you give the manager a pay-for-performance incentive. "If your 10 direct reports do well, we'll give you a $3000 bonus." They probably wouldn't be incentivized for only $3000. Ok, maybe the $15,000? So they lean on their direct reports harder, right? Or they coerce them. They get out the verbal whip, put their jobs on the line, yell more, get meaner? The best boss is going to sit down with their direct reports and say, "Hey guys, they offered me a $15,000 bonus if you guys speed up the line to make 2,000 units a day. If we make 2,500 units a day, I'll give my bonus to you guys instead and split it evenly amongst all of you. I won't take a cent of it." You can probably imagine what happens here. First, the manager was honest. Second, the manager shows he cares about the workers. Third, the manager didn't get all sado-masochistic on them; the manager turned into a leader. Even for the end workers, it's probably not about the $1,500 bonus they'd get, it's about being in it together, and the inspiration that their manager cares about them. They won't want to let anyone else down.

You want to see heads turn? Don't incentivize the teachers. Incentivize the students. And I'm not saying to pay them with money, really, but you need to figure out how the students tick. "If you do really well on your tests, we'll give you back your arts program." "If you do really well, we'll hire back that music teacher you love." "If you do really well, we'll make sure there are twice as many field trips." "If you do really well, we'll make sure that high school you're in next year has a theater program." "If you do really well, we'll take your whole grade to see the world series!"

Why are schools failing? Because you now value test scores more than human achievements. Because you've removed everything creative, inspiring and fun from the school system. Because you undervalue the art of teaching by telling teachers how to do their business so that educating the masses is more like torture for everyone involved. If the teachers didn't love trying to teach, they'd have left teaching a long time ago.

Three words: Student. Centered. Learning. Our school system is a very very sick system. There are some few gems out there, and they can't even serve as a model for the other schools out there until we begin to pull back all the bureaucratic chains holding back the school districts and administrators so that they can, in-turn, free the teachers to practice their art. Because teaching is an ART, not a science.
Please stop making the situation worse than it already is. If you have anything at all to do with education, please check out my posts about William Glasser and Quality Schools.

Making History

2011-03-27T13:29:00.002-04:00

So as adults, I ask how much of what you learned in History lessons do you use today? I'll say I use more of it in helping my children with their classwork -- and that's the be-all and end-all of the facts and details I was spoon-fed in K-12. In SPITE of the fact that I've done historical re-enactment! In other words, absolutely NOTHING I learned in K-12 classes helped me EVEN with my hobby of historical re-enactment! Shame on the school system!

What DID help me was things I read on my own. Listening to people. Watching films & documentaries -- whether historically accurate, and sometimes when not so accurate (such as historical fiction). I LOVE historical fiction! I love re-tellings of old historical tales with some embellishment, such as stories of Sappho, the fall of Troy, medieval England, the Papacy. I could name a half-dozen off the top of my head (check out Judith Tarr and Marion Zimmer Bradley for a few dozen), worth reading and re-reading, that enhance interest and love for a specific time-period. The interest it engenders leads to wanting to know which parts and true, and which were embellishment -- well worth picking up something a little dryer after-the-fact for the sake of curiosity. Heck, you can tie history interest with some Shakespeare, such as King Lear, Julius Caesar. These all incited a love of history, well after my K-12 years.
If you're a history teacher, what do you love about history? What brought you to that love? Did you love history in K-12? What inspired you? If you're a homeschooling parent and have no love of history, it won't rub off on your children.
The basic problem is that history is taught to children without an anchor to a child's present life. We pour all these abstract facts into their head without making it come to life for them, or tying it to their current interests. Out of self-defense for being overwhelmed with abstract nonsense, they automatically dismiss the bulk of the information given to them as irrelevant. What does this have to do with being a child in the here-and-now? Basically NOTHING. There's not a shred of what is taught that they care about or that has a real and relevant impact on their daily life. However, if you look carefully there are some good fact-driven books out there such as Life in a Medieval Castle, Life in a Medieval City, etc. The difference is that you're not cramming numbers and facts into a child's head -- you're making it real and relevant for the child. You're giving it life, a real face, a basis for comparing the time period to what they know about real life in the here-and-now. What was life like for a child during the Civil War? What was life like on the Mayflower? "If you had been born in that area at that time, this is the life you would have had." It gives them a basis for comparing their current circumstances to the reality of a child in another time. Perhaps their own ancestor.
To be honest, the lessons -- the important lessons -- I got from social studies were ALL between the lines and nothing to do with facts. Basically what I read between the lines as I was growing up told me that us European-descent bastards moved forcibly into another people's country, killed, raped, stole, planted our flag here then imported another people here to be our slaves, mis-treated them, and continued being true bastards to them in the name of Europe being bastards to us. What I learned in history class was to be ashamed of being a white woman of European descent. Good job! If they wanted to mould me into being "Proud to be an American" they failed miserably. The price of being an American is all that pain, misery, death -- the subjugation of Native Americans and African Americans that STILL CONTINUES TO THIS DAY, the indenture of even our own women, and a whole lot of dying all-around in defense of our HOLIER THAN THOU ideals. To boot, in more modern American history, and keeping an eye on current events, I've become convinced that our current government took the original ideas of the founding fathers of America who basically had their hearts and minds in the right place, even if they may have had slaves and pointed their guns at the wrong people, and have moved from that original and pure democracy into bureaucracy, political-ism simply to be political, and capitalism. Everything I've learned in 12 years of American History (plus post-secondary learning in college) makes me sad--and angry--at our current state of affairs. If the whole point of 12 years of cramming all that into my head was to make me an active and angry citizen who goes to the voting booth they could have stopped when I was 10 years old.
So in teaching and homeschooling on the subject of history, I think it should always be child-led whenever possible. I suggest finding good films -- fiction first -- simply to spark some interest. For example Troy (2004) with Brad Pitt is a fair representation, with a tie-in at the end with a more medically plausible reason for Achilles to have seemingly died from a single arrow through the heel. Or you could start for a girl with Helen of Troy (2003) (there's a pretty violent rape scene in this one, and some nudity -- you may want to educate around this point!). This could then be contrasted with the myth, perhaps some reading from Homer's Illyad or The Firebrand (fiction/fantasy based on the myth of Troy following Cassandra whom is entirely omitted from the Brad Pitt Troy), and the facts of the times of the Roman Empire, and a documentary about Troy (I have one and it discusses an archeological dig where they believe the real Troy was...).

Once you make history REAL -- the way only movies and great stories can -- then you can study the FACTS. Most social studies courses tackle this inside-out. Incite interest, then let the children dig up more information from a variety of resources, and sift fact from fantasy.

Math - to Curriculum or NOT to Curriculum

2011-03-27T13:09:00.001-04:00

My son loves math. He's got a lot of talent for math, and frankly I think schools and big textbooks hold him back. I don't really feel confident teaching Algebra, even though I think I remember all the important basics and could always brush up from resources online. However, I'm very confident that my son can almost teach himself Algebra with the right tools and materials.

So I considered getting a correspondence course or online curriculum. Then I found what I think will be the RIGHT thing for my son. A good book, just as a backup plan and for additional examples and explanations, and Khan Academy. Khan Academy is an amazing website written by a person with programming and extensive math experience -- but all the lessons are videos and there's a built-in drill for math problems. When you have 10 problems correct, you can move on to the next level. I cleared some 20 or 30 lessons, earned badges and points, and I think that it has a good mix of real learning when you need it (the videos) juxtaposed with real practice (the drills) for the concepts that either you already know or that you've just learned. When I was done, I invited my son to take a turn at Khan Academy, and he spent almost an hour -- outside of homework -- playing with the math problems, earning badges and points, before going back to playing in his room. :)
I'm impressed. I haven't gotten to any of the challenge levels yet. But I like it. It works with school, homeschool, or as a classroom tool (see this Khan Academy video from TED.com for how to use it in the classroom). Khan Academy is a non-profit, it's free, there's also a few non-math classes (notably Biology, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry), and the math classes are completed to the college level already.
For the math text book, I've found Algebra , Geometry, and practical math/math appreciation books by Harold R. Jacobs. I read the reviews and fell in love. I haven't ordered them yet, but it sounds perfect. Now I need a school budget! ;)

Remedial Writing

2011-03-27T13:03:00.004-04:00

My son has had quite the journey regarding writing challenges ever since Kindergarten. He was identified as gifted, but also earmarked for needing occupational therapy (OT) for handwriting. So in 1st grade, he went to a gifted program and had 1:1 instruction to try to correct his fine-motor issues.

I have a genetic nerve disorder, and perhaps my son is not entirely in the clear. However a neurologist didn't find anything in particular wrong, and so the OT continued until 7th grade.

Due to his continuing difficulty with writing, my son avoided writing like the plague.

Teachers said he could type his answers, and eventually (this is a story in itself!) he was given assisstive technology for writing (a NEO, by the same folks who gave the world Alphasmarts -- a bunch of ex-Apple employees with a vision of helping kids out or something like that....). Basically, his thoughts go much too fast to get down on paper at the speed he needs to write to be legible. So he either holds himself back and his writing is very awkward because he already forgot what he was going to write, or his handwriting degrades to a level that is impossible to read and still lags far far behind the speed of his thoughts.

I suppose that years of being told your handwriting isn't "good enough" and struggling to improve it have taken their toll. The assistive technology came to late and he's already built up considerable resistance to writing. He's quite verbal and able to hold conversations with complex thoughts, abstract thinking, deductive and critical thought, etc. His spelling is spot-on, his grammar is excellent. But don't ask him to write it down. So arguably his ability, but most especially his willingness, to write has suffered considerably.

So I wanted to tackle his writing issues at 3 levels by offering him a "remedial writing class". In his zoned High School they have English 9 and Literacy, both required for 9th Graders. My son's spelling, grammar, and reading abilities are all well above grade level, so I would give him a basic High-School level English class -- covering literature, modern best-sellers, basically all adult reading-level materials, exercises to get him to think about them, put different materials together for new conclusions, research skills, etc. Aside from this literature-heavy class, I would give him a writing class. I've picked out a penmanship book that treats you like an adult: Write Now. The reviews sound great, and I think this is the right way to go on handwriting issues at this point. He doesn't have to be perfect, but he should be able to write checks and fill out forms at the DMV, and that's the type of things I'll have him do to challenge him.

The 2nd aspect that I want him to work on is simply letting words flow through his hands. To this effect, I've borrowed the idea of "Morning Pages" -- a stream-of-consciousness daily journal exercise from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. The quality school approach says I will explain the whys to my son, but I still can require that he does the "morning pages" so every day my son will be required to fill 3 pages from a composition notebook with writing. Where he has choice -- 100% choice -- is in the actual content of those pages. This is his own private journal to do with as he will; he can share excerpts if he'd like to. What's not optional is that he writes. I will check it by having him write the date LARGE and LEGIBLE at the top of the page for that day, and then I can see without reading the text under it that he's done his morning pages that day. He could write the same word for 3 full pages, and I will accept it. However, my son's brilliant brain won't stay focused like that for very long. Most likely he'll start out with writing something silly for self-amusement, but I gave him a huge list of "story starters" and journal ideas I found on another website, so that he doesn't have to have anything particular on his mind to do this assignment; he can just pick from the list and start writing. My hunch is that "just writing" will help him break through his internal resistance to writing, help him speed up his hand writing, build up strength and fine-motor skills, improve his basic penmanship (perhaps also his style!), and help him unblock internal emotional blocks if he starts to "trust" the journal and the fact that it is truly a private exercise. Advances in any of those areas would be a breakthrough worth having.

The 3rd "prong" in this is that he needs to not only catch up to the 8th grade writing level but excel into the college writing level domain, as quickly as possible but before the 11th grade for certain. So the most highly recommended book for perfecting essay and expository writing I found is Jensen's Format Writing. I got the book yesterday, and I've taken a good look at it, and decided to re-design some of the scoring sheets to be more in alignment with the "grading" methodology used in The Quality School (via the teachings of William Glasser). So I re-designed the paragraph grading sheet so that instead of grades D (worst) to A (best), there are comments: "You need some help," "It needs work," "You're almost there," and "Perfect!" along with the comment at the bottom of the checklist "You must re-do your paragraph until you have the best score. Please ask for help if you need it!"

If you're interested in this variation on Jensen's Writing Format checklist for your own use, here's a PDF and the Numbers.app worksheet. The forms are 2-up on the page so that you can print and either tear or cut it in half to have 2 checklists. Drafts along with their checklists should be kept for a child's homeschool portfolio. When I've altered the checklists for longer writing assignments, I'll post about them and make sure it's filed under "downloads."

Related Posts: Creative Writing More on Writing

Quality Schools Part 2

2011-03-27T12:16:00.000-04:00

Don't forget to read my Part I on this topic!

I didn't realize that one of the books I already own has a whole chapter (a long! chapter) dedicated to quality schooling. So I started reading The Quality School (William Glasser) and the introduction referred back to that chapter in Choice Theory, so I went to the chapter and read it.

I'm so impressed with this concept, I want to make it a cornerstone of my homeschooling experiences.

"I want to know everything."

That's my son's response to the question "What would you like to learn in High School?" -- at 13 years old, in the 8th grade, occasionally getting so-so grades, unenthused about studying for exams or homework.

So you might not believe his passionate assertion if you saw him working at school, or working on his homework or assigned projects. However, he has basically all A's & B's with the exception of English -- he has a C in English because of his writing (it's a long story, so I'll post about my thoughts on "Remedial Writing" in another post). It's not a matter of how well he tests; he tests easily, he rushes through his work, he gets "good enough" on the tests, and he does "just enough" of his homework to get credit. He doesn't care much if his answers are right or wrong so he doesn't double-check his work. His occasional mistakes don't need to be caught: he usually gets at least B's on final grades even when he's sloppy.

Glasser talks about this type of phenomenon in schools. Kids have no incentive or expectation to give their best work to schools, except in the arts, sports, and extra-curricular activities. The only expectation kids have is to pass their classes and that usually means passing their exams. The book brilliantly quotes a Peanuts comic -- loosely paraphrased that the children who get A's are the ones who forget the work 5 minutes AFTER the test, the ones who get F's are the ones who forget 5 minutes before.

That's the failure of our test-based-school-system in a nutshell. We're not asking children for anything more than doing great work on tests. Most of the work is on isolated tests never to be seen again, with the exception of norm-referenced-exams (state or national) given annually to some grades. In other words, the SAT, ACT, CAT, and other alphabet-soup tests that the SCHOOLS are graded on in the spring (thanks to the No Child Left Behind standards from the Federal Government).

So what evidence do I have that makes me believe my son?

I was cooking or cleaning in my kitchen one day some months ago and watching TED talks. These are short inspirational videos on topics of Technology, Education, Design (hence "T.E.D."), environment, and so on. Basically new ideas, breakthrough ideas, on dozens and dozens of topics given by the most inspirational people on the planet. These talks are amazing. There was an 11 year old giving a talk about real food. This is a topic my family is, as a whole, very passionate about. My son caught the tail end of the presentation and asked to watch it again. When I started watching a new video, he watched it with me. It was a video about a new way to detect breast cancer, that successfully detects tumors much easier than our current technology without as much pain for the subject. He was hooked. Now he asks me if he can watch these "lightning talks" all the time. When I let him choose the subject, it's always about the environment, but he's watched talks about education, medicine, inspirational talks, etc. Notably, these speakers are engaged, passionate, and really the most brilliant minds of our time. They don't have long to speak, so they don't bore you with something dry and lecture-like. It's a real winner with kids.

Making breaking information about innovation THAT accessible to children is something that should be harnessed in ALL schools. When you watch these people you get excited about information. You get excited about possibility. You start dreaming that you can make a difference. You might dream about being an innovator or inventor. You start regaining HOPE that the world isn't going to just end before you reach 18. You start having something to live for, in fact a world to look forward TO.

In the Control Theory model of William Glasser, we each have a special place in our heart and mind for the world we really want to live in. He calls this our "quality world." In this quality world are all the ideas and dreams we cherish, the people we love and look forward to seeing, the places we want to visit, the experiences we want to have. Glasser asserts that young children have school in their quality world. They look forward to starting school, they want to meet new people, meet their teacher, etc. In the first 1-3 years of school, this usually works out. School is pretty fun, the teachers are pretty lenient, there's not too much emphasis on memorization, there's plenty of time for play and interacting with other students, and the teachers are pretty open-minded.

Enter the curriculum and test-preparation. Around Grade 2 the teachers start to assert control over the class, forcing children to sit still and spend more time listening to lectures and doing boring and rote repetitious work. It's the time to start really writing, really studying, really doing math calculations. A few kids get restless or even a bit rebellious. But the teachers in the 2nd grade aren't all that jaded and burned-out so they may just recommend that these restless children get checked to see if they need to be drugged to sit still in class.

But the boring, repetitious, demanding curriculum really piles up in the 3rd grade and by 4th grade the children must be ready for testing. Children generally still are OK with school, but they're starting to break a sweat. By 8th grade, you'll know which children are experiencing burnout. And which teachers, too. They're the ones who come down on the kids the hardest, and who have lost their joy in teaching.

In 9th grade those burned-out 8th graders go to High School and the pressure and coercion in school intensifies. Carry 8-20 lbs of books, sit still for 40 minutes, cram your head full of nonsense you'll probably never use again, then go home and do several hours of homework at night. I don't think ANY adults would stay in an abusive job requiring up to 8 hours of memorization & testing followed by 3 solid hours of work-from-home for 8 years without pay, but here are the kids forced into that environment. And Glasser asserts that making that 8-hour day pay is pretty easy: the formula changes the moment that you give the children freedom to pursue quality work in their environment. Because the only way you'd ever get an adult to put in 8 hours at work followed by 3 hours at home is if they really felt passionate about what they're doing. Steve Jobs gets paid $1 per year for his work with Apple Computer. What pays Steve Jobs is when they produce work of the highest quality. Mind-blowing quality. Because he feels passionate about it, it pays big dividends. It doesn't hurt that he has stocks too, but that's not the point: the point is that many of us work, volunteer, pursue hobbies and projects that don't pay and require us to learn new skills because they're for things we believe in, and when we believe in it we do it to the best of our ability.

Glasser goes over all the technical points -- how to change current schools and school systems to work with his theory, which is much more involved than what I'm spouting about here. After all there's about 6 books or more on this topic written by Glasser, and a whole certification process in application for these techniques. I just wanted to put on blog paper enough information to give you a glimpse into this idea and spark interest, as well as introduce the topic because I want it to be part of MY quality world with regard to my son's homeschooling.

William Glasser & Quality Schools

2011-03-23T15:16:00.000-04:00

I can't wait for my books that should be arriving on Quality Schools. I already have several of William Glasser's books: Choice Theory, Counseling with Choice Theory and The Language of Choice Theory. The Quality School is going to be arriving on my doorstep shortly. Aside from how you treat your student (in my case homeschooler) in terms of verbal contact, there's a basic difference in how children's learning and work is treated that returns dignity, respect, and a higher level of useful expectations to the children.

Basically, children work at their exercises until their work is an A or B level. Barely-passing work is no longer accepted. Since most curriculums build on former knowledge, this makes sense to me. Why are we accepting grades that are below par from children when mastery of material is so important for advancing to the next level? Or another way of putting it: Would you expect a D-grade student to retain enough to pick up when school starts again in the fall?

This is very fitting for my son. His schtick is doing the least possible work that he can get away from. Unfortunately that's rewarded with the current model. He can rush through a test, get a B or C on it, and know he's still passing his class. In Glasser's model, I might not even have a test; if my son does his minimum, he'll be sent back to do it again. And again. Until he puts effort into perfecting and mastering the material in question. A child doesn't really learn from red circles and low scores, and they'll never really know what they're fully capable of in this case. How about a green pen and making a child correct their own work when it's wrong?

There's so much more to Choice Theory than just this one idea of how to be "a better school." I highly recommend taking a look at some of these videos (I have no association with this man, Bob Hougland, but he has good videos):

High School Homeschooling

2011-03-23T13:42:00.000-04:00

Right now it's on the table with my family whether we're going to homeschool my son for High School. I tried to contain myself. I've tried pacing myself. I've tried just gathering information and thinking, but I think I've gone overboard with planning.

I think that homeschooling should be about what's right for a particular student. As excited as I am about homeschooling my son, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be the right choice for my daughter. Well, it might be the right academic decision for her, but socially it wouldn't be. She values her friendships, makes friends easily, and her friendships are a big part of what gets her to her school every day. It's not like that for my son; for him it's quite the opposite.

So I've been hard at thought about what my son's needs are. He absolutely does need to socialize and he needs to make and keep friends. But I think he'll be more successful with socializing when it's completely unhinged from his academics, this way he doesn't necessarily see the same people every day and the people he socializes with are not the ones he's "locked into a class with" all day. He can easily socialize daily as long as the situation is more natural than a school environment.

My son has an intrinsic need to be a "know it all" and to argue with the teachers in school. This has made him unpopular with the children and to a lesser degree the teachers, only a few of whom seem to be at wits end with my son's calling-out and interruptions. I'm going to have to manage the questioning and harping as best I can, and celebrate it for what it really is: He really wants to fully engage with the work. Fact is, this level of engagement with the subject and the teacher is not tolerated in the usual public school environment. When there's a strict curriculum and a set number of topics to cover before the rigorous state-mandated tests, there's no time for arguing. So in a homeschool environment, I'm at leisure to say "Well, I'm not sure. Why don't you do a little research and find out so we can discuss it?" This either will discourage the questions OR, I hope, give him incentive to do the research and have a discussion rather than an argument on the topic.

Homeschooling is such an involved topic. I think I've exhausted my close family's tolerance for my babble, so I'm going to discuss my thoughts in this blog. Thoughts on curriculum, tailoring subjects to a specific child's needs, High School needs and so-called requirements, software, books, etc. that I come across -- and even some tools I've created based on the research I've been doing. So more to come later....

Radio Show Pulled

2011-03-23T13:38:00.001-04:00

Not-so-breaking-news: I pulled Let's Heal the World Together, and I'm saving the idea (and the logo) for a later date. I pulled it before I had surgery in December last year (2010). This has freed up several hours of my week, which I'm currently dedicating to my family and my own health.

Moving Radio Show Posts

2010-08-14T08:02:00.004-04:00

I don't think many people are reading my posts here, so I've decided to take advantage of the BlogTalkRadio blog feature to do pre-show-notes introducing the topic of the show. The traffic there is much higher and if someone tunes in to the show-in-progress maybe they'll see my "thoughts" in the previous blog post and get the drift of what's going on on the show.

The posts I've been posting here are in some ways my preparation for the show. Just making sure that 1-2 days before the show I'm giving some thought to what I'm going to talk about in my opening statements before opening up the lines. It's worked very well for me -- and it helps people become more interested in the show, since I sometimes like to use cryptic titles for episodes :)

So you'll find future show-note-posts at BlogTalkRadio. You'll find other thoughts sitting right here.

Here's show info in the meantime:

Listen to internet radio with Lets Heal the World on Blog Talk Radio

Critter Companions

2010-08-08T08:28:00.000-04:00

When I was growing up, we had all sorts of critter companions, or furry family, in our home. We had gerbils, dogs, cats, and finches, not always at the same time. I did spend some time without animals in my home and they were sorely missed.

I now have 4 cats And they all have very different personalities. My cats are "The 4 kitties of the apocalypse: Whiny, Lazy, Petulant and Curious" -- their names are Cocoa, Squeaky, Talon and Gizmo respectively. All my other critters are the ones who want to be outside my windows like deer, groundhogs, cardinals, bluejays, rabbits.

There are many benefits from having animals in your family. They seem to feed the soul, give companionship, cat's purrs are at a vibration that encourages healing, dogs are loving and loyal companions, and more. There are many health benefits to having critter companions, such as feeling a sense of responsibility to nature, enjoying beauty, fun and laughter, stress relief, and evoking love and passion.

This week's Let's Heal the World Together on BlogTalkRadio is about our furry (feathered, scaled...) companions and all the wonderful things they do for, or evoke in, us.

I'd Like to Lose this Baggage at the Airport

2010-08-01T11:42:00.000-04:00

When I was deep in the trenches of working on my PTSD* I really felt I was dragging around a ton of extra baggage everywhere I went. I've always had a sense of humor that matched my pragmatism, so I'd occasionally quip about it. Now when I work with people who have PTSD I'll walk them through a visualization exercise of losing their baggage at the airport. It's fun, it's funny. It's vivid. It helps.

In retrospect, and even occasionally while I was in the trenches working on my own PTSD, I've had some fun and funny realizations about it. Fun in that "I'm a closet geeky psychology buff" way, and "funny" in that sarcastic, ironic, hypocritical sense as opposed to side-splitting honest & pure belly laughter.

Of course there's nothing fun or funny about it when you're enmeshed in the web of PTSD. In some ways it's like bill collectors persistently calling over and over again. It's intrusive. It's way way beyond just "annoying". It's invasive. It colors everything -- and I mean EVERYTHING -- you do. When it peaks, it becomes a matter of what are you more afraid of: the past or the dissociative flashes themselves? You begin to have trauma from the flashbacks as well as the event. It becomes compounded, it's like a prison wrapped around your thoughts, your emotions, your freedom, your possibilities.

It becomes so all-consuming that people suffering with PTSD often wonder whether they can ever get over it. I personally would like to think I'm over it, in that I'm experiencing freedom, possibilities, passion, and I'm not jumping at shadows, but I also recognize that I have a vulnerability to it -- both to the panic-syndrome of PTSD and to the "I think this is related" burnout that I've experienced from running on that panic energy for too long.

On my call I've labeled this topic "Past Echoes". Let's talk PTSD and holistic healing options including coaching, soul retrieval and self-help on Let's Heal the World Together.

*PTSD: that's Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - also called "shell shock" after the Vietnam War.

Dealing with Loss

2010-07-25T10:59:00.000-04:00

It's a shame -- this is such an important show. I can't really justify the ~$480 it would take to upgrade to BlogTalkRadio's (BTR) pro level. So they only allow 3 shows a month on their free account level. I've been holding Let's Heal the World Together calls for almost a year now (August 17th 2009), but since it's not a money-making venture, and there's not a huge following yet, and since this is such a new venue for me, I'm just not ready to fund that type of commitment yet.

So there's no BTR show this week. HOWEVER I'm so in-the-habit of having a show every week that I've got a topic for Monday that just can't wait. I'll re-air the show in the future on BTR -- I'm sure to need a fill-in-show sometime. But this week we're back on a conference call line.

This week I recorded about 30 minutes of a chat I had on the topic of "Letting Go" with Sheila Pearl in preparation for Monday's Let's Heal the World Together show (the show that won't be on BTR yet!). Sheila is a life coach here in the Hudson Valley of New York, but she has the unique experiences of losing her daughter at 8 months old, and spending over 10 years dealing with her husband's failing health and going in and out of hospice and hospitals before he left the world. She now is a speaker at health conferences on the topic of long-term illness and bereavement, counsels people dealing with topics of our own mortality and loss of our most dear loved ones, and is the author of Still Life, with more books on dealing with difficult transitions yet to come.

Sheila also insightfully brings the topic to dealing with any loss -- of home, pet, fortune, employment, etc. We all go through the same basic phases of mourning regardless of whether we have lost people.

July 26th's call will be at:
712-432-0075
pin 425081#

Differently-Abled

2010-07-17T17:41:00.000-04:00

On the show this week I want to address "Equal Ability" from the point of view of those of us who are differently-abled from others. I am a "disability" advocate. I don't even like the word "disability".

Firstly, the very definition of disability implies that someone is missing out on something, that the person with the difference somehow has a "problem" and that either we -- meaning society -- have to make accommodations or that the person with a difference must get themselves fixed in some way (expensive equipment, surgery, personal assistance, years of therapy, medication with harmful side effects, etc.) to be more like others.

At one time, being gay was considered a mental health disorder. Someone wrote a brilliant short story about a person who felt terribly out of place, ashamed about the people to whom they were attracted, they had to hide their difference, pretend to be attracted to the "right" people for their gender. The kicker is that you find out that the difference is that the person is attracted to the opposite gender -- the book is a fictional representation of a place where the societally-advantaged people are homosexual.

In my humble opinion, the vast majority of people aren't broken and don't need to be fixed. It's about how happy they are, and whether or not they hurt anyone.

Let's just imagine if our whole society decided to get along on rollerblades. Suddenly, stairs are a crazy impediment, and evenly sloped ramps an indispensable asset. People in a wheelchair don't look so funny when you remove all stairs from society and stick with ramps and elevators, right?

People who are differently-abled are only at a disadvantage if our society has set them up to be at a disadvantage. So as an advocate I advocate for services BECAUSE society has created the disadvantage. Why don't we have a more open society in the first place? More books in braille and audio. More movies with subtitles -- I can hear just fine and I prefer subtitles on when I'm at home. Better yet, an on-screen sign interpreter -- I'd love that personally. Ramps on every building and every interior door of the correct width for a wheelchair to get through.

How can we raise awareness in our own lives of these differences and make our day-to-day lives, our delivery of services & healing more adaptable to individual differences? When I do in-person events I note whether they're wheelchair accessible to the best of my ability. And I'm a life coach--our main mode of work is to have a conversation. I'm willing to coach in chat and email (not all coaches are!), because I realize that my ASL skills are rusty and I would never say no to a Deaf customer on the grounds that MY communication skills in their language are insufficient. Besides, face-to-face or on-the-phone coaching doesn't fit into everyone's busy schedules anyway.

What small changes can we make so that we give equal -- or at least fairly equal -- access to those with differences compared to the abilities we assume people "normally" have?

Independence vs. Interdependence

2010-07-11T16:19:00.000-04:00

Independence is great! It's tempered with the fact that to have the lives we lead we are also interdependent. Some people are entirely self-sufficient, breeding their own sheep, creating thread and yarn, weaving cloth, making clothes, planting crops, etc. Most of us, especially those of us Internet enabled, do not lead entirely self-sufficient lives. We need others for reasons of money, resources, companionship, and more.

To take it one step further, most of us are entirely interdependent, relying on people for childcare so we can work, or in my case relying on my partner to keep an eye on my car's health so that my mind is free for other things.

In what ways are you interdependent, and how can you honor your interdependence? This is the topic on Monday's Let's Heal the World Together BlogTalkRadio show.

Responsibility

2010-07-03T15:17:00.000-04:00

Dr. Viktor Frankl, father of Logotherapy (a specific school of psychology), said the Statue of Liberty should be balanced by the Statue of Responsibility.

We're very concerned with our liberty in the USA, and as important as individual and national freedom is we should temper our fights for our freedom with a sense of responsibility.

I'm as "guilty" as the next person in defending my own individual freedom while stepping on the toes of someone I love. It's my job to take responsibility for my actions, however right I thought they were at the time.

This is the topic of our radio show at 5pm EST Monday July 5th. Join us at Let's Heal the World Together on BlogTalkRadio.com. You can listen and chat on their site, or you can phone in at 917-889-7615 during the call.

I create, therefore I am

2010-06-26T09:11:00.000-04:00

Inspiration informs creativity. Creativity informs creation.

I have been a creative person all my life, a dabbler in many arts, fine or otherwise. I've sculpted in clay, I've created jewelry with saws and sandpaper, I've built wood projects, I currently crochet, I write.

In this art of reaching out to the essence of inspiration, we are touched by something beyond simply our mechanism of logical thought. We must set aside our ego to bring a creation into reality. In this process of divesting ourselves of a portion of our psyche, we leave ourselves open to the process of being touched on a deeply profound level whether or not we realize it.

In creating a story, we create the characters in ourselves. In writing a poem, we lapse into a filter of metaphor and the grace of poetic license. In weaving cloth, I tie together the loose ends of my reality into an orderly rhythm or pattern. In sewing I join the fabric of my separate realities. In sculpting, I build structure from nothing or cut away obstructions.

When we sing, we are being sung. When we write, we are being written. When we sculpt, we are being sculpted.

More about this on Monday's Let's Heal the World Together.

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Our "Father"

2010-06-19T16:08:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is Father's Day, and I'm calling the day after our Other Fathers' Day. There's so many ways to honor our collective and individual "other Fathers".

On those occasions when I honor Earth and other Earth Religion figures as male entities, I honor Father Sun, I honor the god/Father in the men in my life (in a holy sense), I honor the old Father spirit of the forests that I picture much like a very large pinetree-haired man with a white beard (Hey, it's my picture :) ). In the shamanic sense I've interacted with many male deities, and many of the Totem spirits are personified as male. There's Kokopelli, and Old Man Coyote. In the private realm, I also honor Fate and a little tongue-in-cheek: I pay homage to "Murphy" -- that god of irony (as in "Murphy's Law").

In the Interfaith sense, dealing with more contemporary religions, I honor G-d and Jesus, Angels, Saints.

In my life there are all the "other fathers" I had when growing up. The male father-figures who helped me have a more balanced view of men.

There's the fathers of our country to also honor, in addition to simply "Presidents' Day". The fathers of mankind ("First Man" and Adam, depending on one's perspective).

What "Fathers" do you honor on "Our Other Fathers' Day"? Join us on Let's Heal the World Together Monday at 5pm EST (2pm PST) to talk about it.

Food and Spirit

2010-06-12T16:21:00.000-04:00

The power of the sun feeds the plant helpers, the algae, moss and fern, that in turn feeds the fish and animals, birds and all of these, every creature and creation on earth that can be consumed whether for fuel, supplies, or for food, is at times consumed by humans.

Without the sun and without the plants humans would not be able to eat.

Vegans and vegetarians are often following the path of reason that animals should not be eaten because they have feelings, because it is cruel to herd them and raise them for slaughter, and most especially that it is cruel to keep them in substandard conditions and torment them.

I agree with the last point, and I'm uncertain about others. Every creature with the exception of some of the creatures whose primary sustenance is sunlight must consume something that is in some sense alive, sentient, aware. In the shamanic sense, everything, even inanimate objects, has a spirit. So however cruel it is to raise animals for slaughter one could equally argue that it's cruel to raise plants for slaughter as well. We force them to grow in rows, often in substandard conditions compared to how they would grow in the wild. We crowd them. We either chemically or physically remove their weed friends who would help keep the drying heat of the sun from the soil around their roots, we play god with their children, and in terms of industrial agriculture, we rip them out of the ground en masse without so much as a "Hey, thanks for feeding me!"

If animals can feel, how about plants? There is some evidence that plants can communicate and can sense danger, and that they have their own defenses against being harmed. So we may disagree about the level of sentience a plant or an animal has, however in the shamanic sense plant and animal both have spirit. If we are grateful and send our thanks to all of the lives, objects, plants and animals we touch in any way, we must benefit.

On this week's Let's Heal the World Together, we will have a brief discussion about the Shamanic concept of food. Please join us on Monday at 5pm EST (2pm PST) for our call.

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The holistic concept

2010-06-06T11:01:00.000-04:00

When I was studying herbalism, 20 years ago, my teachers Robin Rose Bennett and Susun S. Weed would point out the roots of the word "holistic" as being "whole" and "holy".

"Holistic" recognizes that for every thing we consider, its environment is important. I have a saying "As inside, so outside (and vice versa)" and in religion there is "as above so below". Modern quantum physics also recognizes this in field theory. The idea is that everything is influenced not only by itself alone -- it's parts, chemicals, constituents -- but by the things around it.

So if I am influenced by the air I breathe, and the air I breathe is influenced by the cars that drive by, then to be concerned with my health I should also be concerned with the fuel that feeds the cars that drive by, and so on. This is the concept of "whole" + outside within "holistic".

There's the concept of "whole" + inside in "holistic". I am not only concerned with my physical health, I am concerned with my mental health, my spiritual health, my emotional health. These are my "whole" inside world. Psychobiology proves that the thoughts & emotions I have bear fruit in my health. So to be truly holistic, I watch my thoughts and feelings as much as what I eat.

Then there's the concept of "holy" within "holistic". In my shamanic take on spiritual thought, all life is interconnected. I acknowledge that it is life that gives me life. I honor that connection. I thank the spirit of my food, I acknowledge the sacrifice and I know that when that spirit is not present in my food, the food is no longer life-sustaining. It may keep my body alive, but it will not feed all parts of me. The sacrifice of big industrial food machines is that the food has lost vitality through severing the food from the earth in a way that does not honor its spirit. People hunger, overeat, and wonder why the food does not satiate them. People fully acknowledge that they eat for "emotional comfort" and forget that part of the fuel that sustains us is beyond the material -- the emotional comfort we're seeking from that dead food is not present. We break down how healthy a food is by whether it has chemical nutrients, but we've forgotten to pick our foodstuff with respect, honor the animals whose flesh we eat, give our plants and animals proper life-sustaining sustenance and respect while they live so that the spirit is in the food we harvest, hunt or slaughter.

This same connection to spirit is missing in many sectors of our life. That "holy" connection. Our schools do not regard children as holy beings, so our children do not thrive there. Instead, children are to be feared, watched, corralled, and force-fed pre-planned morsels of thought and held to set standards of achievement with sterile knowledge that does not allow for discovery and left respect of another spirit, albeit young, behind over a century ago. Now schools at best are institutions that babysit while workers are out keeping the consumption-driven capitalist machine running. At worst, they are prisons that keep children from having their own thoughts and dreams.

So those are some of the thoughts that I have about what "holism" is -- more to be explored in collaboration with my peers on "Let's Heal the World Together" on Monday at 5pm EST.

Remembering

2010-05-29T13:35:00.000-04:00

Memorial Day is a time of remembering, so I thought I would write about memory itself.

I have a particular psychological disorder that affects perception and memory. On the spectrum of this disorder, I am for all intents and purposes minimally impacted, but there are ways that my peculiar way of storing memories impacts my daily existence. There is no practical way for me to keep my calendar of commitments in my head, for example. In the past I have lost track of time in a more significant way, not even knowing what day of the week it was and "losing time" simply in the fact that the days flowed together without a clear accounting for my time. I would surface on Wednesday only to find that I should have been at a volunteer appointment the day before. It was messy and I was unable to keep my commitments at that time. I'm glad that I now have better organization and habits to help me track things better.

So one type of "remembering" helps us keep our lives and our commitments organized. It doesn't work equally well for all people.

In addition to tracking things and remembering things to do, there are many things to discuss about the act of remembering and the impact it has on our spirit and our motivation. Remembering comes in many forms, some of which may hinder life's progress.

We can have remorse, guilt, reminisce, fantasize, regret, resent, cherish, forgive, forget, repeat...there's so many verbs for the different relationships we can have to the past! It's important to learn from our past, not live in it.

As a race, humans dedicate studies, organizations, pastimes, and arts to keeping the past alive, perhaps in the hopes that the mistakes of the past will somehow bring hope to the future, as well as for cultural heritage, language preservation, reminders of our roots in humanity, etc.

There are good arguments on both sides of keeping the past alive and concentrating on the goals of the future. How do you balance a need to remember your roots and stop living in the past?

Join us on Let's Heal the World Together on Memorial Day, Monday May 31st from 5pm EST to 6pm EST to explore this topic!

Inner Voice or Outer Voice

2010-05-22T10:11:00.001-04:00

In meditation we get quiet with ourselves.

When we are quiet, we can access messages that are not usually accessible. Some may call it our "conscience" or our "intuition", some may simply think it's another layer of our own thoughts.

This quiet voice, the voice so easily drowned out by the usual churning of our thoughts, can speak in urges, in pictures, in feelings, in thoughts and in words.

Almost universally this little voice carries words and messages of wisdom, of peace or of purpose and passion. Indeed when we are overcome with fear, this little voice is drowned out by concerns, by exhaustion, by panic, by worry, and by the whirring of our conscious thoughts.

Many voices speak inside of me. Some are part of me, and some I attribute to the voice that comes through my connections to the spirit world, like the spirits are whispering softly in my ear and I hear it in my head. I always have the question of "Is that an inner voice or an outer voice?"

On Let's Heal the World Together this week, the topic is "Intuition and the World Beyond". What is listening to our intuition? Do we perceive listening to that voice as inner or outer? Has it ever led us down the wrong path? Do we trust it?

Please join me for this free collaborative call at 5pm EST Monday May 24th.

It's all in the Mind

2010-05-15T16:22:00.000-04:00

In the normal modern consciousness, we are often caught up in the next moment, the next day, the next week. We’re always planning and preparing, thinking through the future, criticizing our past, reminiscing, acting in habit while our mind wanders elsewhere. A mindfulness meditation is the opposite and cure for the act of living outside the moment. A mindfulness meditation involves being completely in the current moment, acting with deliberation and clear consciousness, bringing the mind back time and again to the present and what is actually going on. This is a tool we should all have in our consciousness arsenal. There are times to plan, and times to focus on the present moment. It is possible to find a place in every moment where you are completely aware of your surroundings and your place within them, and of nothing else. We should each take some daily action without being focused on what we’re about to do, or going over what we’ve already done. The act of being fully present to what you’re doing helps relax us and calm the mind. This quiet time for our mind can bring us to profound peace with the world and with whatever is going on right now in our lives. Please join us this Monday evening at 5pm EST for Let’s Heal the World Together and we’ll discuss our experiences with mindfulness meditations.

Taking care of our Mother

2010-05-08T19:31:00.000-04:00

On Mother's Day we celebrate our individual mothers, the beautiful wonderful women who perhaps brought us or our parents or grandparents into theworld, who scrubbed the crayons off our childhood bedroom walls, who soaked the gum out of our hair and who cried as we walked down the aisle -- whether for kindergarten graduation, college graduation, as the bride or bride's maid, or carrying the casket of a friend who went off to war and didn't come home. Perhaps we were celebrating the beautiful woman who brought our child into the world or nurtures our children. With the weight of life's roller coaster on each of our shoulders, there's one Mother to us all who bears the weight of every one of us, both in resource and in spirit. Our Mother Earth. I know we have "Earth Day" but that's a planetary garbage awareness day, a day for reusable shopping bags and ecopreneur shows, and quickly being commoditized. We need a day to honor our spiritual global Mother, and by extension the connection we share with each other, regardless of our species. And it would be nice if that day didn't require reusable bags and trade shows. Do something simple to give back to Our Mother. A simple healing or prayer, as her blood is spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, sending her love, giving her a giant hug, welcoming and loving all her creatures, donating to the World Wildlife Fund, thinking peaceful thoughts, walking barefoot, or whatever you can think of and join us on Let's Heal the World Together on Monday evening at 5pm EST to talk about our connection through Mother Earth.

Heads of State

2010-03-07T08:58:00.000-05:00

I try to read the Hudson Valley Business Journal, but for the last couple years I’ve mostly been breezing past titles of doom & gloom. The March 3rd front page: “County execs want to change the way the state does business” however the article turns out a quick skim shows leaders in my state (New York) playing games with people’s money and security. Inside we have stories about Restaurant Week (which is promising for tourism in the county) and for the shutting down of state parks, which is REALLY BAD for local tourism and taxpayer morale. A true sign of state-wide panic in a state that is absolutely gorgeous and truly worth seeing and desperately needs tourist’s money. I could teach government something about panic vs. peace vs. passion. Panic is putting us where we are now, panic is keeping us there, and since panic is contagious it’s no wonder that the panic of our leadership is filtering down to the personal household and individual level. Stop making decisions out of panic. If government is panicked about money, of course individuals are going to panic about money. Then the economy tanks -- how many times did the HVBJ cite falling tax and sales tax revenues? I saw several and I didn’t finish reading any of the articles I started reading except the upbeat one about Restaurant Week. Lessons from running great businesses come into play here. Let’s just take the idea of what makes a great leader -- whether it’s business or government. Leaders can be afraid inside, but a great leader leads with passion, not with panic. Democrat or republican, I am not saying who should have the Chief Executive position in our federal government. Changing the head of our nation won’t get us anywhere if the leader can’t inspire those under him (and a lot of the decision about who is under the president is out of his hands and instead it’s in our hands as voters!). The lay of the land in the United States sets up a very odd dynamic. Each state is, in true Constitutional terms, a sovereign entity. These states are governed under a central body of rules that provide ties between the states and lowers the barriers to inter-state commerce & travel, similar to what the European Union is now attempting to do. So on a state-wide level, this calm passionate and inspiring leadership must be seen in our governors and legislators. I’m afraid these qualities aren't why we vote people into office. We vote people in based on their campaign promises, so-called experience and their track records. It’s made a circus out of our political scene. I’d rather have someone I didn’t agree with 100% who isn’t a tyrant, had a calm & cool head on their shoulders and a vision to live into of what I can at least generally agree is a better future than someone who knows which corporate or lobbying interests to brownnose, how to hide his fooling around from the media and his wife and plays a great political game flipping their opinions at a moment’s notice and no idea or goal for what the future might be like other than increasing his own salary whether or not at the expense of others. A terrific business has a vision, a mission and a clear idea of whom they serve. Our country has none of that to my knowledge at this time. With so much divisiveness about who we are, what to do and where we’re heading, it’s no wonder our politics are corrupted and sick. Who are these pitiful individuals in our government trying to represent? They’re a reflection of us. The divisiveness and selfishness runs right down to you, me and our neighbors. The Constitution had some very clear missions, clear ideas of whom to serve, and we’ve padded it with so much political nonsense that it’s lost almost all of its meaning. The keys are in the preamble. To paraphrase: Who are we? We are the people of the United States. What is our mission? Providing justice and ensuring domestic peace while providing for the common defense and promoting general welfare and liberty for ourselves and our every generation of our children. Wow. Compare this with what’s going on now? We treat our own citizens as enemies. As individuals, we treat our neighbors as enemies. We take care of ourselves today and to hell with our children’s children. Instead of defending our own nation, we’re being presumptuous and babysitting the entire world with or without the blessings of the United Nations (and often without the blessings of the voting population either). We’ve forgotten the meaning of Liberty as a country, and happily enforce our ideas of what is right on others without giving them the freedom to define their own idea of liberty. I think we should have liberty to do as we please until the point at which it is infringing on the idea of domestic tranquility. So yeah, speed limits are a pretty good thing, but gays should be able to get married. In any case, the passion with which our forefathers crafted this brilliant document has been lost in a sea of selfishness and panic. If we get back to passion, compassion, love, neighborliness, and get our collective act together it would help a lot. Top-down change needed: Passion and calm directed reassurance. Bottom-up change needed: Security and peace. If the leaders can get passionate about providing for individual’s safety and security, calm and peace will follow, spending will increase, businesses will hire, taxes will increase. The more you panic and shut down spending the worse this situation will get. That’s not saying to spend what you don’t have but to choose what not to fund with a PLAN for a future that’s sustainable and with compassion for the people you serve. Cutting medicaid and closing parks won’t do it. WHY is medicaid costing so much? WHY are the parks costing so much? I want to see one leader stand up and say “Money is tight in our budget. I have some money socked away, so I’m voluntarily reducing my salary because I can’t stand asking everyone else to tighten their belts unless I’m willing to do it too.” Fear. Is. Contagious. Namasté, Rev. Criss

Awakenings

2010-03-03T08:03:00.000-05:00

It’s always around this time of year that I really can feel the world awakening around me. Even though there’s still snow on the ground, there’s buds on the trees, the birds are back, and the world is ready to bring forth fruit again. Many people also start to wake up -- in the spiritual sense -- around this time. Like, “Helloooooo! Life here....what’cha been doing lately?” Aerosoles sent me a “Spring Awakening” discount code. I’m making plans for more events, even ones out of my house! I’m going to have not one, but 3(!) new (shared) offices to have client meetings and hold workshops and group coaching in. And I’m starting a new networking group for the holistic community. It’s Spring Cleaning time -- I haven’t really touched the house, though. I’ve been cleaning up my business. All sorts of new behind-the-scenes technology fiddling going on, planting seeds for a year of growing and harvesting the fruits of my labor. And the people I’ve been working with for years are bearing fruit -- like fine fruit trees take years to come to harvest, these ladies have been digging deep deep roots, but WOW the changes, the new excitement of spring, the plans coming to fruition, the ability to reach out and give such enormous value to others that it is a pleasure to exchange money for it. Many of us are hitting 5 years in business, the very start of “adulthood” for most of our little babies. The real trick is not to pour every ounce of your energy into it, but to choose wisely how to give to your projects without losing focus on yourself. A certain amount of moderation is in order, as is knowing what energy to put into your projects. That’s what I’ve been teaching in my teleseminars. Namasté, Rev. Criss

Importance of Language

2009-10-28T06:01:00.001-04:00

I've changed my website branding, the subtitle of my upcoming book (now Healer in the Hotseat: Rekindling energy for your burning desires), my seminar & workshop titles to talk about "energy management" rather than "burnout". I realized that people aren't able to "get it" when I'm talking about "burnout". Whether out of self-defense, denial, or misunderstanding the language, they don't relate to the term burnout. The people who needed the workshop haven't changed. Their problems haven't changed. In fact, my workshops haven't changed. I'm just changing the package the workshop is wrapped in so that people have a better chance of "getting it". It should have been obvious to me: I had no idea that I was on the road to burnout until I was reading the literature. That's not what I would have called it. I have people coming to my workshop on Friday (now called 9 Keys to Energy Management) because they have been listening to me and realize they're on that road. It's like I'm the pied piper or something. But just like the pied piper, there's a danger of falling off the cliff when calling it "burnout" too. It sounds too absolute, too final, too pessimistic, although I transform not only the symptoms of burnout but the term burnout itself into a positive in my workshops. Before my workshop in that space where people acknowledge that they need my classes, I don't want them to depress themselves or feel fear of what they're going through. Exhaustion and overwhelm are enough, I'm not trying to cause people to prematurely hit rock bottom. Changing the title means I don't have to work against days or weeks of suffering with the notion that one is at the end of their proverbial rope. My SURRENDER™ system isn't just about burnout; it's about managing your energy. Every day we transact energy with the universe. Those of us in most balance may be sourcing some of our energy outside ourselves. Others are trying to get water from sand in a desert and are too depleted to go on much longer. So on this note, for a limited time you can sign up on my mailing list and get "Transforming Burnout into a Burning Desire" -- the recording of a conference call on October 6th that includes some exercises from my book. Last night I had a teleseminar titled "Introduction to Energy Management" which is a 1 hour version without exercises. Once it's ready I'll be swapping the Introduction to Energy Management audio in the place of the burnout audio.

Thinking Bigger: Worldwide Calls

2009-08-14T08:26:00.000-04:00

With no small thanks to Michael Port (creator of the Book Yourself Solid 15 week course I'm currently enrolled in, author of The Think Big Manifesto that I'm currently reading -- and the leader of the revolution via the website http://thinkbigrevolution.com ), a nodding acknowledgement to Peter Gabriel (Big Time), I am thinking bigger and bigger. Many of you know that I've been a holistic healer for many years, and that's one reason I've always extended a discount for my services to holistic professionals. You may not have known that I have been an ordained Interfaith minister for over 10 years, although if you've been reading this blog you should be aware of that as well. I've decided that I am going to practice (and preach) what I preach more often: unconditional love, non-discriminatory healing of anyone and anything, raising the bar on planetary awareness. This is part of my personal Think Big Revolution. Now it's on your doorstep. "Whatcha gonna do 'bout it?" Sorry, you can move the girrl outta Brooklyn butcha can't take da Brooklyn outta da girrl. Here's what you can do about it: Get on the calls! Not interested? Get someone else on the calls! You know the type -- they think they can help people, heal people, save people. Maybe they're even doing their part already. Invite them to this call. My ultimate goal is to make sure the healers are taking care of themselves. How better to do that than to have them share with each other about how they work, what they're up to, getting help with the work, sharing the burden. In my self-examination in Michael's Book Yourself Solid course, I realized WHY I want to work with holistic healers. My answer to why: "I can't heal the world alone!" Well, duh, of course not. But maybe all the other healers are thinking the same thing! So get them on the call -- because if we can't heal the world alone, we can heal the world together! Hence the "Let's Heal the World Together!" Collaboration Calls are born! Let's Heal the World Together - free collaborative calls* Motivation - Connections - Group Healings Mondays: August 17, August 24, August 31 Time: 5pm EST, 2pm PST Get together on a conference call with healers from around the world to talk about how we can raise awareness of healing modalities and collaborate together to perform group healings to help people all over the world. Everyone is welcome - this is free, you don't need to be a holistic practitioner or healer to participate on the calls. All modalities of healing welcome. Please invite other healers to the call! if the calls are successful, they will become a regular offering! Register for the call here. *This is not a toll-free call. You must cover the expense of connecting to the call. The call is in the USA area code 530. For now only the first 50 people can be on the call, but we'll have the ability to have break outs into smaller groups to have intimate discussions. If you're too busy to join the calls, I'm going to try to record them and offer recordings to my mailing list for free after-the-fact, so be sure to sign up on the mailing list!

Follow Your Burning Desire - without burning out

2009-08-07T14:27:00.000-04:00

I've been working on a proper marketing plan for Liberated Life Coaching and following a path that seemed to resonate with me, and I ended up in the category of burnout in the holistic practitioner market. It was an interesting cubby, I thought, as a life and business coach, to help practitioners identify and manage burnout. There's a reason these things happen. Call it Law of Attraction, synchronicity, kismet, coincidence, what have you: I'm pondering dozens of articles about burnout, printing them, making mindmaps of a variety of concepts on my whiteboard, digesting all this information. When I got to the second article, or was it the third, I stopped in my tracks. That veil of ignorance or is it denial suddenly fell down and I was looking at a profile of myself on paper. Signs & symptoms of burning out vary from person to person, but enough of them fit my former incarnation as a web designer that I realized that I was at minimum at very high risk if I had not already succumbed. I won't go into all the symptoms here and now, the list is tremendous, but I checked in with my life coach, Sheila Pearl about it. So our meeting this week was an overview exploration of my burning out, whether complete or in-progress, and what I needed to do to start getting un-burnt. Causation or correlation, no matter, when you burn out you are no longer living your dreams, no longer taking care of yourself, not maintaining a steady energy and beneficial stress (eustress) level, and you are succumbing to exhaustion, lack of motivation, distractions, and sometimes a sense of fight (gripe) or flight (change careers, change cubicles, something). I have an extreme problem in how I frame my "to do" list. It's my "Do I have to?" list. It's full of should's, have to's, musts, someone will get upset with me unless...but on the other hand the entire list, top to bottom, are things that I decided, wittingly or not, to accept onto my plate. How something I've said "yes" to (even if only by not saying "no" to it) suddenly transforms into this heavy weight of obligation is beyond me, but it does. I recognize that I did the same at my last employer too. At every weekly meeting I was given a few more things "to do" aside from requests that came in from staff during the week. I ended up with a "Do I have to?" list of over 100 items, frozen in my tracks unable to define an action plan or prioritize the list, and I was fired. That's ok, I usually would burn out and leave a position in about 3 years -- long before they wanted to get rid of me. I've only been fired twice out of a dozen jobs, and I take being fired as a great learning experience. It's only taken 3 years to learn this particular part of the lesson, and I've never said they were wrong to fire me. Well, I have to fire my "Do I have to?" list. It's now becoming a "Want to" list. This is a challenge for me, having been blackmailed out of being comfortable with saying I want something in childhood. The fear says that "When I want something, someone is going to use it against me." So if there's something on my "Do I have to?" list that can't be reframed as "I want to..." then I'm going to have to -- oh, there I go again -- then I want to get rid of the sense of obligation. I want to find the person who handed it to me (yay monkeys! Which book has the monkeys again?) and give it back. I may be doing a lot of apologizing, but at least I'll be able to sleep. Oh, I see 2 paragraphs above, I did it there too: I WANT TO fire my "Do I have to?" list. **Phew** This is tough work. Sheila asked me to spend time this week exploring why I'm reluctant to label things as "wants" rather than "shoulds" or "musts". For example, I caught myself this afternoon saying "I should check if there's a UPS number for my book order" and corrected myself to "I want to check if there's a tracking number" because there isn't even a client involved. Checking for a number won't change when it gets here. It's not an obligation, and it's absolutely unreasonable to call it a "should." It's an unnecessary burden -- framing my desires as obligations is hurting my ability to finish even my personal projects. As I work on my own burnout, I'm also taking note of the process I'm going through. I will be helping others with this process in the very near future.

The Word of Love

2009-06-15T15:23:00.000-04:00

Many civil marriages are not considered “holy matrimony” by religious institutions because they do not conform to the rules of the religious institution. Those marriages have not challenged religious liberty. We must see that civil marriage, which has always been separate from religious marriage, will remain so.
-- New York Times, Why I Now Support Gay Marriage by Tom Suozzi

As a proud supporter of the Queer community, and an open-minded Interfaith minister, a statement like this raises my hackles. I agree about the separation of religious marriage from civil marriage only because I'm a staunch supporter of the separation of church & state. I want to debunk absolutely any implication that Gay marriages may not be suitable for "Holy matrimony." They are entirely suitable in my church. I challenge people to give a great deal of consideration to how much of their particular bible is in favor of love and inclusion, against mortal judgement, and what a small portion is dedicated to statements telling you to hate, to exclude. If God is Love, and we wish to spread the Word of God then we must spread the Word of Love. Where there is love, let there be marriage. Where two mindful respectful beings decide to share their lives together in the name of what is most holy, which is to say in the name of love, we as ministers are but there to witness that which has already taken place, to set it in stone, to bring it to the people, to create a certificate and to show without doubt the explicit vows for those that have already been whispered by the fireplace, whispered from the pillow, written in private love letters, engraved on the inscription of a ring too tiny to use for a proclamation, the spirit of the roses given now dust, the intent, the promises, the decision to spend a minimum of one's life with another. We are genderless spirits incarnated for a time into bodies with gender. No matter what the bibles say about that which is not condoned by God, the same bibles say to love thy neighbor, to forgive, to not pass judgement. It is not our job, and God has left us with contradictions rather than explicit instructions, with rules that say first this, then that. I'd rather go to the pearly gates and beg forgiveness for having solemnized marriages than be eternally damned for having violated the one supreme commandment: Love. It is with great love that I look forward to performing my first legal and religious marriage ceremony. Thank you, Tom Suozzi, for your explanation of your reconsideration of equal marriage. I pray that you're able to help change minds, and that more and more people will listen to the Word of Love.

A Minister on Marriage Equality

2009-04-19T13:05:00.000-04:00

A note to share on one of my personal & professional struggles for change in the world. Governor Paterson has introduced a bill for marriage equality to the New York State congress. I have written to my state senator: As your constituent, and as an ordained resident minister in the state of New York, I request the right to marry all loving and committed couples, and to officiate their access to the civil privileges and responsibilities of marriage. I applaud governor Paterson's support of equal marriage, and I am asking for your support and your vote for the Governor's program bill to provide equal marriage for lesbian and gay couples in the state of New York. New York is always on the forefront of equal rights movements of all types. We enjoy civil liberties in New York that we take for granted, however we always pave the way for progressive change across our nation. Our stance is a strong vote towards a future without hate, where people enjoy simple but profound freedoms regardless of their color, their religion, or the gender of their true love. As an ordained minister, the lack of equal rights legislation is preventing me from performing my ministerial and civil duties when I am asked to perform joint civil and religious ceremonies of love and commitment for gay or lesbian couples. This legislation is pivotal to my granting access to civil liberties and equal rights, hampering my full access to the same rites/rights and rituals I am privileged to perform for heterosexuals. I hope you'll vote for this important legislation and make clear that New York is a state that honors and respects all loving couples and all families equally, and grant the freedom to ministers like myself to do what is right for committed and loving couples. Rev. Criss Ittermann I wanted to publicly post this as a reminder that it is not all religions, nor all religious persons, priests or ministers who are in opposition to marriage equality. I support the change and my church of ordination respects the equal rights of all people regardless of religion, sexuality, gender, race, (dis)ability, etc. I have already vowed that the first wedding ceremony I perform will be a same-sex marriage. I know we are closer than ever before, and I will happily and proudly officiate once this legislation has passed. Here's hoping that President Obama keeps his promises to the Gay community, that New York remains on the forefront of change in our nation and stops dragging its feet. I bless and thank all states that have already recognized that equal access to marriage is pivotal to remaining a society that is free and respects basic human liberties, and here's hoping those states that have recognized then overturned equal rights to marry wake up and smell the freedom coffee brewing.

Alive in spite of myself

2009-02-11T10:19:00.000-05:00

I took a brief shamanic journey yesterday at the request of Sheila Pearl, my life coach and coaching trainer. The topic at hand was to think of a significant situation in my life and find the gifts in it. I had already found so many gifts from the event I brought up, it seems like there's nothing left to find, but all things have so many layers to them, we can always find new meanings and new purposes if we look again. The event I brought up was of a period in my life where I hit "rock bottom". I'll go into it more, because not everyone has been to rock bottom. I took a shamanic journey back to my rock bottom. If you've experienced rock bottom it may be very different from mine. Or it might be the same. Please share in the comments! My brief Middle World journey back to Rock Bottom yesterday: I had no trouble finding my Rock Bottom -- since Sheila and I were actively talking about the journey I had taken there, it was palpable, just within reach. I closed my eyes, and drumless, only my heartbeat and my breath there to take me to the otherworld. But I often walk with one foot in each world. Only a slight twist of my inner eye, and I was there. It was a dark place. But not the dark of void. It smelled of loam, of rich earth of the forest floor. It was a deep vertical shaft, a pit, and only the very barest hint of light like your eyes at 3 am could barely pick out objects in a pitch black room. I could feel, touch, and faintly see the materia* laying in the bottom of this earthy shaft. It was not rocks, it was fertile soil, disintegrating wood, nitrogen rich, nutritious and dark and oh-so-ready to bring forth life. The ether hummed in this place with the pain, the loneliness, the crying, the tears, the torn stuff of the soul that I had lost there, the possibilities so limited in this narrow space. I wrote about it, "At the bottom there is a richness of emotion of feeling of exquisite negative fodder." When you're at the bottom there's only one way to go: up. "In depths of pain and despair we can fuel our return to the fullness and possibilities of a renewal of life & positive energies," I continued writing. But there reliving my moments in this pit with the clarity of the Shamanic experience, I realized what I had done with myself. I didn't climb my way out. I didn't claw my way with bloody torn fingernails. I gathered the fuel. I set it on fire -- a mystical blaze of energy and renewal. I took a long time to rebirth myself. So I wrote, "Like the phoenix, I simmered in the ashes of a ruined life -- alive in spite of myself. And with the carcass of love at my feet. It was no instant journey to rebirth & renewal. It was a hard journey." I might explain. I am alive in spite of myself. My journey to Rock Bottom was hard and long. I'd been there, or someplace like it, so many times before that day. But this time it was different. This time, Rock Bottom had taken the life of my lover -- boyfriend, best friend and confidant. I was the sole survivor of a suicide pact. It took 9 years to start to forgive myself, but that is behind me. It is now almost 23 years ago. I've moved on. I'm moving on yet farther. Forgiving and never forgetting. I am not Christian, I do not have conversations with God in a Judeo-Christian sense. He has only graced me with His voice once: I lay in the hospital, in the aftermath. I am only just coming to, raw and open like a bodiless heart laying on a gurney in the ICU. The room has not yet come to me. My whole body is coalescing around me, transparent like the manifestation of a body through a transporter beam. I have the dawning realization that I'm still alive. And I have the utter gall to ask, in the overdose-induced haze and only dawning self-awareness, but with the ever-present, full and overwhelming burden of all my mystical and Shaman gifts at the tender age of 16. In that moment I reached out, bewildered. "Why?" I asked, "I tried so hard. It would have been so much easier to let me go." and He replied, although not quite in words, "You're not done yet." Since then I have spoken with many gods, of many religions. Gods who you can dine with, gods who will massage your back when you are tired, gods who will hug you and hold you when you are weak & cold. I have channeled gods, and I have been given great gifts by them. But that Judeo-Christian God has nothing to say to me after this one day. Perhaps He has no great love of me, if He takes those he loves the most early. Or He loves me most dearly and refuses to face the hard work He has put before me, and in staying His Hand and saying, "Sit! Good dog!" was all He had the heart to give to me. It is clear to me that I am my greatest church, my best temple, and that all the sparkling facets of divinity are free to come and go from my life. That is not enough, but it will do. For a time. My Shamanic journey ends in the present & future tense, so I write, "Arisen and on fire, I dried my wings & soar -- I now lead a flock of phoenixes like geese to ignite a new direction -- to bring the rebirth of the planet -- to give hope & love & healing." The most amazing thing is that without intending to, I realize I've done a spontaneous soul retrieval. It's not recommended to do your own soul retrievals, but it was not my intention and I'm not one to listen to other people's rhetoric & dogma anyway. I understand soul retrievals are very very dangerous territory, but I considered myself very safe in the loving presence of my Life Coach Sheila, and I am so very happy to have another part of my big soul puzzle back. That I spontaneously recovered part of my soul (in the Shamanic sense) explains why I felt wonky when I left. If you're interested in learning more about Soul Loss and Soul Retrieval, I have an article I wrote many years ago on the topic. Thank for for being my Witness. *In Latin, herbals are called materia medica.