Nature’s Lesson

Wind strewn debris  from the trees around the garden collected and stored for kindling on cold nights to come.

With the wind, much needed rain for the parched fields and a calming of the slow build frustration fuelled anger of drought.

Life is greening again.

On the chestnuts, spikey pods are formed and set now to grow through the weeks taking us inexorably into the Autumn.

These short seasons fold their qualities into each other.

The frosts, the daffodils, the blossoms, the bluebells, cherries and alfresco evenings, the harvests, the fruits and the mists, all passing in a moment.

Make hay while the suns shines

Visitors

Another garden breakfast day, the great spotted woodpecker swinging on the bird feeder while an impatient young parakeet squwks noisily in the ash tree.

The last two days have been an endless trail of meetings and motorways. Home last night in time to walk the dog across the fields as the sun was sinking into the low clouds on the horizon.

Chasing rabbits, he disturbed this years first flock of 40 or 50 Brent geese resting overnight on their journey from the Artic tundra. They are early, normally arriving in October. The blackberries are flowering.

Snakes & Ladders

Today, reaching into the back of the lawn mower and retrieving a snake minus its head reminded me of John K Wood, a psychologist who deserved more recognition than he received.

John was a professor of psychology at the University of California not long after the days of Tim Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) were making waves at Harvard University.

John worked with Carl Rogers at UCA. Carl was a purist who invested hugely in research to support his theories. The focus of Carl’s work was basically that people would develop in a psychologically positive direction in an environment of empathy and respect.

John was interested more in groups, in what he called the wisdom of the group. The tendency for groups to make decisions wiser than the individuals within them.

John later moved to Brazil and wrote to me about an encounter with a snake in a wood pile on his farm.

Ram Dass (Dr Richard Alpert of Harvard) wote a book with Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame. These truths persist and find their evolution and expression over time. Goleman and others are of the view that EQ is about twice as important to organisational and personal success than is IQ.

Psychotherapy lost it’s way in the 1990’s as the theories of Freud, Jung, and their many followers whithered under the spotlight of anthropology and brain science. The various schools of psychotherapy were propped up by the universities for far longer than they should have been because of the business interests involved in running training courses and selling books.

Rogers never received the recognition he deserved. It was hard to sell as special a theory that just about all schools of psychotherapy accepted as a basic prerequisite to working therapeutically.

Rogers simply argued that this basic foundation was all that was needed. What he termed neccessary and sufficient.

This wasn’t well received by the other schools which had potions and spells to market.

What brings this all together is that it is generally accepted in the newly emerging field of Coaching is that EQ (emotional intelligence) and being person centred (Carl Rogers – The Person Centred Approach) are core practice values.

Many NHS mental health services are now also promoting what is termed the Recovery Model and this too is essentially Carl Rogers Person Centred Approach. I am glad the zeitgist seems to be catching up.

Our Stories Create Our Realities

Most evenings after work I spend a pleasant half hour walking our dogs through the fields and woods. The exercise is good for us all.

Through the winter months and when the moon is in its first or last quarter it can be very dark. I have to peer through the night to pick out the shapes of a very badly behaved puppy Border terrier and her older brother whose favourite pastime is sleeping by the fire.

The other evening on a particularly dark night, I found myself thinking of the risks of being out alone in the countryside, barely able to see the ground underfoot.

Scanning the torch over the field in front of me, the light reflected in a pair of eyes to my left. They were gone almost instantly but something didn’t sit well about these eyes, whether the height above the ground or their size I wasn’t sure.

As we walked into the woods I noticed that the dogs were very close when usually they would be off chasing rabbits. Perhaps they had seen us coming and decided to go to ground until we had passed. But a little further on, the silence drew my attention; the crows roosting in the trees were unusually quite.

To the side of the path, some 25 metres ahead, I thought I saw a flash of red in the torchlight. I wasn’t sure if this was real or imagined but nevertheless unusual in the normally monochrome  woodland night.

Walking on, I began to notice small rustlings in the bushes. I felt cold and it seemed I could feel a shiver on my back. I slipped my hand through the strap on the torch so that if something sudden happened I would not drop it. I began looking at the ground for a stout length of fallen branch to defend myself if needed.

….. It wasn’t.  As I later pondered why this evenings walk should have taken this turn, I recalled walking the same route with one of my daughters the day before in the spring sunshine.

When I told her that I walked this way regularly in the deep darkness she had said that she wouldn’t have the courage to do that.

I had begun to wonder what she might be afraid of and in doing so had begun to create a reality where my attention had begun to pick out things that reinforced that reality. This in turn had created bodily sensations which further strengthened this internal narrative of danger. My behaviour started to change in sympathy with
this. (using the wrist strap on the torch and looking for a length of fallen wood). Thoughts drive feelings, feelings drive behaviour.

It is useful to be reminded that the stories we tell ourselves about the facts affects our emotions and the actions we take.

Days of Our Lives

Life is too short to stuff a mushroom. Is there time for anything?

Weeks of cold grey mist and overcast days have suddenly hatched into nursery sunshine tinted daffodils on the lakeside.  The hawthorn and now the cherry are in full blossom. Though gone are the magnificent orchards of towering clouds of pink and white blossom; replaced these days, by pigmy orchards that can be stripped by machine. Gone with them are the gypsy pickers and their countryside lore.

Almost overnight the chestnut leaves have unfolded transforming their ancient armatures into verdant parasols hiding rookeries and shading young lovers.

The woodland has woken, shaken off its brown blanket and draped itself in vibrant green in preparation for the magical weave of electric blue and purple flowers.  The seasons tussled a while and one day Winter conceded to Spring. I didn’t make a note of the exact date but I remember it well.

I was walking, collar up and hat pulled down against the cold evening air, along the green lane down towards the marshes. I noticed ambling towards me, absent minded and preoccupied with other things, a skinny hare.

He wore a scruffy coat, three sizes too large and moved with the casual confidence of a reincarnated Bill Wyman. He stopped a few yards in front of me, big bulging eyes unsure whether to be offended or whether to pass by with a casual nod. We looked uncertainly at each other and paused. Time folded as it does at moments of enlightenment, and then Winter gave way to Spring.

I didn’t catch him check his pocket watch, but suddenly and with the grace of a well executed aikido pass, he shifted, broke away to the right and accelerated along an old plough furrow,  across the field, with astonishing speed. The Spring and Autumn are my favourite seasons, they are no shorter than Summer and Winter but it feels like they have the spirit of the hare.

My Take on State Education

Education that transcends the paradigmatic confines of modernity.
(Children and societies need education to be future oriented rather than past oriented)

English  state sponsored education serves three Primary functions. To maintain and reinforce the  status quo and the present social distribution of power and wealth.

To prepare children to be  able to contribute to the economic and social objectives of Government
·
To socialise children to  accept the unequal distribution of opportunity through forced and competition with their peers; whilst denying them the knowledge to understand the fundamental unfairness of this competition.

This is easily demonstrated by:
·
Reference to early Education  Acts in the UK and the absence of any fundamental revision of this legislation.
·
Outcome research linking  social deprivation and educational achievement.
·
The lack of evidence of  social mobility as a product of state education.

Soft evidence for this can be seen the anti learning culture of working  class communities, high levels of school disaffection, challenging behaviour  and low self esteem in children who ‘fail’ academically in a system designed  to select a minority for higher education. The brain washing and coercion of this process is known by sociologists as ‘the hidden curriculum’.

This situation is both morally indefensible and counterproductive to the  needs of both children and societies in preparing for the 21st century.   It is maintained because the forces devoted to it’s maintenance have not yet been overwhelmed by the combined forces of social evolution, children’s increasing access to other sources of knowledge, and the recognition of the unmet educational needs of individuals and communities in the face of the accelerating technological and social change that characterises the present times.

The intrinsic characteristic of formal education in the UK is that it is narrowly focussed on discredited notions of intelligence, is authoritarian, hierarchical and conformist. These characteristics are antithetical to what we know about what individuals and communities need to be equipped to respond to change.

Future oriented education would equip children to deal with paradox,  uncertainty, changing opportunities and multi-cultural interpersonal relationships. It would enable children to learn how to learn and to love learning and discovery. It would enable them to experiment and learn about their potential within a supportive and nurturing environment. It would enable them to experience collaborative co-operative learning and achievement and would support self directed learning and creativity. It would
support them in engaging their families and communities in the celebration of their learning.

Future oriented education would approach the child and their group  holistically helping them to develop clear analytical thinking skills alongside creative, intuitive thinking valuing both equally.

It would understand ‘reality’ as a narrative driven process that  inevitably evolves and changes so that knowledge of ‘truth’ is held gently and allowed to evolve. It would essentially demonstrate trust in the innate process of human growth and development by trusting the wisdom of children in being able to significantly influence their own learning experiences.

Future oriented education would not throw the ‘baby’ of Newtonian  scientific rationalism out with the ‘bathwater’ of modernism. Post modernist  thinking is not about the rejection of everything past in favour of embracing  everything ‘New Age’. Neither is it about replacing one set of guru’s with  another. However modernist thinking was mechanistic and limiting, has not stood up to the test of time and has dismissed useful ideas, knowledge and approaches on the basis that they have not been compatible with a modernist world view.

Future oriented education would place emphasis on the child as a whole  person, holistically valuing senses such as intuition and unconscious  interpersonal communication even if they are not fully understood from a  modernist perspective. Interpersonal skills, introspective analytical skills,  awareness of body/mind connectivity, emotional intelligence (EQ) would all be  valued and nurtured.

Coaching
With it’s roots in the person centred approach of Carl Rogers, coaching  provides a uniquely well placed skill set with which to re-equip teachers to  be able to provide educational experiences for children and young adults that  would prepare them better to meet the unknown challenges of the 21st Century.

Reality Testing