Our days can be quite full of tasks.
They're filled with caring for children, pets and the home, planning, preparing and serving wholesome meals, cleaning up afterwards, maintaining healthy rhythms and routines, ensuring time and space for free play and getting outside in the fresh air and being the chief cook, bottle washer, organizer and overseer of family life.
In addition, some of us work from home or have jobs outside of the home, and garden or farm.
Some of us are homeschoolers too. As homeschoolers we add to the daily tasks of preparing and presenting lessons. This is an even bigger task for a single parent, or a family in crisis. It’s big my friends, and full of opportunities for transformation and growth.
Each of us is our child's first teacher. We teach our child what it means to be human in this world through our own life, our words and gestures and deeds.
What does this have to do with inner work?
Our most important task as parents and educators is described in a quote I share in the description of my program, Celebrate the Rhythm of Life eGuides and eCourse ~ living curriculum. It’s from Rudolf Steiner and it is so meaningful in the context of inner work that I’ll share it here:
“Essentially, there is no education other than self- education, whatever the level may be. This is recognized in its full depth within Anthroposophy, which has conscious knowledge through spiritual investigation of repeated Earth lives. Every education is self-education, and as teachers we can only provide the environment for children’s self-education. We have to provide the most favorable conditions where, through our agency, children can educate themselves according to their own destinies. This is the attitude that teachers should have toward children, and such an attitude can be developed only through an ever- growing awareness of this fact.”
This “self-education” that Rudolf Steiner describes is not a memorization of dates or facts. He is talking about working on our self, on getting to who we are and what makes us tick.
Inner work is about getting to know ourselves, and through that process we are better able to see and get to know our children.
When we observe our children through our own pain and wounds, without knowing they are there, we tend to project our needs on to them. In getting to know ourselves, we can better recognize what’s our “stuff” from the past and who our child is, as separate from us, as the other. Inner work helps us come to a place of being present, so we are able to respond rather than react to our children, and whatever life throws at us.
Through this process of inner work, and with it comes inner growth, we are better able to meet our children and guide them along.
You may have thought that Waldorf education was about the material in the curriculum, yet it is about so much more. So many parents come to Waldorf education for the beauty and simplicity, and find themselves growing and stretching, getting to know themselves better, and feeling more clear, confident and connected to what they value most. Sometimes it comes as a surprise. I often hear, "I didn't expect it to change my life." Yet is does, if we are open to it.
It is through inner work, the ongoing and sometimes subtle and not so subtle work of getting to know ourselves and embracing the muck in our lives that transformation occurs. In becoming more clear about who we are, and what we are doing in this wild and precious life of ours, we become more present and more able to easily make decisions that resonate with our deepest and most heartfelt values. We open to creativity and often find answers coming to us, seemingly from out of blue, but really from our deep longing for getting to know ourself and our truth.
It’s exciting, no? To be spurred on with our own growth as human beings. Who would have thought that parenting brings so many hidden gifts.
Celebrate the Rhythm of Life
Harmonious Rhythms :: Soulful Parenting with the 3C's : Consciousness, Connection, CreativityWaldorf Homeschooling + Homemaking
Peace on Earth begins at Home.
