Raising Awakened Children

When we dream, we seem at the mercy of what happens next—a passive rider on a driverless train.  When we learn lucid dreaming, we recognize that the conscious or awakened part of us can slip into the engineer’s seat and set the direction.

There is a way in which we all, adults and children alike, get caught up even in the daylight hours, in the sleepwalking, automatic state of, for example the Matrix, in which we are not consciously aware of ourselves and the possibilities around us.

I believe it was Angeles Arrien, Ph. D., author of The Four Fold Way and Signs of Life, who developed a series of simple questions for a workshop that changed the way people began to view their lives. She suggested keeping a daily journal in which, as night falls, you look back on your day and answer these questions.
The questions were:

        What surprised you today?
        What moved you?
        What inspired you?

The interesting phenomenon occurs not when we answer the questions, but when we start our day expecting that we will have to answer them as evening comes. 
It seems that, if we posited them to us daily, realizing that at day’s end we would be required to reconstruct the events until we found our answer, that the process would spontaneously happen in reverse. We would anticipate the questions and look for the answer before we found them. Thus, creating our day.

That is, knowing that we will have to answer these questions starts the process of looking at the world in these terms. 

When my children were young, I searched my wisdom to find a way to help them know what was right and what was wrong.  I discovered something I called “a happy heart,” and used to have them check in with their heart to see how they felt about what they did.  Did what they are doing make their heart feel happy?  It worked not only for connecting with their bliss, but to keep them from doing hurtful things to others, as we cannot do so with a happy heart.

I am proposing that we invite children, however small, however inarticulate, to begin a journal each night.  Mommy or Daddy could be the scribe and it would require no more than 3-5 sentences to describe the following facets of the day.  And I suggest, of course, that we reconfigure the questions so that it is possible for even the youngest to give some sort of response.  For example:

1) What surprised you? or what didn’t you expect to happen?
2) What made you laugh
3) What made your heart feel good? (“happy heart”)
4) What made you glad you were there to see it? (that is, inspired them)

As they play in the playground, something might happen and they might realize that it surprised them.  Or made their heart happy.  Coaching is definitely allowed.  It is helpful for Mommy to say, when that girl gave you her swing, that surprised you, didn’t it?  When you gave your swing to someone else, did it make your heart happy?  We could put that in our book tonight.

If we could use this technique in schools, we might even be able to grow a generation of awakened beings.

What I hope will happen is that a sense of the watcher, the stepping outside that is so essential for both peace of mind and an awareness of our higher self, begins to grow.  Knowing that they will be asked, in this pleasant time with Mommy or Daddy, about their day, to create a book in which they are also free to put illustrations, they may begin to anticipate these questions.  They might become a silent witness to their own life, and in so doing, gain the perspective of the gods, of their higher self, of their soul.

Judith Simon Prager, Ph.D.
imagine@labridge.com