Konsultasi Keluarga Muslim

berbagi suka...duka...luka...kecewa

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Pertanyaan dari Ummi Faizah

umi faizah wrote:
Asalamualaikum wr. Wb

Ibu Rina yth, saya dan temen2 ingin membuat sebuahprogram untuk recovery psikis anak2 di Klatenpascabencana, sebagai tambahan referensi, kami mohonpada Ibu untuk memberi masukan, kira2 jenis kegiatanatau permainan apa yang dapat membantu memulihkansemangat dan memotivasi mereka?Atas seran yang diberikan kami ucapkan banyakterimakasih, mohon maaf jika terdapat kata-kata yangkurang berkenan.Wassalamu'alaikum Wr. Wb.

Jawaban

Assalamualaikum wr wb,

Ummi Faizah yg budiman,
A. Jika yg jadi peserta siswa/anak- anak

  1. Ajak mereka untuk duduk/ berkumpul suruh mereka menceritakan semua yang mereka rasakan, lihat dan dengar atau bagi anak yang trauma/mogok bicara suruhlah mereka menggambar apa saja yg mereka rasakan,lihat, dengar atau apa saja yg mereka mau gambar, atau mengarang tentang apa saja tujuannya agar semua beban yg mereka rasakan dapat mereka kelurkan, ini baik untuk mengurangi depresi
  2. buatlah permainan-permainan dengan cara bertanya pada anak, permainan macam apa yg ingin mereka mainkan? kalo mereka tdk memilki ide kita tawarkan permainan seperti tebak-tebakkan/ sulap, petak umpet, dll
  3. buatlah kegiatan seperti mendengarkan dongeng, nonton film anak yg isinya ttg ketegaran, kesabaran (bisa kartun atau apa saja utk anak), mewarnai,melukis, membuat karya cipta : layangan, tembikar dll

* anak-anak jangan dulu diberi pembelajaran yg menguras pikiran sampai mereka pulih betul

B. jika peserta orang dewasa

  1. Buatlah forum/ kelompok untuk curhat, biarkan semua orang menceritakan semua yang dirasakannya, lalu tanggapilah oleh semua orang setiap cerita yang disampaikan
  2. Ajaklah untuk mendengarkan tausyiah/ pencerahan
  3. Buatlah hasta karya yang bermanfaat
  4. Motivasi mereka untuk tetap melanjutkan kehidupan
  5. Ciptakan kelompok yang solid dengan saling tolong, saling bantu.
  6. Jika ada waktu senggang buatlah permainan dinamika kelompok (untuk membangun tim yang kompak/ out bound)
  7. Suruhlah mereka untuk selalu mengevaluasi dan merefleksi diri setiap akhir hari, renungkan sikap dan aktifitas yg sudah dilakukan dalam sehari lalu diskusikan dengan kelompok dan pembimbing.

    semoga bermanfaat
    Ummi Rina Mutaqinah

Thursday, June 22, 2006

pertanyaan dari Z Riza untuk temannya

I am a British Muslim can you help me to answer my questions:I need some questions about divorce in Indonesia explained to me, And I'm turning to the forum for some help.

  1. I've read that a couple MUST go to consuling sessions to try to work out their problems before hand. What happens if the husband works out of the country for 8 months at a time?
  2. Is there a standing amount or range for the amount of child support? Can it be sent directly to the courts so there is a record, the money has been paid?
  3. What happens when the husbands is away, Can he be represented by an attorney, and continue the divorce process? or must everything be put on hold until he returns?
  4. I've read that the Indonesian courts look favorably at the husband in child custody issues,. Is this true?
  5. If the children remain with the mother, and financial support is sent, how does the courts keep track of this? How can someone be sure the monies that are sent are used for the support of the children and their education. This is a very big problem right now, monies that were to be used for education, were NOT paid to the schools. I suggested to send the money directly to the schools, is this possible?
  6. Since the family is Muslim, and I understand they will also need a Talaq? is this hard to get? is it expensive?
  7. how long does an ugly ugly divorce take? the reason I ask, Is to get the children," family visas" before the turn 18, the youngest is 12 now. I begged the wife, to come here as well, so the children could go to school here in the USA, but she refused and will NOT allow the children out of the country... At what age do the children have a voice. to express their wishes?
  8. What is this international child support law? i've never heard of it before? How does it work?

Z. Riza

  1. You can go alone to the session while waiting the wife
  2. There’s no standing amount, it depends child’s need.
  3. You can send in directly to child’s bank account or to whom responsible
  4. Yes, it can be represented by the attorney
  5. Not really depend on judge in "Pengadilan Agama"
  6. Yes, it is OK, if you directly send it to the school
  7. Of course you have got talaq, and it is not expensive,
    actually if the father is a foregeiner , the child coustady should on his father just ask your atorny about this. You have to come to "Pengadilan Agama"
  8. in international, it’s the same regulation

Pengasuh

Reading-Writing Skills For Kid

by Dana Sullivan

During 1st grade your child will learn to express herself with words, both spoken and written. She'll continue to read (or hear the teacher read) fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, but this year she'll be asked open-ended questions about the material to improve reading comprehension. Here are some specific reading and writing milestones you can expect your first grader to reach. Keep in mind that educational standards vary from state to state (even from one school district to the next) and that children develop at different rates, so your child may not do everything on this list.

• Print uppercase and lowercase letters accurately
• Print from left to right and to work from the top to the bottom of a page
• Print her first and last name, with correct capitalization
• Write clear and coherent sentences and paragraphs that develop an idea
• Use adjectives when writing a sentence. ("The big brown dog chased my mom's car.")
• Write several sentences about a specific experience, such as the best thing that happened to her over the weekend
• Read about 100 words, especially common ones such as "have," "go," "said," "give," and "the"• Ask questions about something she's read
• Recognize the difference between singular and plural nouns
• Sound out unfamiliar words
• Understand the difference between words, sentences, and paragraphs
• Add, remove, or change sounds to change words — for example, changing "sun" to "run" and "cat" to "bat"
• Read contractions, such as "don't," and some compound words, such as "rowboat"
• Respond to "who," "what," "where," and "how" questions
• Follow one-step written instructions
• Figure out what unfamiliar words mean by thinking about the story in which it appears or the words around it
• Use basic punctuation — for example, writing a sentence with the first letter of the first word capitalized and a period, exclamation point, or question mark at the end
• Pronounce all the consonant and vowel sounds
• Sound out consonant blends, such as cl and br, and digraphs like sh, ch, and th. (These skills will develop toward the end of the school year.)
• Predict the subject of a book based on the cover illustration
• Identify the main character, setting, and events after reading or hearing a story
• Distinguish between truth and make-believe in a story
• Read and explain her own writing and drawing
• Read different types of literature such as fiction, nonfiction, and poetry
• Identify ways in which stories she reads relate to her own life

The teacher will ask your first grader to spend a big chunk of her reading time reading out loud. This gives her plenty of practice making consonant and vowel sounds. During reading periods the teacher will probably ask open-ended questions about the stories to help your child develop comprehension skills. She may try to bring the stories to life, too, by cooking a batch of green eggs and ham, for instance, on the day the class is reading the Dr. Seuss favorite.When your child starts to write complete sentences, the teacher might have her do "fill in the blank" exercises, such as completing the phrase "I feel happy when..." Some teachers encourage writing skills by asking students to keep a journal or to write down new words they've learned in class or at home.Quick reading comprehension testTo see if your first grader is moving from "learning to read" to "reading to learn," try this exercise from the U.S. Department of Education. Ask your child to read the following excerpt from Franklin Is Bossy by Paulette Bourgeois. Then test her comprehension by asking her questions such as "What did Franklin do in his room?"In his room, Franklin built a castle. He made a cape to be brave in. He made shields and swords and suits of armor. He drew pictures. He played house. He read stories. He played by himself for one whole hour, and then he didn't know what to do. So, Franklin went looking for company. His friends were in the river, cooling off.

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

Mengenal Otak Manusia

Kerja otak adalah misteri terbesar yang dianugerahkan Allah SWT dalam hidup kita. Secara hipotetikal prinsip kerja otak dapat digambarkan sebagai suatu sistem rumit yang melibatkan setiap tingkatan dalam struktur kehidupan

Gordon Drayden dan Jeannette Vos, Ed.D dalam bukunya The Learning Revolution menyebutkan :
1. Otak memiliki satu trilyun sel termasuk
· 100 milyar sel syaraf aktif
· 900 milyar sel lainnya yang menempel, memberikan makan dan mengisolasi sel-sel yang aktif
2. Masing-masing dapat tumbuh hingga 20.000 cabang dan 100 milyar sel syaraf
3. Memiliki tiga otak yang berbeda satu sama lainnya
- Otak insting
- Otak emosional
- Kulit otak yang menakjubkan
4. Memiliki dua sisi yang bekerja selaras
- Otak ’akademik’ : otak bagian kiri
- Otak ’kreatif’ : otak bagian kanan
5. Bekerja secepat/ seperti ”telephone exchange” yang mengumpulkan jutaan pesan dalam sedetik anatar sisi kiri dan sisi kanan
6. Beroperasi pada sedikitnya 4 gelombang panjang
7. Mengontrol sistim transmisi yang memantulkan pesan-pesan elektrik kimia dengan segera ke setiap bagian dari tubuh anda

Otak tumbuh maksimum di usia 0 – 18 tahun, dan pertumbuhan yang pesat terjadi pada usia anak usia 0 – 5 tahun, para ahli mengatakannya sebagai The Golden Age (masa keemasan) sebab di usia ini otak tumbuh 90 % dann 100 % setelah anak berusia 18 tahun.

Namun pertumbuhan dan perkembangan otak akan maksimal hanya jika anak mendapatkan rangsangan dari lingkungannya, rangsangan yang dimaksud adalah semua l obyek dan perlakuan yang didapat anak dari lingkungan yang melibatkan semua indera penglihatan, pendengaran, penciuman, perabaan dan indera pengecap. Semua alat indera ini harus dioptimalkan untuk menyerap semaksimal mungkin stimulus dari luar dirinya.

Roger Sperry menemukan dua belahan otak manusia yang cara bekerjanya sangat berbeda. Otak kiri lebih rasional, dan otak kanan lebih emosional.

Paul MacLean menemukan konsep satu kepala tiga macam otak (triune brain). Pelatihan Superlearning merumuskan tiga macam otak tersebut sebagai: satpam otak (otak reptil), manajer otak (sistem limbik),
dan direktur otak (neokorteks).

Di antara “tirune brain” yang sangat penting dan berkaitan dengan kegiatan belajar-mengajar adalah otak tengah atau otak mamalia. Di sinilah tersimpan organ penting bernama amigdala. Inilah pusat kecerdasan emosi. Sebagaimana diketahui, kecerdasan emosi sangat berperan penting dalam membuat otak akademis atau IQ bekerja sangat efektif. Kecerdasan emosi juga adalah pengendali keadaan emosi. Ada emosi positif dan ada emosi negatif. Kecerdasan emosi dapat memola diri untuk senantiasa berada dalam balutan kebahagiaan. “Happiness is a choice,” ujar pelopor psikologi positif, Martin Seligman.


Dengan kecerdasan otak, manusia diciptakan Tuhan untuk mampu mengatur diri, lingkungan dan dunianya. Manusia bisa berperan mulia laksana malaikat namun juga bisa terdampar nista seperti layaknya binatang. Dan sesungguhnya Kami jadikan untuk isi neraka Jahanam kebanyakan dari jin dan manusia, mereka mempunyai hati, tetapi tidak dipergunakannya untuk memahami (ayat-ayat Allah) dan mereka mempunyai mata (tetapi) tidak dipergunakannya untuk melihat (tanda-tanda kekuasaan Allah), dan mereka mempunyai telinga (tetapi) tidak dipergunakannya untuk mendengar (ayat-ayat Allah). Mereka itu sebagai binatang ternak, bahkan mereka lebih sesat lagi. Mereka itulah orang-orang yang lalai.

Semua itu terjadi, sekali lagi, berkat bantuan dan peran otak. Oleh karena itu, tak disangsikan lagi, otak adalah senjata dan perbekalan yang demikian berharga yang dimiliki manusia selain tentunya qolbu.

Maka sudah sepantasnya apabila manusia menyukuri karunia Tuhan tersebut dengan cara mempergunakannya dengan benar dan seoptimal mungkin. Laksana belati, otak adalah peranti tubuh yang statis dan pasif. Ia hanya akan tajam dan aktif apabila digunakan dan diasah sebaik mungkin. Sebaliknya bila ia hanya dibiarkan telantar tanpa perawatan dan latihan yang memadai, ia pun lama-lama akan lumutan dan berkarat.

Sunday, June 11, 2006

Happiness is a Choice, by Barry Neil Kaufman

Dari Buku :

HAPPINESS IS A CHOICE by Barry Neil Kaufman

She had just celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday. She came, she said, to work on anger and forgiveness. Her mother had conceived her after being raped by an acquaintance. Wounded and meek, the woman never filed any charges. Now the child of that act of violence wanted to make peace with what she called "the unthinkable."

Her own successful marriage, her delight in her two sons, and the enjoyment of a developing sales career had been dimmed by the gnawing anger she directed at phantom images of a man she had never seen. Initially, she considered her intense emotions as a cross of outrage she would bear the rest of her life. Then, she held on to the bitterness to protect herself and those she loved from such "subhuman" behavior as the rape of her mother. Finally, exhausted by pain, she wanted to somehow move beyond her narrow view and come to a new understanding.

"This man has never seen me, though he knows I exist. He is old now, riddled with cancer. I have even located where he lives; I know his exact address. At first, when I found him I thought about cursing him or beating him with my fists. Oh, God, I want out of this misery and all I do is get myself deeper in. Instead of practicing peacefulness, I practice rage!"

No one would fault this woman for her wrath. Some might even see justice in a finger-pointing confrontation with her "father." However, she knew she had been twice the victim: first, of a stranger's violence toward her mother and then of her own emotional violence toward herself. The first violence had passed years before; the second continued simmering inside.
While exploring these issues, she came to a crucial awareness. "If I continue to see him as terrible, I will never let go. Never! I really have to look at this person differently for my own salvation.
" She shook her head and sighed. "Okay. This will probably sound stupid, but the man's a human being isn't he?" She smiled. "I know, Bears, you won't give me the answers; I have to find them myself. Okay, then yes, I agree with myself; he's a human being. Violent, probably miserable, but still human like you and me.".
"What does it mean to you to call him human?" I asked.
"It means he's fallible. And it means I don't have to hate him forever. If I could just figure out how to let go of this anger, well, then I'd be free and at peace with myself."
"How do you think you can let go of it?"

Her eyes closed as she covered her face with her hands. In a muffled voice, she said "I know how to do it, I really do. Forgiving him would be letting go." With those words she began to cry. In subsequent sessions and in dialogues with her own husband, she formulated a plan of action which would change her life.

Two weeks later, she flew to a remote Midwestern city, rented a car, and drove hundreds of miles to a small rural village. She telephoned this man's younger daughter, the product of an eventual marriage, and introduced herself without referring directly to the rape. The other woman hesitated, then refused to invite her to the old man's home. She announced that she would come anyway; they could turn her away at his door if they wanted.
Old paint peeled off the side of the house. Shutters hung askew beside blackened windows. As she walked along a dirt path to the front door, she saw the woman who must have spoken with her on the phone standing on the porch with her arms crossed.

"I won't stop you," the woman, declared coldly, then stepped aside while maintaining her obvious vigil.
After she knocked on the door several times, a man's voice told her to enter. One small lamp cast its dim light over the room. An old man, his shoulders hunched into his chest, sat quietly in a wooden chair. The deep lines on his face seemed chiseled by a crude and unforgiving knife. His reddened eyes peered at her uncomfortably. When he gestured for her to sit, his physical pain became apparent.
"I know who you are," he said in a whisper.
She couldn't talk. He was just a man, old and dying, nothing like the phantoms that had whirled in her mind. She struggled to find her voice. She had rehearsed the words hundreds of times on the plane. It's just a decision, she told herself.
Finally, in a whisper that matched his, she said: "I forgive you. I really do."
He nodded his head several times and then looked away. In a voice more audible, he said, "I'm sorry."

She rose to her feet. Just a human being, she thought, like me. Then she surprised herself by putting her arms around him. She had truly forgiven him. His words of apology had no meaning for her now; it was her new vision that had made her whole.
A vision (a frame of reference or viewpoint) is like an invisible friend we invent to help us make sense of unfolding circumstances. We create visions for the best of reasons: to protect ourselves, to honor those we love and to express caring. But we do not have to become prisoners of our perspectives; we can change them and our lives by developing a completely new world picture ... one human step at a time.

Our Beliefs Create Our World Picture, Which We Then Transmit to Others.


As individuals, each of us becomes a force within a shared field of ideas and visions. Two powerful aspects of our interactions can be discerned easily. First, we can acknowledge ourselves as receivers. We see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch and we consume and digest beliefs. Much like a television set, we receive a variety of signals. But now we can recognize our authority over the tuner or channel changer and ask ourselves what messages we want to invite into our homes and our minds. We are not talking about censorship or putting blinders on; we are speaking of exercising more consciously our right to determine the types of inspirations we want to bring into our lives.

In addition to receiving, we transmit our ideas and visions. As transmitters, we can be seen as similar to a television or broadcasting station. Our lives become beacons, communicating the attitudes we assume, the beliefs we create and the actions we take. We become more than role models; we seed the field of human experience with our perspectives and deeds.
A thirty-year-old mother, who had arranged private, individual sessions for herself and for her child at our learning center, asked in agony why her adolescent son would actually lift his hand to her and threaten bodily assault. When questioned gently and without judgments, the boy explained his action quite openly. Since his mother hit him and his sister to express her disapproval, he similarly used the threat of force to express his resistance to her.

Parents ask many questions about the perplexing behavior of their children. "Why does she complain all the time?" "Why does he shout angrily when he doesn't get his way?" "How come my child seems so ungrateful?" Although children learn from the media, friends and their own experiences, often the lessons learned at home have the most impact. We can use the behaviors of those around us to stimulate questions about our own transmissions. Do we complain? Do we shout? Do we fail to express gratitude? Our answers tell us not only what we teach those around us but also what we put into the human collective and reinforce for others as well as ourselves.


Our beliefs and attitudes not only bubble to the surface in our feelings and behaviors but also are apparently transmitted on subtle levels as well. Once, when working with a nonverbal special child, we introduced a volunteer into the room as an observer. The child withdrew almost immediately from participating with her regular teacher and scurried across the room, clearly putting distance between herself and this new arrival. When the volunteer left, the child rejoined her teacher and participated easily and joyfully once again. Later, when I questioned the young man about his experience as an observer, he admitted feeling exceedingly uncomfortable and judgmental of the little girl's wild head movements and hand flapping.
We have noticed over and over again that nonverbal children rely on their ability to pick up attitude "transmissions" even when the initiator camouflages his or her discomforts with smiles. They know. They have a capacity, akin to radar, to pick up non-visible signals. Words, even actions, do not distract them from getting a quick "fix" on a person's level of comfort. We all have that same capacity, but, unlike the special child, we have not maximized our skill. Many times, as verbal people, we focus on words alone. Yet on other occasions, we do "read" between the lines and take in data communicated less overtly.

The power of our beliefs and visions shape the character of our personal realities and impact on others around us. Recent scientific studies suggest that the "reach" of belief transmissions might go beyond anything we have ever imagined.

A contemporary biologist has noted a community of shared information among species, which he calls morphogenetic fields. Essentially, his unfolding theory suggests that species, even groups of species, share an invisible and intangible communications field which can be observed and tested.

Early experimental efforts to teach rats to move through mazes yielded some startling results. The first group of rats performed endless trial-and-error rituals before finding their way through the maze. They succeeded at the task only with great difficulty. The second group of rats appeared somewhat more proficient. Subsequent experiments with genetically unrelated groups of rats, who had never before seen such mazes moved through the mazes as if they had been pre-trained. Somehow training some members of the species impacted on the abilities of all the others.

In other research, a group of behaviorists took pigeons, believed to be quite uneducable, and tried a behavioral approach to teach them to peck on lighted panels in what became known as the Skinner box. Initially, it took a long teaching period to train the pigeons to just begin the pecking. Researchers find that pigeons now peck at lighted panels easily and quickly. Some people claim now that anyone could go to any city in the world, coax a pigeon into a Skinner box, and, in short order, perhaps only minutes, teach the creature to peck on lighted panels - a humorous suggestion about an outrageous yet testable reality. Teach one or more of a species and all the members begin to learn the lesson.

The implications escalate when we ask if our transmissions are confined to species within the animal kingdom. In 1966, one of the foremost experts on polygraph machines (lie detectors) tried a unique experiment. One morning, in his office, rather than hooking his lie detector to a person, he attached the electrodes to the palmlike leaves of a plant. His initial printout from the plant matched similar ones he had recorded when testing people at rest. He knew an individual under stress, frightened or agitated, would cause changes in the meter readings of the polygraph. Could he produce a similar response from plants?

He proceeded to water the plant to see if there was a measurable impact on the polygraph. There was no significant difference. Perhaps the analogy he hoped to demonstrate had no basis, he thought. However, he decided to escalate the experiment and precipitate stress by introducing a hot cup of coffee and dipping the leaves of the plant into the scalding liquid. Again, the reading did not register any significant change. He fantasized about what act he could perform to trigger a response in the plant if that was, indeed, possible. He considered finding matches and actually burning the leaves. As he rose from the chair to execute his idea, he noticed the readout on the polygraph moving frenetically. In subsequent experiments, he demonstrated repeatedly that his violent visualizations affected the foliage and plant life around him.


We could conclude from these studies that all living things communicate with each other through intelligence or morphogenetic fields. The implications are staggering. What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind and, perhaps, to all other life forms as well. Each life has profound significance.
A new question now arises. If we want to be happy and support a universe that nurtures such an endeavor, what data would we want to feed into the human collective? What would we want to engender and reinforce? What gifts of awareness, what deeds, would we want to give our children, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our community, humankind, the animals, the plants, even the rocks?


Whatever we put into the river will mix in the current and bounce back to us. If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group.

People spend years, even lifetimes, rummaging through old memories and philosophies accumulated throughout the centuries in the pursuit of happiness or the promised land (where people are happy, loving and peaceful). The answer lies not behind us. We have to look forward toward a new vision that we can create - not merely in our lifetime, but right now!

The Way We Look at Life Determines Our Experience.

Such a simple insight presents each of us with an opportunity to make momentous changes in our lives. The only limits are the ones we create!
We can ask a new kind of question: not simply inquiring into "what is" but inquiring into what we want and what grasp of the universe would nurture and support a choice to be happier, more loving, more peaceful and more secure. Can we move away from the contemporary cauldron of pessimism to find a more useful and inspiring point of view? Rather than wait for a pie-in-the-sky apocalyptic event, we can take charge of our own evolution by changing our world view now.
The current cultural paradigm - the frame of reference from which we view the events unfolding locally and in our global village - suggests a scourge upon the land, with brother fighting brother, new diseases sweeping like plagues through generations of people, poverty and famine snarling at the doorsteps of human dignity, and a general ecological malaise hanging like a frightening veil over the planet's future.


Current events, as depicted by the news media, bombard our consciousness with one catastrophe after another, reinforcing a "victim" mentality. Reporters and newscasters endlessly parade, for our literary or visual consumption, the bodies of those killed, maimed or noticeably diminished by war, disease, violent crime, economic recession, poor parenting, drug or alcohol addiction, sexual abuse, food poisoning, train wrecks, air crashes, automobile collisions, tornadoes, hurricanes., floods and the like. Although we remain attentive, we numb ourselves, trying to put some distance between us and the brutality of those onslaughts. In the evening, we wonder how we made it through the day in one piece or, worse yet, how we will survive the unseen catastrophes of tomorrow.

We could decide, flat out, to stop watching and listening to the news ... and to stop reading it, too. We have made an addiction out of being "informed," as if knowledge of disasters could somehow contribute to our sense of well-being and serenity. Our lives will never be enriched by the gloomy pronouncements of unhappy people, fearing and judging all that they see. They follow fire engines racing toward billowing black clouds of smoke and ignore the smiling youngster helping an elderly woman carry her grocery bags. One dramatic traffic accident on a major highway sends reporters scurrying, while the stories of four hundred thousand other vehicles that made it home safely go unnoticed. Newscasters replay over and over again a fatal plane crash captured on videotape but rarely depict the tenderness of a mother nurturing her newborn infant.

Simple acts of love, safe arrivals, peaceful exchanges between neighboring countries and people helping each other, are noteworthy events. The media bias toward sensationalism and violence presents a selective, distorted and, in the final analysis, inaccurate portrait of the state of affairs on this planet. No balance here. We feed our minds such bleak imagery, then feel lost, depressed and impotent without ever acknowledging fully the devastating impact these presentations have on our world view and our state of mind.

Why not inspire ourselves rather than scare ourselves? We choose our focuses of attention from the vast menu of life's experiences. Wanting to be happy and more loving on a sustained basis directs us to seek peaceful roads less traveled. Though we might not determine all the events around us, we are omnipotent in determining our reaction to them. Some of us will live on the earth's crust searching for horror; others will lift the stones and see beauty beneath. Our embrace of life will be determined not by what is "out there," but by how we ingest what is "out there." Our view becomes almighty.

What we have been taught about ourselves and the universe around us conspires to have us believe that living requires awesome energy and great struggle. "No pain, no gain," we are told. "Life is a constant struggle." "You have to take the bad with the good." "You never really get what you want." "You're unlovable." "Something is wrong with you " (although it's never quite identified, you know it's there). "There is no justice." "No one cares." "Look over your shoulder and beware!"

These become communal mantras, shared with others and elevated to the status of treasured folklore. They color our vision and send us searching for the experience (rejection, attack, indifference) that we anticipate. Usually we find it! Our vision blossoms into a self-fulfilling prophesy, which each new experience tends to verify and reinforce. I never met a man who lived forever. I also never met a man who believed he could live forever. We become our beliefs. We get stuck in our heads.

Suppose we set aside the rigid concepts we might have learned about how the universe works. If we can now begin to entertain the possibility of many world pictures, then we might want to experiment by putting aside a logical, linear view of existence with fixed points and "hard facts" and consider a metaphor which reveals the ever-changing nature of the known universe.
We swim in a river of life. We can never put our foot into the river in the same place twice. In every second, in every millisecond, the water beneath us changes. Likewise, in every second, in every millisecond, the foot that we place into the river fills with new blood. Instead of celebrating the motion, we try to hold on to the roots and stumps at the bottom of the river, as if letting go and flowing with it would be dangerous. In effect, we try to freeze-frame life in still photographs. But the river is not fixed like the photograph and neither are we.


Ninety-eight percent of the atoms of our bodies are replaced in the course of a year. Our skeleton, which appears so fundamentally stable and solid, undergoes an almost complete transition every three months. Our skin regenerates within four weeks, our stomach lining within four days and the portion of our stomach lining which interfaces with food reconstructs itself every four or five minutes. Thousands, even millions, of neurons in our brain can fire in a second; each firing creates original and distinct chemistry as well as the possibility for new and different configurations of interconnecting signals. As billions of cells in our bodies keep changing, billions of stars and galaxies keep shifting in an ever-expanding space. Even the mountains and rocks under our feet shift in a never-ending dance through time. Life celebrates itself through motion and change.

Although we can certainly see continuity - seasons come and go, trees grow taller and people get older - we can acknowledge that each unfolding moment, nevertheless, presents a world different from that of the last moment. We could say that we and the world are born anew in every second and our description would be accurate scientifically. Therein lies an amazing opportunity for change. We can stop acting as if our opinions and perspectives have been carved in granite and begin to become more fluid, more open and more changeable, even inconsistent. We are in the river. We are the river!

Every stroke we make, every thought or action we produce, helps create the experience of this moment and the next. And the beliefs we fabricate along the way shape our thoughts and actions. Sounds rather arbitrary, some might say. It is! Quite simply, we try to move toward what we believe will be good for us and away from what we believe will be bad for us - operating always within the context of our beliefs. Even our hierarchies of greater "goods" and greater "bads" consist only of more beliefs. We hold our beliefs sincerely and defend our positions with standards of ethics or "cold, hard facts." We treat much of what we know and believe as irrefutable. We talk in absolutes. Once our beliefs are in place, we use all kinds of evidence to support them, quite unaware that we have created the evidence for the sole purpose of supporting whatever position we favor. In essence, we have become very skilled at "making it up."

Our Beliefs Create Our World Picture, Which We Then Transmit to Others.

As individuals, each of us becomes a force within a shared field of ideas and visions. Two powerful aspects of our interactions can be discerned easily. First, we can acknowledge ourselves as receivers. We see, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch and we consume and digest beliefs. Much like a television set, we receive a variety of signals. But now we can recognize our authority over the tuner or channel changer and ask ourselves what messages we want to invite into our homes and our minds. We are not talking about censorship or putting blinders on; we are speaking of exercising more consciously our right to determine the types of inspirations we want to bring into our lives.

In addition to receiving, we transmit our ideas and visions. As transmitters, we can be seen as similar to a television or broadcasting station. Our lives become beacons, communicating the attitudes we assume, the beliefs we create and the actions we take. We become more than role models; we seed the field of human experience with our perspectives and deeds.

A thirty-year-old mother, who had arranged private, individual sessions for herself and for her child at our learning center, asked in agony why her adolescent son would actually lift his hand to her and threaten bodily assault. When questioned gently and without judgments, the boy explained his action quite openly. Since his mother hit him and his sister to express her disapproval, he similarly used the threat of force to express his resistance to her.

Parents ask many questions about the perplexing behavior of their children. "Why does she complain all the time?" "Why does he shout angrily when he doesn't get his way?" "How come my child seems so ungrateful?" Although children learn from the media, friends and their own experiences, often the lessons learned at home have the most impact. We can use the behaviors of those around us to stimulate questions about our own transmissions. Do we complain? Do we shout? Do we fail to express gratitude? Our answers tell us not only what we teach those around us but also what we put into the human collective and reinforce for others as well as ourselves.

Our beliefs and attitudes not only bubble to the surface in our feelings and behaviors but also are apparently transmitted on subtle levels as well. Once, when working with a nonverbal special child, we introduced a volunteer into the room as an observer. The child withdrew almost immediately from participating with her regular teacher and scurried across the room, clearly putting distance between herself and this new arrival. When the volunteer left, the child rejoined her teacher and participated easily and joyfully once again. Later, when I questioned the young man about his experience as an observer, he admitted feeling exceedingly uncomfortable and judgmental of the little girl's wild head movements and hand flapping.

We have noticed over and over again that nonverbal children rely on their ability to pick up attitude "transmissions" even when the initiator camouflages his or her discomforts with smiles. They know. They have a capacity, akin to radar, to pick up non-visible signals. Words, even actions, do not distract them from getting a quick "fix" on a person's level of comfort. We all have that same capacity, but, unlike the special child, we have not maximized our skill. Many times, as verbal people, we focus on words alone. Yet on other occasions, we do "read" between the lines and take in data communicated less overtly.

The power of our beliefs and visions shape the character of our personal realities and impact on others around us. Recent scientific studies suggest that the "reach" of belief transmissions might go beyond anything we have ever imagined.
A contemporary biologist has noted a community of shared information among species, which he calls morphogenetic fields. Essentially, his unfolding theory suggests that species, even groups of species, share an invisible and intangible communications field which can be observed and tested.


Early experimental efforts to teach rats to move through mazes yielded some startling results. The first group of rats performed endless trial-and-error rituals before finding their way through the maze. They succeeded at the task only with great difficulty. The second group of rats appeared somewhat more proficient. Subsequent experiments with genetically unrelated groups of rats, who had never before seen such mazes moved through the mazes as if they had been pre-trained. Somehow training some members of the species impacted on the abilities of all the others.

In other research, a group of behaviorists took pigeons, believed to be quite uneducable, and tried a behavioral approach to teach them to peck on lighted panels in what became known as the Skinner box. Initially, it took a long teaching period to train the pigeons to just begin the pecking. Researchers find that pigeons now peck at lighted panels easily and quickly. Some people claim now that anyone could go to any city in the world, coax a pigeon into a Skinner box, and, in short order, perhaps only minutes, teach the creature to peck on lighted panels - a humorous suggestion about an outrageous yet testable reality. Teach one or more of a species and all the members begin to learn the lesson.

The implications escalate when we ask if our transmissions are confined to species within the animal kingdom. In 1966, one of the foremost experts on polygraph machines (lie detectors) tried a unique experiment. One morning, in his office, rather than hooking his lie detector to a person, he attached the electrodes to the palmlike leaves of a plant. His initial printout from the plant matched similar ones he had recorded when testing people at rest. He knew an individual under stress, frightened or agitated, would cause changes in the meter readings of the polygraph. Could he produce a similar response from plants?

He proceeded to water the plant to see if there was a measurable impact on the polygraph. There was no significant difference. Perhaps the analogy he hoped to demonstrate had no basis, he thought. However, he decided to escalate the experiment and precipitate stress by introducing a hot cup of coffee and dipping the leaves of the plant into the scalding liquid. Again, the reading did not register any significant change. He fantasized about what act he could perform to trigger a response in the plant if that was, indeed, possible. He considered finding matches and actually burning the leaves. As he rose from the chair to execute his idea, he noticed the readout on the polygraph moving frenetically. In subsequent experiments, he demonstrated repeatedly that his violent visualizations affected the foliage and plant life around him.

We could conclude from these studies that all living things communicate with each other through intelligence or morphogenetic fields. The implications are staggering. What each of us learns has the potential of becoming a message to all humankind and, perhaps, to all other life forms as well. Each life has profound significance.

A new question now arises. If we want to be happy and support a universe that nurtures such an endeavor, what data would we want to feed into the human collective? What would we want to engender and reinforce? What gifts of awareness, what deeds, would we want to give our children, our friends, our lovers, our parents, our community, humankind, the animals, the plants, even the rocks?

Whatever we put into the river will mix in the current and bounce back to us. If just one of us changes our beliefs and teaches happiness and love, then that attitude or information goes into the connective tissue of the community and enhances the aptitude for happiness of the entire human group.

People spend years, even lifetimes, rummaging through old memories and philosophies accumulated throughout the centuries in the pursuit of happiness or the promised land (where people are happy, loving and peaceful). The answer lies not behind us. We have to look forward toward a new vision that we can create - not merely in our lifetime, but right now!