Recomended Reading

Magical Parent - Magical Child
The Art of Joyful Parenting
By Michael Mendizza & Joseph Chilton Pearce
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For centuries being in the Zone was sought after by ancient performance specialists, Zen archers, Yogis, the Samurai, and others. Optimum learning, performance and wellness is not some far-off, mystical fantasy. It is right here, right now, pulsing in every cell of our bodies. Magical Parent - Magical Child: The Optimum Learning Relationship is the first book to apply the psychology of optimum experience, what athletes call the Zone, what researchers call Flow and children call Play to parenting and to education. Michael Mendizza and Joseph Chilton Pearce have produced a practical guide for parenting and coaching healthy, happy, intelligent children in today's turbulent environment. Combining theory with practice the 225-page manuscript contains 150 sidebar quotes from Pearce's collected works, over thirty-five years of distilled insights punctuating, complementing, and expanding a completely new model for optimum learning and peak performance for children and adults. If being in the Zone is good enough for athletes and Aikido masters, why not for you and me? Why not for our children? Magical Parent - Magical Child describes how to learn, perform, and parent in the Zone, not just in rare moments, but most of the time, and for a lifetime.

In Defense of Childhood
Protecting Kids' Inner Wildness
By Chris Mercogliano
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Joseph Chilton Pearce and I agree. In Defense of Childhood, a new book by Chris Mercogliano, is a must read for anyone interested in children, education or a sane society.

Chris explores how the changing environment is changing our children. The innate genius of childhood, what Chris calls the inner-wild, is being caged, tethered, domesticated by irrational adult fears and polices that blossom in fear. A thirty year history as director of the Albany Free School, working with regular and highly challenged children, gives Chris a unique perspective. Everyone needs to read this book!!

I have covered a lot of ground in this book, traveling from birth to adulthood with stops along the way to delve into history, parenting, biology, psychology, education, sociology, philosophy, literature, and occasionally my students’ or my own personal stories. My goal throughout has been to assemble the entire puzzle, to examine as thoroughly as possible the far-ranging alterations to American childhood, their origins and development, and, most important, how they are affecting the tender inner selves of our children. If we don’t ask these hard questions, our efforts to change things for the better are often reduced to putting Band-Aids on compound fractures and dabbling in the latest popular trends. Inner wildness is endangered, but it need not become extinct. In fact, as I look around me today, I see much that inspires cautious optimism."

Joseph Chilton Pearce
The Biology of Transcendence
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Transcendence, defined (by Webster) is the ability to rise above limitation and constraint. Transcendence is an evolutionary imperative, a built-in genetic function, which, if not fostered and developed, leads to violence in all its forms. An analysis is made of current cultural practices of child-birthing, rearing and education which directly and clearly cripple the transcendent drive which shapes all of human development. A principle metaphor around which the book is woven is the late medieval concept of creator and created "giving rise to each other" as creation, that is, the creative process of life itself and man's mind are a mirroring-dynamic, each bringing the other into being. Written for the average reader, avoiding complex language and using concrete examples, explanatory diagrams and pictures, the book utilizes recent research in the neuro-sciences, and the new discoveries in neuro-cardiology, (the "brain in the heart"). Current cultural practices that interfere with neural development are discussed, graphic new magnetic imaging of the brains of normal and violent people both verify and visually depict the results, while the final section explores an eminently practical solution.

Playing by Heart
The Vision & Practice Of Belonging
By O. Fred Donaldson, PH.D.
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Playing By Heart is a contemporary hero’s journey, leaving behind the safety of cultural identity to discover something vast, authentic, universal and true, a state of being and relationship that Fred Donaldson calls Belonging.

From a conversation between Fred and Michael Mendizza:

If I can discover a quality of relationship that is really safe, then I don't need to defend myself, then you don't need to defend yourself from me. Now we can focus our energy in creative ways. Once you're safe and not dissipating energy in self-defense, then it's a much easier to communicate, to love, to be kind and do all those things that we'd really rather do than hurt and defend. Play begins when we discover this safe place, that we belong, right here, right now, with all of life.