New Featured Weekly Insight

My life and my understanding of how I became who I am has deepened beyond measure by recording and editing hundreds of personal interviews with people like Joseph Chilton Pearce, Ashley Montagu, David Bohm, J. Krishnamurti, Gabor Mate, James W. Prescott, Jean Leidloff, Bev Bos, Suzanne Arms, the list goes on and on. The Academy was created to share these collected insights today and into the future.

We are beginning a weekly Featured Insight series to highlight the depth and rare wisdom these interviews hold. The first is from Joseph Chilton Pearce as he describes Bonding and the Intelligence of the Heart. Please enjoy and share this weekly series with others.

Michael Mendizza
Founder, Touch the Future

My wife and I went to a meeting for several hours. When we returned we both remarked that Carly Elizabeth had changed and indeed she had. No surprise here. She is changing every moment. We simply aren’t acute enough to notice. This morning she climbed the wood stairs hefting one of my shoes then scooted down, face first, carefully and skillfully on her way to the leather sofa that she now uses like a baby trampoline, exploring the bounce and uneven surfaces, smiling and uttering a variety of sounds as if to say, “there!” It was only a few weeks ago that she began to walk. Today it is a near constant joyful run. That is how fast her constant changing is.

Now Live in The Academy

I consider Bev Bos and Joseph Chilton Pearce the perfect complement of theory and hands on experience. The Academy features a Bev Bos Library. We just added over two hours of clear, passionate insights with Bev in her home. What a treasure! This rich collection compliments, deepens and builds on our original interview and What Every Preschool Could Be, a guided tour of the renowned Roseville Community Preschool Bev founded years ago.

The shared attention between parents and children, between all of us really, I maintain, is telepathic. Recall Rupert Sheldrake’s studies on feeling watched and with animals. The question, of course, is the degree that we are sensitive and attentive to this subtle radiant communication. Sadly, mostly we are not which leaves our young children, who are innately sensitive and aware, stranded and disconnected.

We don’t need to go to an ashram to become enlightened. Experience resonates throughout the brain and body like solar winds shimmer in the northern sky. Watching and feeling Carly Elizabeth unfold each day is like that; brilliant, exponential, utterly appropriate, perfectly age and stage appropriate, never the same, not even for a second. What a miracle. You and I are that too if we are sensitive enough and quiet enough to notice. Carly is a good teacher whenn it comes to sensitive, quiet attention. As good as it gets.

Carly’s attention deepens, distills and expands. She doesn’t miss a thing, not a sound or speck on the floor, the tone of my voice, tension in my body or the ever-changing emotional expressions we share. The play look has taken root. In a glance the chase is on, laughing and rolling together on the floor. The absorbent mind is what Maria Montessori called it, absorbent because it is not preoccupied. Her attention is like the wind touching, experiencing, indeed absorbing, creating new patterns of relationship with every leaf on every tree. The greatest challenge we face is steady attunement with this unfolding miracle. We are mentors and completely responsible, moment by moment, 24/7. That’s intense and it is a blast.

Between Crawling & Walking

Calry Elizabeth is like a little CSI tank or bulldozer chugging across the floor, reaching, investigating, touching and tasting everything on the path, relentlessly. She makes my usual twelve to fourteen hour day look like a nap. The mama nurturing, papa playing dynamic now begins to shows its teeth. Not being ‘in arms’ means great new vistas to explore with related dangers. Mama hovers and protects while papa temps and encourages, a beautiful Yin/Yang set of complimenting balances, not always but in general this is the case.