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Spirituality

Rites of Passage

 

How is the path to adulthood affected when a person misses a critical factor of development during their teenage years? How does that affect their ability to mature and show up fully grounded in adulthood?

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Most ancient cultures had Rite of Passage ceremonies built in to their customs and traditions. This helped earmark natural life changes (transformations) and helped the individual connect their physical and spiritual natures, giving meaning to one's existence during their age of existentialism. Much of that connection has been lost today. Christians have confirmation, the Jewish faith has Bar mitzvahs and Bots mitzvahs, and Native Americans have vision quests. But for many people living secularly or questioning the validity of organized religion, without a rite of passage to help establish and confirm the meaning of their existence, our youth have been turning to gangs and using violence as a tool of transformation. Initiation will happen, one way or another. When formalized through ceremony and celebration, it can prepare you for, and possibly even spare you from, life's curve balls. The Learning Path will soon be offering Rites of Passage ceremonies for young adults; please stay tuned!

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"The initiation ceremonies of many traditional peoples occur right around the time when this initial period of childhood 'innocence', of direct and uncomplicated connection with the spiritual world, comes to an end.  When we lose that original childhood connection, that intuition of belonging, it's the job of religion to step in and help us get it back and keep it.  Traditional societies, aware of the deep connection that children have with the spiritual side of the universe, knew exactly when it was time to do this, to help the emerging adult codify the knowledge of heaven he or she had naturally known as a child so that it would never be lost."

            Eben Alexander, The Map of Heaven

7 Blind Mice

Angels

Atheism (Did God create man or did man create God?)

Basic Spiritual Principles to Teach Children

Beginning Spiritual and Natural Laws to Teach Children

Catholic Moms

The Heart of Learning: Spirituality in Education

Heaven is for Real

How to Raise an Intuitive and Spiritually Gifted Child

Meditation

Mindfulness

Religious Experience

From more than four thousand first person accounts of religious experience, Edward Robinson has selected and arranged significant anecdotes describing the religious experience of childhood. This unprecedented material reveals that religious experience does occur in advance of the cognitive and rational skills developed in later; it also shows how childhood experience can be crucial for later development.

The Secret Spiritual World of Children

Spirited Children

Spiritual Support

Spirituality for Kids

Yoga

Children and Education in Sahaja Yoga

One of the most deeply held commitments amongst people practicing Sahaja Yoga is that of the well-being of our children. There are tens of thousands of remarkably happy and harmonious families practicing Sahaja Yoga around the world, and tens of thousands of remarkably happy, well-adjusted children have been born into these families.

 

Parents in Sahaja Yoga are concerned, as all parents are, with helping their children to grow to adulthood without falling prey to the traps of peer pressure, drugs, violence and immorality along the way. We use the techniques of Sahaja Yoga to help our children stay balanced, alert, healthy and self-aware. As they grow up, we teach them how to meditate, and to understand the subtle inner workings of their own energy systems, to know when they are in a healthy, balanced state and when they are not. We teach them how to treat imbalances within and to take responsibility for their own states of mind and awareness.

 

We have found that as a result, children in Sahaja Yoga develop a beautiful reverence for goodness, for practicality and for righteousness. They maintain a bright, positive attitude toward life long after children of similar ages begin to show signs of encroaching cynicism and disillusionment.

 

Seeing the horrors of violence and self-destructive habits, and the subtler negativities of extreme materialism and competition amongst children in our nations' schools, we in Sahaja Yoga have created several international schools for our children, which we feel are healthier alternatives. There is a school for younger children in rural Italy, and another in the mountains of India for older children. These schools promote not only academic excellence, but a continued support for the growth of our children's self-awareness through Sahaja Yoga meditation.

 

The atmosphere in the Sahaja Yoga schools are both cheerful and serene. Children learn in an environment which is close to nature and full of natural beauty, and spend the day in learning traditional subjects, languages and the arts, as well as having time to play and enjoy together. The international population of the schools gives our children the additional benefit of broader horizons, as they develop friendships with children from many other countries.

 

Of the many thousands of children in Sahaja Yoga, only a few hundred each year are able to attend these schools. Some families choose not to send their children, others send them for some time, and then choose to keep them in local schools for a time, according to what they feel are the needs of the individual child.

 

We have found that the Sahaja Yoga schools instill in our children a very deep and unshakable joy in their approach to life. The children who are fortunate enough to attend these schools develop an inner strength by which they are able to withstand the forces of peer pressure when they return to schools in their native countries. As parents, we feel this is possibly the greatest gift we can give them, as our wish is to see them grow up strong, healthy , with a deep respect for all that is divine within and around us, fully able to enjoy life and express themselves.

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For more information on Sahaja Yoga, please refer to the links below.

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