Healing With Love & Discipline

Yesterday, a friend passed me a flyer of a child care centre called "Whole Child Nurture Centre" in it is a very interesting article and I would like to share a short extract of it.

{So what does a parent or teacher do? First comfort the child who has been kicked or struck. At Waldorf pre-schools other children immediately run to bring a cup of water for the hurt child. Then, turn your attention to the child who has hurt the other child.
"We say, 'now something is wrong with your foot or your leg' (not with the child] but with the limb. 'This leg keeps kicking other children. We must take care of your sick foot/leg.' So it will not keep kicking.' So we bandage the foot or leg and make the child sit quietly until the limb is 'healed'. Sometimes we have to do it more than once but it always works,' said Ritta}
Ritta Korpinen is a Waldorf-Steiner kindergarten teacher living in Australia sharing about how to discipline a 'kicking' child.

Not only is this method successful with children, I think it can be equally successful with adults too. So for eg you have an addiction and you have tried time and time again to combat it, but you have not been successful. How often do you beat yourself up? How often do you blame yourself? Perhaps a change of perspective would be useful - by seeing that your addiction is an act which causes you not to function in a healthy manner. And in truth the addiction is not you. Loving yourself despite your addictions can be challenging but you may find that you can muster the courage to love yourself and accept the love and support from others, as well as instill the discipline to do what you must to move beyond the hold of the addiction.

Whenever I counsel people with addictions, and I also found this to be true in my own story, addicts tend to lack unconditional self love and discipline. But when I focused on getting well by exercising greater discipline and taking responsibility for my actions as well as loving myself despite the ups and downs, the good days and the bad days, I found much more strength to take me one day at a time with a resolve to stick to my goals.

The wonderful Waldorf-Steiner teacher did the exact same thing with the children. It is so simple yet so elusive to the judgmental mind. Healing with love & discipline certainly makes a big positive difference!

© 2009

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