Struggling with Behavior in Consciousness Soul Times
What are our Children and Adolescents Behaviors Telling us? Rekindling the Courage to Heal: July 6-11, in Wilton, New Hampshire with James Dyson, MD, Kim John Payne, MEd, and Tonya Stoddard, LCSW. by Karine Munk Finser, Kairos Institute Did we really think we could traverse into Consciousness Soul times without having to struggle mightily? What we observe in terms of challenging behaviors in our schools, especially in the Grades and High School, but also forcefully creeping into Kindergartens, is the struggle of the soul longing for balance and a home in the heart, in the context of our times. We, as teachers, school leaders, colleagues, friends, parents, and partners are aware that we are all in the unfolding story together. As if we are in a large boat, sailing with increasing speed due to the wildest conditions, the winds leading us to new places, never traversed before. On this journey, some of our children and adolescents have fallen overboard, have lost direction, and are flailing in the deep waters. They are waiting for us to figure out how to pull them back up, and with renewed courage, help set everyone in a new direction. This courage is dependent on deepest devotional feelings: everyone matters, and if our children suffer, it is our own suffering we are addressing as well. In the Consciousness Soul times, we are experiencing a birth, it is a birthing condition where we need to relate everything, digest everything we take in through our senses, and through our sense-free experiences as well, to our indwelling spirit. It’s the same for our children. They come with many complex environmental influences, karmic knots, and are born into a traumatized eco-system. They each have a star over their heads that needs to descend into their hearts, as they gradually incarnate, and it is our task to remove the hindrances on their paths. These children and young people are calling out for us to learn to diagnose their stuck places and help free them: to actively meet their unprecedented needs with new skills and soul capacities. Dr. James Dyson will offer medical and psychological spiritual foundations, Kim John Payne and Tony Stoddard help us understand family systems and much needed compassionate responses that include protecting our own soulforces in the process of helping others. This is an advanced short training course to help educators, parents, school leaders, and those who wish to address their courage to heal: there will be daily lectures, time to work in smaller groups with each faculty member, enjoy daily Plenums where you can ask the full faculty your questions. We are here to help you as the winds are blowing, the trumpets sounding, and you are experiencing your own consciousness soul birth, by seeing and hearing those you are serving: the behaviors are soul landscapes into soul sorrows. Please join us in Wilton, July 6-11. Together we will find comfort in asking our questions, and renewed courage to help heal, to love our children. With Warmth,Karine, Kairos Institute For more information and to register: bit.ly/KairosInstitute
Kairos Institute: Welcoming a New Track in Animal Therapy, July 2025
At 8:15am on a frosty winter morning, small groups of children are carrying buckets of water and cutting baling twine loose from hay bales as they move around the farm animals at their school. Some third graders are bravely reaching under nesting hens to gather the warm eggs while their classmates scatter corn around the chicken run. One third grader walks over to greet and feed the shy rabbit. The fourth graders confidently tend to the goats and donkeys, giving them fresh water, grain, and sweet smelling flakes of hay. A couple of fifth graders fill the grain buckets for the hungry sheep who jostle each other as they nibble up their breakfast, their breath rising in clouds of steam around them. A few lanky sixth graders are with the beautiful Jersey cows, giving them grain and hay to eat and deftly moving around them to gather forkfuls of manure for the waiting wagon. Within twenty minutes, all of the animals are happily fed and the students are in their classrooms ready to begin their lessons. But wait. Hasn’t some learning already taken place? From one perspective, it may seem that the children tending the animals go through the morning chores by rote, knowing what needs to be done and getting down to business. And that is true. What is also true is that each of them is having a human-to-animal encounter. The basis for these encounters is to be of service to members of the animal kingdom who live close to us, yet not as close as the pets the children might have at their homes, nor as far as the wilder animals. What is the learning taking place here? How do the children feel while carrying cold buckets of water, gathering warm eggs, mucking out the barns? Is there an opportunity here for children’s hearts to open towards their fellow creatures while working alongside their classmates? Later in the morning, it may be that a student meets the farmer at the goat barn and is shown how to groom a goat with a brush. The goat stands quietly chewing its cud, its eyes half-closed as its dark brown hide is brushed. The student stands in close proximity, feeling the warmth from the goat’s body. The farmer working nearby observes the change in the student’s breathing and the softening of their posture. Here is another kind of encounter. This one has directed intentions for the individual student. The aim may be to regulate the anxiety that can build up in some students within the classroom environment. It may be to cultivate social capacities in a safe, nonjudgmental relationship. It may be to foster the ability to slow down and practice patience so the goat isn’t startled. Many children today are carrying heavy life burdens and yet they have chosen to be part of this world at this time. In their encounters with animals, children can experience the loving warmth of the animals, their companionship, their openness and acceptance, their unconditional love, and feel the need to take care of them. This is the sacrifice of the animals, that we need to care for them and by doing so, grow the capacities we need to engage with life at this time. Is there a place for animal-assisted therapy in schools and communities? Yes! The Kairos Institute, founded by Karine Munk Finser and part of the Center for Anthroposophy, aims to bring healing in a world of need. A new course on anthroposophically- oriented animal-assisted therapy will begin in July 2025. To inquire further or to register your interest, please visit Kairos Institute Or contact Brian Jacques at brianj@centerforanthroposophy.org
Upcoming Kairos Program Alerts
February 28-March 2: Traumatology, Module 4: All Welcome Online, with Bernd Ruf. Emergency Pedagogy For more information and to Register, click here April 2025 We welcome a New Cohort in Art Therapy We welcome a new track: Animal Assisted Therapy. (Summer residency, mentioned above, will introduce Animal-assisted Therapy to those interested in the new track) For more information and to Register, click here
Rekindling the Courage to Heal: What are the Behaviors of Our Children and Adolescents Telling Us? Addressing Urgent Needs through Anthroposophic Medical and Psychological Insights
with James Dyson, M.D.; Kim John Payne, M.Ed.; and Tonya Stoddard, LCSW Kairos Institute: Center for AnthroposophyWilton, New Hampshire: July 6-11, 2025Training Intensive Residency In Roots of Education ( Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophic Press, 1997), we are reminded that as adults, we carry our breathing, digestion, and circulation within ourselves, less dependent on the outer world. For the young child, these systems are laid open to the world; therefore, they take their inner life from this environment. In the child all these activities are given up to their environment and are therefore by nature religious. This is the essential feature of the life of the child between birth and the change of teeth; their whole being is permeated with a kind of “natural-religious” element, and even the physical body is in a religious mood. (pp.34-39) The fragile development we undergo to integrate these great creative forces of our upper and lower systems so that we are no longer dependent upon the environment but can unfold our innate powers is thus the spiritual-religious mood of our consciousness soul age. Much can go wrong between our arrival on earth and this development of the creative capacities of sense-free thinking. We enter an ever-increasingly traumatized world, a traumatized ecosystem, and a world where we, on a soul level, are forced to leave the home of our hearts as early as possible. Recently, I spoke with a teacher who shared with me that as soon as the children leave their more sleepy states of consciousness, they tend to become embroiled in a tech and social media environment that, within a very short time frame, becomes the emotional source of their newly emerging social life. Some children can withstand this powerful unifier, and others fall more deeply into this captivity of nervous system overload. The continuum that moves from dependency on the environment as spiritual nourishment to the adolescent’s ability to feel safe within themselves can be seen as a great soul-breathing process. Each child and adolescent has their soul landscape to traverse. All behaviors that we perceive are open windows to this landscape. With all the social pressures, environmental chaos, climate crises, climate changes, and overwhelming traumatic experiences children are exposed to, we see an increasing number of behaviors that reveal the many burdens our children and young people are carrying, often all by themselves. They are bravely transitioning from open devotion to the world to devotion to themselves so they may become carriers of their destinies. This odyssey encounters huge obstacles to the harmonious unfolding of the self. We experience behaviors, but what if we realize that these are, in essence, soul sorrows and a call for help to traverse impossible impasses? What do parents and teachers struggle to understand, and how do they find the courage to heal the many who suffer anxiety, fear, hysteria, loss of ability to focus, nervousness, fixed ideas, learning challenges, defiance, and later, more suicidal ideation, various expressions of self-harm, or harming others, and vulnerability when it comes to addictions? Kairos Institute, dedicated to Healing in a World of Need, is inviting you to take action: We have asked psychologist and doctor James Dyson, social therapist Kim John Payne, and social worker and education support specialist Tonya Stoddard to shed light on the medical and psychological aspects of the behavior of children and adolescents. Participants will listen to daily lectures that offer multidisciplinary perspectives to parents, (special) teachers, school leaders, therapists, and all involved in providing supplementary support educationally, socially, and within family systems. We hope to welcome many experienced teachers as this is an advanced course. Those who have taken teacher training but long to extend their understanding and capacities, will find ways to offer more support. We will meet daily in smaller discussion groups with the faculty and receive instruction in healing aspects of movement for our students and ourselves. We hope this intensive training will rekindle enthusiasm for the challenges facing …everyone. For more information and to register, click here Karine Munk FinserDirector, Kairos Institute
