What’s wrong with the education system?

Once I was talking to a group of 10 and 11-year-old children.  I asked them a simple question which reduced them to silence for some minutes.  The question was this: “Do you want to grow up to be like your parents?”

Eventually one little girl spoke out.  “No.  I mean – my mum and dad are great and that, but if we grew up just like them, the world wouldn’t move on, would it?  We’ve got to take it further.”

Once she’d spoken, the rest of the group looked relieved.  They agreed.  That was the truth they’d been searching for.

Ironic, isn’t it – we educate our kids to learn all the stuff the adults know – to try to turn out a bunch of people who will grow up just like us.  What if we listened to them sometimes?  They’re young, they’re not used to being heard and most of them don’t yet have the skills to put their message across as eloquently as that child did.  By all means teach them how to communicate effectively and how to listen thoughtfully, but then listen to what they have to teach us.  You might be very surprised…

What’s the point of life?

Turned on the TV when I got downstairs this morning.  There was this beautiful young woman being interviewed about why she self harms.  She spoke about how she hates herself – how she’d love to like herself…  They went on to say that a report by Young Minds has found that huge numbers of young people are self harming.

I’ve worked with so many kids who have no self-esteem, who harm themselves (in that way and others) and who think they’re rubbish.  This book I’ve written is really aimed at them.  It starts with the question ‘What’s the point?’ and goes on to honour that question and answer it.

Anyone who knows a young adult who feels that way, please tell them about Life: A Player’s Guide.  It just might help.

A burst of energy!

My book Life: A Player’s Guide has just gone live on Amazon.  I’ll celebrate with a quote from it:

Remember that at the quantum level, the building-blocks of you are energy or pieces of pure potential.  Just as you decide how to use the mass of energy entering your house from the electricity supply, so you can decide how to use the energy you and your world are made of.

How to manifest your favourite meal!

I want to introduce you to Elijah.  He’s ten years old and one of his major preoccupations at the moment is conscious manifestation through belief.

Not that many adults know how to do that, but kids are less cluttered.  They need very little encouragement – usually just an older person, maybe, who accepts the possibility that they can really do what they say they can do.  Well it just so happens that I’ve recently published a book on this very subject, so he knows I’ll listen.

“It’s really working!” he announced with a huge, happy grin as he bounced into my study last week.  “THREE times last week, I sat and imagined what I wanted for dinner until I could smell it and see it and taste it, then when I went downstairs I got exactly what I’d imagined!”

He’s ten years old!  So what could be more important than getting what you really, really want for dinner that evening?  If Elijah keeps going like that, what will he be manifesting by the time he’s twenty?  World peace?  An end to famine?  Or will he by then have stopped believing, and so lost the key to manifesting his dreams?  That depends on the rest of us really.  Will we help him – and the masses of kids like him – to keep the belief alive?  Sadly, it only takes a few people telling an impressionable kid he’s talking rubbish to extinguish that belief.  That happens a lot.

If you’re skeptical, good!  It means you’re thinking about it.  Why not give it a try?  If the future is a quantum soup of possibility, and if – as the scientists tell us – we as observers form reality from that soup… why not use belief and imagination to conjure up your favourite meal?

(Or you could check my book for more details: Life: A Player’s Guide by Jan Stone on Kindle or paperback from www.feedaread.com)