Your education is a lifelong affair!

Your greatest teacher is life itself. Being open to your innate intelligence, your body, your mind and the opportunities life offers each day, even through difficulties, you cannot fail to discover wonders that you could not have otherwise imagined.

Whatever you believe of a situation is decisive in determining your experience of it. If you believe it is possible, you will remain open to its unfolding whatever it takes. If you believe it is impossible, for you it will be so.

A young woman contacted me today on Linkedin. Following her early experience of life, she has created an orphanage in her home for 12 children. She is also placing other children with families in her village. In our brief exchange, she tells me that she is involved in outreach programmes and fundraising to create new schools.

Facilitating education is a key part of my work, and our real education is happening all the time, any place, anywhere. The question is how to get the most of our experiences, seeing them as opportunities for adventures of discovery, readying us for the next one, and the next one….

This young woman’s dream of a better life and education for her children inspires me to write this piece and share it with her and with you.

The School of Life is here, wherever you are.

Here are some principles:

• It is vital to know that you can accomplish anything when you decide to do so. Despite popular myths regarding the limitations created by differences in innate ability, much can be accounted for by differences in attitudes and experience. Innate ability is vast, we just don’t realise that and so we don’t try to express it.
• Understanding how we learn. This allows us to start and proceed in a way that enables us to do what we want to do.
• Perception as Interpretation: Whatever the instruction we receive, we interpret the message and make our own meaning of it. Each message is processed through the lens of our perception, framed by our individual experience and beliefs so far.
• Learning from Others: As children, an influential part of our learning comes from impressions and ideas from others through what we learn from our earliest carers and teachers. We also need others in our continued learning but we can consider others in a different way as we grow.
• Experimentation is where the adventure of life begins. To make the best of our lives as we grow, we need to be building our own real understanding in an ongoing way. We cannot endlessly take the opinion of others as fact. This doesn’t mean endlessly criticising others either. It means being aware that we are working with knowledge given by another. When that works for us, we can continue. When it doesn’t, instead of feeling afraid, we can know that we have the option to test out ideas for ourselves and discovering what happens.
• Openness and Practice. Even the best ideas are not always reproducible, with many factors discreetly influencing outcomes. There is nothing that we cannot accomplish with openness and practice. Each experience, even each challenge, can help us to develop a finer and finer sense of what works for us and what doesn’t, all the while opening new horizons.
• You, your Mind and your Body.  The elements entailed in effective learning (ie the ability for relevant application of knowledge) are not always well understood. In the most simple terms, directed by desire, our mind builds concepts in the best way it can using the tools available within our experience.  (All sensory and extra-sensory information is filtered through the prism of perception, which includes our emotional response.) Significant resources come from how we use our bodies in movement, and in interaction with our environments. These experiences are necessary for putting our ideas into practice, even in the simplest everyday situations. Without these, we may be inhibited in our ability to take our ideas further. Alternatively, we can realise that we can employ or collaborate with others in order to include these qualities.

These elements are at the root of anything else that we want to learn, including languages, mathematics, science, history, dancing, musical instruments, you name it…

Putting the preparation in place is a smart investment to being able to do what you want to do more easily and with increasing finesse.

Are you ready to start? 

YES?

OK. Here are some practices that you can use to irrespective of

• Age,
• Physical or Mental Condition,
• Educational Level
• Career Level

1 – Meditative practice

• 15 minutes per day
• Start your day with a moment of stillness. 
• Preferably in the morning before you do anything else.
• As far as you can…sit, preferably crosslegged, with your spine straight but relaxed,

Here is a video example to get you started – Isha Kriya

2 – A ROMBi Puzzle a day

   (Requires use of eyes and hands)

ROMBi is specially designed for extending capability by improving perceptual organisation. It starts to work with your first puzzle! ROMBi Puzzle

For using puzzles to improve your capability, remember that the priority is to

• Do a puzzle before any task that you find challenging.
• Consistency brings bigger benefits – a puzzle each day;
• Practice makes you faster;
• For great developments try more than 1 puzzle a day. One user who had spine surgery a couple of years ago does 3 puzzles in the morning with his coffee (10 minutes) before taking an 8km walk along the seashore!

ROMBi is a great investment, but if you are not able to afford it just yet, you can begin with an online jigsaw service: JIGZONE

A physical object in the hands is preferable to online versions, as it engages the body in space and time in unlimited directions. If you find puzzles difficult, this is a good indication that you will benefit from these kinds of exercises, as the difficulties will be affecting other aspects of your life and it doesn’t have to remain that way. Start with simple puzzles, you can use children’s puzzles.

3 – Juggling

Learning to juggle will simultaneously improve your mental as well as your physical coordination. It brings clarity and dexterity. It doesn’t matter how many times you drop the ball, practice and you will see sudden changes in your ability to think, imagine and move! Here is a video to get you started.

If you find this difficult to begin with, do a ROMBi or other kind of puzzle first and notice the differences.

4 – Step Dancing 

Waltz, Salsa, Tango, Cha Cha, Rumba, etc are among the

Dances that require you to practice a structure that repeats organise your mind and body in a coordinating way. There is no dance that you cannot master if you practice. After a certain critical mass of exposures to the experience ( practice, practice, practice), there will be a sudden jump and you will simply get it.

This will have effects of opening your body and mind to being able to organise other things more easily too.

5 – Playing Musical Instruments

Start with the beat, or get taken by whatever instrument excites you. The key elements are practice, so that you get to know your instrument intimately, get the feel of it and what it can do.

6 – Rule-based games

Finesse your fine and gross motor coordination, enhance perceptual organisation.

Court or Pitch – eg

• Baseball
• Football
• Basketball
• Tennis
• Volley Ball

Board games – eg

• Drafts (Checkers)
• Chess
• Backgammon

If you want to enhance your abilities, all of these things make a big difference on one condition, you actually do them regularly.