3D ANIMATION AND MODELING:This article explores the spiritual nature of children, a profound and necessary aspect of being human, gracefully present from birth. The most divine form of human life arrives in the smallest of packages-a newborn babe. As these tiny beings enter the world in a flurry of commotion and anticipation, a spirit is also reborn among us. They come to us with open hearts and pure souls, exuding a spiritual essence that belies their brittle and vulnerable nature.
The primary Nature of Child Spirit
What is Childhood Spirituality?
The term as well as the plan of "spirit" is elusive. It no longer exclusively pertains to religious beliefs, learned values, or cognitive conceptions. Rather, it is the holistic perceive of the human being, both corporal and nonphysical, as well as allusion to a Higher Power or universal energetic presence. Spirit is the life force, the essence of our being as well as the essence of all things. Spirit manifests in human beings as cosmic memory, social knowing, unconditional love, intuition and creativity - it is the universal energetic which creates existence, experience, the material world, and consciousness. The embodiment of the human spirit is present and active from birth, and is uniquely energetic in children.
We are born with our spirits fully intact; with a relationship to the social spiritual realm as tangible as our corporal bodies. In a culture which has largely ignored the spiritual aspect of our being, those children able to consciously mouth their relationship to the metaphysical are gifted with an inherent sense of self, purpose, and service. The point of insight and embracing the plan of childhood spirituality is imperative to the salutary development of the child, and therefore, to the continuous evolution of our race as we know it. It's imperative because the spiritual aspect of humans is as necessary to our well being, natural development, and thorough evolution as the cognitive, emotive, and biological aspects.
If we are to truly understand our purpose here on earth, if we are to grasp the meaning of life, if we are to reach our full potential, both as corporal and spiritual beings, the pursuance of such insight must honor and embrace the entirety of our experiences, from birth to death. The point and sway of child spirituality is as prominent as, if not more so than, adult spirituality. The childhood spiritual perceive may be more crucial because of the mammoth impact and sway childhood spiritual experiences have on the combination of our adult lives. The natural and necessary link between mind-body-emotion must include spirit as well.
What does Child Spirit look like?
Childhood spirituality is the being essence of the child encompassing mind, body, emotions and soul while simultaneously transcending corporal perceive and linking the private to universal social Spirit. "Spirit is the essence of life, the power of the universe that creates all things. Each one of us is a part of that spirit-a divine entity. So the spirit is the higher Self, the eternal being that lives within us" (Living in the Light, Shakti Gawain, 1986). Our spirituality is experienced on two levels - an individual, soul level and as an aspect of social universal power or Spirit. Spirituality and the human being are inseparable and this spiritual essence, on both the private (soul) and universal (Spirit) levels, provides the human being with a foundation for experiencing the true meaning of life. Spirituality is a prominent aspect of our being, and such spirituality has a profound impact on who we are, how we perceive ourselves and the world around us, and how we live our lives. As a result, without the recognition and nurturance of our spiritual nature from birth we are destined to severely inhibit our physical, mental, and emotional increase in increasing to our perpetual development and evolution as a species.
Children possess a natural clarity N �����Ѵਹ in their experience, expression, and personalities. Insofar as this is believed to hold true with their thoughts, personalities, and emotions, so it is with their spirits. Children are not gifted from some external source with a unique soul or spiritual essence at later stages of development-instead they are simply and, more accurately, innately aware of their inherent spiritual essence, as well as the dual nature of all humans and, perhaps, all living things from conception. Children appear to simply understand that we are, first and foremost, embodied spirits-that our purpose here on earth is of a spiritual nature. Many children exude a spiritual maturity that is remarkable. Consider, for example, the perceive of young Clara who was able to foresee the death of her young cousin who lived miles away,
I said I wanted to see him. When I was asked why, I said he was going to die. They [Clara's parents] said no, Mitch was not going to die, he was perfectly healthy. Only a merge of days later, my grandfather saw Mitch's father in town and was told that Mitch was very sick. Soon after, we learned that Mitch died. When I went to the funeral, even the children kept away from me because they had heard I'd known of the death ahead of time. (The secret Life of Kids: An exploration into their psychic senses, James Peterson, 2000)
It is not unusual to recognize some children weeping over the pain or death of a stranger, even person they may have heard about in school or seen on television, but to whom they have no personal connection. How remarkable, the wisdom of children-the intuitive, universal knowing we carry transmit into this world!
What does Child Spirit act like?
As mentioned previously, the human perceive is of a dual nature-human and spirit. As a result, children often perceive their spirituality or spiritual essence through metaphysical phenomena. Meta implies an perceive or circumstance which lies beyond the corporal realm. This spiritual awareness in children is observed to manifest in many different ways, including: experiencing visions, hearing voices, having magical moments, having out-of-body experiences, and experiencing heightened communication (such as extra sensory perception, intuition, knowing, prophesizing, and deep empathy). It is our culturally imposed limits, which are largely dismissive of the legitimacy or point of nonphysical experiences, which lead to the tendency to regard children's spiritual essence as inauthentic or invalid. We can turn this by insight and nurturing the spiritual essence in children.
What is it like for a child to perceive his or her spiritual being? Many have theorized on the nature and existence of adult spirituality, but few on how the child's spiritual essence materializes or manifests on the corporal plane. Based on years of formal and informal explore by child spirituality specialists, characteristics related with spiritually known children include: deep compassion; gifted creative and artistic ability, morality, deep relationship to people, nature and animals, insight, altruism, seeing the invisible, past-life memories, exceptional abilities (such as extra sensory perception, out-of-body experiences, and insight others unspoken thoughts or feelings), wisdom, child-world consciousness, attunement to spiritual forces, and many more. For example, Bonnie, age 8, shared her perceive of "attunement to spiritual forces",
As I put my two fingers together, I felt the electricity flow down one arm, go through the two fingers, and then move up my other arm and into my chest. It kept going around and around, and I felt my body getting warmer and warmer. Then, just as it got so hot that I was going to stop it by taking my fingers apart, I suddenly saw my body light up-all over! (ChildSpirit, Samuel Silverstein, 1991)
Children often convey, whether through the spoken word or through nonverbal expression, their personal mystical or spiritual experiences as something they have "imagined." With their minuscule vocabulary and undeveloped grammatical insight of deeper concepts such as mysticism, the term imagination most accurately describes what they are experiencing. The mystical childhood perceive encompasses those experiences which offer a glance into the spiritual realm, an unexplainable insight of life beyond one-self, of the social cosmic consciousness and infinite existence. To a child these early years are a constantly unfolding mystery. As children recognize their corporal world and all that it holds, they are also in the process of discovering the nonphysical world - the world of power and spirit.
The embodied spiritual essence of the child is not experienced in a vacuum-it is an accumulation of a lifetime (or maybe many lifetimes), albeit short, of experiences in the context of a world within and beyond their own corporal existence. Not infrequently, the level or perceive of spirit present in children is vastly different from the perceive of spirit in adulthood; however, this does not mean it is nonexistent or less necessary in children. Accepted developmental models suggest an adult is capable of more very intentional, focused, and nonegoic (transcending corporal and cognitive experience) states of awareness. Yet, children, in their naivete, pureness and innocence, are more simply inclined to move freely within their internal and external experiences and between corporal and nonphysical realities. The necessity of accepting and nurturing the essence of spirit in children is crucial in order that we not perpetuate the disregard for this necessary developmental process.
What can we do to hold Child Spiritual Health?
Children possess an innate, natural capability to embrace life and live in this palpable existential relationship with the universe, to stand with one foot in corporal reality and the other in the spiritual realm. Children seem to be able to voyage between these two planes with ease and ownership. It is largely the active imagination of children and their openness to alternative realities and planes of existence which allows them to so authentically shift between body and spirit. Children are born with an insight of the following, "It is prominent to identify that spiritual experiences are magnificent natural processes. We are spiritual beings temporarily clothed in matter, we can and will instinctively perceive our spiritual nature when the allowable conditions are present" (The secret of the Soul, William Buhlman, 2001). It seems that childhood itself embodies those allowable conditions; the very nature of childhood is spiritual in its essence. very spiritual children are free of the typical constraints of both linear time and ego. Children are concerned less with the outer personality and more with the inner world, hence children's proclivities toward: out-of-body experiences, perceptions of non-linear time planes, having mystical experiences, and their capability to voyage between corporal and nonphysical realities.
In recognizing and supporting the necessary nature of childhood spiritual health, it is my goal to help every parent and adult as they recognize and hold the presence and active manifestation of children's spiritual essence. Children possess an active spirit which can be broadly observed in 6 areas: Nature, Mysticism, Wisdom, Wonder, Imagination, and Relating (Grace in Small Packages: An Exploration in Childhood Spirituality, Kimble Greene, 2008). Within these 6 areas one can recognize the manifestation of characteristics and abilities such as: past-life experiences; near-death experiences; visions of apparitions or the invisible; psychic and extra-sensory abilities; breathtaking creative abilities; indications of profound wisdom, wonder, knowing, and insight; and a very developed sense of compassion, caring, and love.
Spirit is an necessary aspect of our being. How children perceive their spiritual essence has a profound impact on who they are, how they perceive the world around them, how they live their lives, and who they become. As a result, without the recognition and nurturance of children's spiritual essence, we are fated to severely inhibit their physical, thinking and emotional increase in increasing to their spiritual development. If we, as adults and parents, disregard, discount, and discourage the natural expression and perceive of a child's spirit, we may as well bind a part of their bodies in a mummy-like encasing, for the outcome is likely to be similar - severe restriction of an integral aspect of their being. It is our responsibility to nurture our children's spiritual development just as we do their cognitive, corporal and emotional growth.
It is necessary to the salutary development of our children, and to the future of our race, that we begin to appreciate more abundantly the totality, depth, and scope of children's spiritual essence-from the magical to the mysterious and on toward the mystical. While children are born with the wisdom and faith necessary to embrace their own spiritual nature, it is the responsibility of parents, researchers, and all adults to do the same by understanding, nurturing, and supporting this graceful spiritual essence in children.
In the box below is a list of 7 specific things parents and adults can do to begin to identify and nurture children's spiritual essence:
1. Listen to and validate children's imaginings and musings, for they are likely to be of a spiritual nature;
2. Create time for discussions or exploration around the nonphysical, metaphysical, and spiritual aspects of existence. If you are unsure about the existence of these yourself, simply recognize the possibility of such things with your child (there are many breathtaking children's books on this topic);
3. Children explore, learn, recognize and come to understand on all levels; intellectual, emotional, corporal and spiritual, through play - Create a space and time for enchanted play in their lives;
4. Nature provides endless opportunities for spiritual revelation, self-discovery, and inspiration - encourage your child to spend lots of time in nature, with pets, and observing wildlife;
5. salutary relationships are key to our thorough well-being. Allow your child opportunities for relating to other people, animals and the imaginary;
6. Rely on your own intuition and inner knowing when it comes to parenting and relating to children. Society's "rules" do not all the time hold children's holistic increase and spiritual development;
7. Let children guide you - children know what they need on a deep, profound level. Let children be your teacher!
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