So, Katie, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the way you’re educating the boys and how you apply Sahaja yoga in a very practical way in the boys’ education. Is that a good place to start?
Katie: Yes, that a very good place to start. And very relevant because we’ve just decided what we’re going to do with their education, they’re 8 years old. In a couple of years, they finish school and then it really felt that actually, although they were learning everything they want them to learn at school, there was a huge chunk that was missing, it seemed like a real waste that all the things that we’ve been doing as a family suddenly once they reach school are squished to 5 minutes at the beginning of the day and 5 minutes at the end of the day because they were too exhausted to really pay attention.
– What all the things you’ve been doing as a family?
Katie: Meditation, looking after each other in a way that really was in harmony with each person, and suddenly we were fitting into that school routine, everybody had to fit into the same box and we found that didn’t suit the family at all because proved creative, needed much more self-expression in that sense. And as they went on to school, that all got cut down and we value that, we felt that it’s very important that they could express their creativity and that we could also realize some other values which weren’t picked up in school because we know them from Sahaja yoga. The things that we really work on at home are, we kind of introspect on how we’re actually in our relationships and the family. So, in some way, we can pay attention to not reacting to each other to be able to witness, to relating things, to things that we’ve learned about the different chakras and saying why there are problems to us and what happens, we have our personal defects, and how we could deal with a lot of humor and we can let go much more easily and we can help each other through them. I find that with home education we actually more topics. I have more topics around these. And we can get a lot of educational material out of it. And we can just look at all the things that we’re actually doing in our everyday life and expand on them doing reading and writing and math.
-Can you think of one particular example or one particular area where you applied those principles in a way studying to help the children to realize something about those principles?
Katie: I need to pause.
-Well, having to do with the appreciation of Mother Earth. That’s something you’ve focused on quite a lot.
Katie: What we do here, we’ve got a farm and it’s quite old and run down but we’ve been looking at how we can actually do something with it to express all the values around nature and looking after the environment and picking up on a lot of things which are very current at the moment in particular, sustainable living. We’ve had various work done at the place which involves managing the waste water from the house and that gets filtered through the plants and the soil. We dug a hole, we had a whole system done for that. And I was surprised that the boys have actually been very, very attentive in this whole project and they want to know how to grow things, how all these systems in nature work, the names of everything to do with the plants, the animals, the behavior of plants and animals. And I didn’t have to do anything about that. It just came up. It used to be nourished every day and they really thrive on in. and actually, I find that when we meditate, if they’ve been outside, they’ve cleared out. They don’t have the same problems that they had earlier on and it makes them feel much lighter. They often complain of being very tired when they’re in the house or out shopping, they immediately feel exhausted and just send them outside for an hour and let them be, we can related that all with Sahaja yoga, we can relate that to the fact that we have these elements within us and if these elements are awakened and if they’re kept clean and nourished and those chakras are kept clean and nourished, then that can actually stabilize us. And they see it, they can just see it in their everyday life.
-Did you notice that they really missed that benefit when they were going to school? Did you see a sort of a negative effect upon when they were attending school?
Katie: Well, the thing I saw about them at school was that they very quickly turned to the outside of themselves and they became very shallow in a way because they wanted to mix with their friends and their friends didn’t have any connection to Sahaja yoga. They didn’t have any of that, no encouragement or support. Although they’re very, very sweet kids, they didn’t seem to have any support on the subtle side of their life and some of their friends are having to deal with quite serious issues at home anyway. And so, the boys developed a lot of the side of them self which is rough and tumble and get exhausted and crash into bed, wake up, the same cycle was going on. But we felt it wasn’t really nourishing who they really are and we had taken them out of school. We actually sent them to a camp in Italy where there were other children doing Sahaja yoga and they really developed their personalities because they’re twins and you could see such a difference, people who had been practicing Sahaja yoga could focus in and help each one of them with their own different strengths or weaknesses. So we felt that was enormous help to us. When they came back for the holidays, they said we don’t want to go to back school, we’re learning more at home so we know we are doing enough for them academically, spiritually.
-Okay, that’s great, thank you very much.