Thomas Merton – Institute for Educational Advancement

Finding and Cultivating Your Voice

��Ƶ Staff — Fri, 16 Sep 2016 05:15:24 +0000

by Jennifer de la Haye, Program Coordinator

This year, ��Ƶ’s theme for both the Bradley Seminar and Yunasa Summer Camps was “Finding and Cultivating Your Voice.” In a culture that has become image-obsessed, where we often exist behind a meticulously crafted social media identity, and where many personal interactions have been replaced with digital ones (my social media mask meets yours), finding our real voices, understanding who we are and what we have to offer unto the world, is essential. Also, most of us – and many gifted kids that I know – battle a convincing inner critic who can rise up, looming like a bully whose leg is constantly outstretched for us to trip upon.

If we can develop strong and healthy inner voices, we will hopefully live authentically while standing up successfully to the debilitating critical voices in our heads. ��Ƶ strives to provide a space for children to unfold, where they are emboldened to find and cultivate their voices.

In a 2008 interview from the podcast On Being, Irish poet, author, and philosopher John O’Donohue discusses biography: “It often seems to me that if a person believes that if they tell you their story, that’s who they are. And sometimes these stories are constructed of the most banal, second-hand psychological and spiritual cliché, and you look at a beautiful, interesting face telling a story that you know doesn’t hold a candle to the life that’s secretly in there…There’s a reduction of identity to biography.” Identity is different than the sum of our experiences, and while biography often “unfolds identity and makes it visible,” we hold within us a unique person who is so much more nuanced, interesting, and capable of incredible things.

As we develop a presence on the Internet, we essentially create an ‘in-real-time’ biography that we display to the world. We often interact with others through this Internet veil, and our real identity – our true voice – is neglected. In the same interview, John O’Donohue talks about an “evacuation of interiority” in our culture. How do we find and cultivate our voices? We nurture our interior lives; we tend to our insides. How do we tend to our insides? By being attentive, surrounding ourselves with beauty, becoming a part of an accepting, healthy community, and .

Attentiveness – an ideal that we emphasize at Yunasa – provides us with the opportunity to explore how our surroundings affect us. It helps us to notice the needs of others and figure out how to meet those needs. It helps us to identify our own needs and advocate for them. It helps us to remain present. Finding our voice requires us to pay attention. Psychosynthesis, a type of guided meditation that we practice at Yunasa, serves to cultivate attentiveness in campers by helping them to focus solely on beautiful imagery that unravels in their minds. As the meditation continues, participants are able to uncover bits of creativity, imagination, and real issues that require consideration, and they are provided with a safe space to discuss and analyze these things. I believe prayer, mindfulness, and journaling also cultivate attentiveness and further awaken us to the beauty that surrounds us.

We must seek beauty: always “keep something beautiful in your mind” (Blaise Pascal). Beauty – whether it takes the form of poetry, literature, music, sculpture, painting, theater, film, math, chemistry, astronomy, nature, or deep, enlivening conversation – awakens our identities; it brings us back to who we are. All of ��Ƶ’s programs provide the opportunity to nurture our need for beauty. Yunasa places gifted children in nature, in a beautiful setting where they are free to explore how their social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and physical selves connect to make them whole. EXPLORE and Academy provide participants with a place to learn deeply about subjects that awaken their identities among other children and adult experts who find beauty in the same places. CDB allows students the freedom to pursue an education in a learning environment that matches their values, goals, hopes for community, and understanding of beauty.

Finding one’s voice is impossible without community; we are social creatures, and community provides a place for us to speak, to practice using our voice. A community of accepting individuals who hold similar values helps to draw us out of ourselves. When we feel safe, when we trust the people around us, we are able to give and receive help and love. ��Ƶ provides safe community within all of its programs – a place to land, a place to be vulnerable. We help guide each other, asking questions that help us .

As I am wont to do, I shall end this blog post with a Thomas Merton quote:

“We have the choice of two identities: the external mask which seems to be real…and the hidden, inner person who seems to us to be nothing, but who can give himself eternally to the truth in whom he subsists.”

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The Importance of Balance

��Ƶ Staff — Wed, 11 Mar 2015 03:23:04 +0000

By Jennifer de la Haye

Jennifer is the Program Coordinator for , ��Ƶ’s pioneering summer camps that unite gifted young people ages 10-15 with experts in highly able youth. In a nurturing setting, campers explore and grow the intellectual, social, emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects of their lives. Yunasa is the Lakota Sioux word for “balance.”

“Breathing in, I calm body and mind. Breathing out, I smile. Dwelling in the present moment, I know this is the only moment.”

-Tich Nhat Hanh, Zen Buddhist monk

At Yunasa, we begin each psychosynthesis session with a similar directive. Tich Nhat Hanh’s words remind us that all of life is held in this moment; his words encourage us to smile and seek gratitude for the moment we are in. Psychosynthesis, as practiced at Yunasa, is meant to cultivate balance amongst its participants, whose minds are often swirling with thoughts, anxieties, ideas, and observations, and for whom a peaceful moment is a true gift.

The word “balance” connotes an array of ideas – time management, sanity, stress-control, and lithe circus professionals sauntering across tight ropes. At Yunasa and within all of ��Ƶ’s programs, we strive to impart the type of balance that helps us to understand and interact with every piece of ourselves in an effort to pursue wholeness. In his commentary, “The Heart of Understanding,” Tich Nhat Hanh refers to the five elements that comprise a human being as five rivers that flow through every one of us: “…the river of form, which means our body, the river of feelings, the river of perceptions, the river of mental formations, and the river of consciousness.” These “rivers” are “made by the other four,” he says. “They have to co-exist; they have to inter-be with all the others.” Just as each limb, neuron, cell, blood particle, and organ work together to sustain physical existence, so do the body, myriad emotions, soul, mind, and relationships interconnect to create life experience. Thomas Merton, a Catholic Trappist monk, says, “There is in all visible things…a hidden wholeness.” We strive to be whole, to seek balance, because wholeness brings us closest to who we are – complex and alive.

The pursuit of wholeness requires vulnerability because it means that we are intentionally acknowledging parts of ourselves that are less developed, even broken. In our culture of social media, it is tempting to present a polished rendition of ourselves – the most attractive, the cleverest, the most sophisticated version – as though we are ashamed to reveal the bits that we are working on, the parts of ourselves that need help. If we are not careful, this tendency creeps into our real-world presentation of our self, as well; this self is safer, impervious, protected by the armor of contrived impeccability. To grow in understanding of ourselves, however, and to establish meaningful, mutually empathetic connections with others, we must embrace vulnerability. As Brené Brown, author and public speaker, discusses in the podcast On Being: The willingness to approach life with our whole heart cannot be less than our willingness to be broken-hearted.

“We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”

-Thomas Merton

We must take risks to be whole. For a shy intellectual, it might feel terrifying to acknowledge his innate need to integrate into an accepting community, especially if he suffers from the internal vituperation of , when every word that he uses to forge a connection with another leaves him riddled with doubt. Likewise, understanding the connection between one’s emotions and her physical reactions, or engaging her physicality through outdoor adventures, might seem scary for the individual whose exceptional gifts are rooted elsewhere. Some of us prefer to eschew emotion altogether in an effort to remain focused on our work or to avoid the discomfort emotion sometimes renders. To live in relationship with ourselves and others, to pursue wholeness and balance, we must, with vulnerability and honesty, take the necessary risks. Yunasa is important because it is a safe, accepting place to take these risks and to delve into intensive learning about ourselves and our world.

This is our intention: to develop our ability to relate to others and our capacity to empathize with different perspectives; to explore and cultivate our blazing intellect; to create honest connections with the world, with nature, and with our community; to grow in understanding of our range of emotions – intense, subtle, tender, and wildly uncomfortable; to engage the intricacies of our spirit – both delicate and resilient; and to acknowledge the interconnectedness of each of these pieces – how they influence and inform one another at every moment.

In seeking balance, we are not striving to achieve equilibrium amongst every element of our personhood. Living in balance does not mean that one’s social skills are on par with her ability to reason, or that one’s physical agility matches her profound emotional reaction to beauty in nature or literature or art. Balance isn’t a strange and unnatural perfection; rather, balance is to understand the relationship between all of our parts – the developed pieces and the fragile ones. A musician does not employ every note of his instrument simultaneously or with equality; if he did, the result would be shrill and offensive. Instead, he creates an interaction between each of the notes; they complement one another, culminating in mellifluous accord – beautiful and alive.

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Small Steps

��Ƶ Staff — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:21:25 +0000

Last week, ��Ƶ’s staff members met for a two-day retreat. The retreat was filled with fun, laughter, and collaboration as we participated in teambuilding activities, discussed our programs and the organization, and planned for the coming year. To start the retreat, each team member shared a quote she brought to inspire the group.

Here are some of those quotes:

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” – Thomas Merton

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment.” – Jim Rohn

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” – Annie Dillard

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.” – Vincent Van Gogh

“The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary.” – Vince Lombardi

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead

As we looked at the quotes and listened to why each person chose that quote, we found a few themes: We are all here to make a difference. The issue we are addressing – the importance of meeting the needs of gifted children – is a big issue, and we encounter many barriers in working towards that goal. However, that goal is worthy of every ounce of our time and attention, and the small steps we take to get there are powerful and important. Every small step we take impacts a life, and every life we impact impacts the world. That is why we are all here.

Over the rest of the retreat, we talked specifically about the small – and sometimes large – steps ��Ƶ will take over the coming year to support the needs of gifted children across the country, steps that included everything from school outreach to parent support to enhanced program offerings.

All of us in the gifted community can take small steps to work towards a world in which our gifted children are understood, celebrated, and supported. Please join us as we take necessary steps towards that worthwhile goal.