How To Stay Awake and Do Your Algebra Homework without Falling Asleep in Your Oatmeal

I currently have two teenagers living in my house in addition to my almost three-year-old daughter. You’d think that on Friday nights I’d be up late walking the floors wondering where my party-animal teens are…but I’m not.

On Friday’s we’re usually all in bed by 8 pm. Weird, huh?

My kids go to a public high school that starts at 7:10 am. They have to be at the bus stop at 6:20 am. They are usually up at 5:30 am.

If they were farmers, they could follow the schedule of the sun and sleep in the dark and work in the day. But they’re not farmers. My kids are students and many nights they are up until midnight doing homework.

I’m also up with them. I like to make sure they get a good start to their day with breakfast and a nice lunch. Yes, I know they can do this for themselves, but they’re so tired, I’m afraid that they’ll forget.

Sometimes, if it’s raining or if they need tutoring, I’ll drive them to school. I’m a single mom. That means I have to wake up my toddler and take her with us. Then she’s tired, too…

I think our situation is unusually dysfunctional. Most schools I know of make sure the kids have an opportunity to get enough rest.

Chronic sleep-deprivation is a big problem for lots of folks and some of the cause is our lack of understanding about how to get good sleep.

(I don’t think it’s a coincidence that wearing pajama pants out in public is now kind of an okay thing. We are all longing for more sleep.)

Generally, sleep deprivation may result in:

• aching muscles
• confusion, memory lapses or loss
• depression
• hallucinations
• hand tremors
• headaches
• malaise
• sensitivity to cold
• bloodshot eyes
• bags under your eyes
• increased blood pressure
• increased stress hormone levels
• increased risk of diabetes
• increased risk of fibromyalgia
• irritability
• obesity
• temper tantrums
• yawning
• and symptoms similar to Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Psychosis

More than 10.4 million children are diagnosed with ADD in the United States, up 66% in the last 10 years. Ten million adults are also diagnosed with ADD in the U.S.

The symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation are identical to the symptoms of ADD. Not only that, when we get enough sleep, our bodies produce serotonin, a neurotransmitter that is responsible for “feeling good”. Chronic sleep-deprivation results in chronic low serotonin levels, creating depression.

I don’t want to depress you and talk about the rates of diagnosis and medication for depression in the U.S., but let’s just say it’s a lot….

My challenge today is to not slip into a crazy rant about ADD, serotonin and depression (Click here if you want to read more about ADD and Human Design)….remember, sleep deprivation can also look like psychosis (see above)….

Today I’m only going to talk about sleep, and most importantly, how to get good healthy sleep by Human Design. Specifically, I’m going to write about the Sacral Center and how it influences the way you sleep.

The Sacral Center is the energy center responsible for workforce and life force energy. Approximately 70% of the population have the Sacral defined. 

If you are a Manifesting Generator or a Generator, then your Sacral is defined and colored in red on your chart:

(Want to learn more? Click here to receive our free Introduction to Human Design slide show.)

If you are a Projector, a Manifestor or a Reflector, your Sacral will be undefined or white on your chart. 

Defined Sacrals and open Sacrals have different sleeping strategies. In my experience as a Human Design Life Coach and Family Coach, I have found that many of my client’s personal challenges and struggles can be resolved, or at least ameliorated when they get better sleep.

If you are a Manifesting Generator or a Generator, your energy is designed to “wear out”. That means that in order to sleep well, you need to expend your energy in some way every day. If you are struggling with falling asleep or insomnia, as a Manifesting Generator or Generator, it may mean that you need more physical activity to sleep better.

This is especially true for children. Sacral children need a lot of free play “run around time” every day to “wear down” their Sacral energy. I find that almost all of the children in my practice who have a diagnosis of ADD are Sacral Types and benefit tremendously from turning off the TV’s and computers and getting some solid outdoor playtime.

School, aftercare and even organized sports can often be short on the physical expenditure necessary for a Defined Sacral to sleep well. Of course, if a kid isn’t falling asleep, a parent usually isn’t getting enough sleep either and the whole family starts to run a chronic sleep-deprivation pattern.

(It’s amazing how much family dynamics can improve when everyone gets enough sleep for a few weeks…)

Many adult (and teenage) Manifesting Generators and Generators develop a habit of “pushing” through exhaustion at the end of the day and avoiding going to sleep while engaging in mind-numbing kinds of activities such as TV or computer.

Defined Sacrals are designed to do the right work. Of course, Defined Sacral people can usually “fake” their way through their work, even if it’s not ideal or correct. But that “faking” can lead to burn out, or at least a need to numb the frustration at the end of the day, so we avoid going to sleep, in the name of claiming our own “free” time.

For a Defined Sacral, it’s important to go to sleep when you’re tired. This helps you regenerate your work force and life force energy.

The Open Sacral is much more mysterious. Most Open Sacrals are conditioned to sleep like Manifesting Generators and Generators. But the Open Sacral needs to lie down and rest before they fall asleep and if an Open Sacral is waiting until they’re tired to fall asleep then they are waiting too long and they miss the opportunity for good healthy sleep.

The Conditioned Theme of the Open Sacral is “not knowing when enough is enough.” Many Open Sacrals get busy doing stuff at the end of the day and, instead of stopping and resting and then falling asleep, they push, trying to do more than is healthy for them…

Of course, the Open Sacral doesn’t get exhausted in the same way as a Defined Sacral and if the Open Sacral waits for the exhaustion, they might fall asleep for a short time but they’ll probably wake up again and have poor quality sleep with periods of wakefulness or insomnia throughout the night.

The Open Sacral takes in Sacral energy all day from the Generators around them. They need the “down” time (lying down and resting prior to sleeping) in order to discharge the extra energy they’ve picked up all day.

Open Sacral people should sleep alone and Open Sacral children should have their own room, if possible so that they can have their own auric integrity at night for better quality sleep.

The Open Sacral has another challenge, too. Transit energies from planetary movement can also influence the quality of their sleep. For example, over the last few months we had a long-term planetary transit that added the “flavor” of Sacral definition to the planet.

In other words, many Open Sacral people had the experience of having “too much” energy in the past few months, which ultimately burned out their bodies and made good quality sleep difficult. (I had tons of Projectors tell me that they’ve struggled with sleep over the past few months. My own Projector toddler has had horrible sleep challenges recently which only just improved as the Sacral transit went away….)

If you have an Open Sacral, it’s good to stay informed about the planetary transits. It can help you leverage your energy in a healthy way. (Same goes for the Defined Sacral although your sleep won’t be affected as profoundly.)

BTW, it’s not too late to receive your Weekly Human Design Evolution and Transit Report. The Human Design Weekly Transit and Evolution report is normally $120.00 per year. If you subscribe this week (until Friday, March 30), you pay only $97.00 for the whole year (until March 2013).

In addition, you will receive the following bonuses: 

• Soul-mates by Design MP3 ($47.00 value) 
• The Empowered Family Training Home Study Program ($198.00 value) 
• EFT for Parents E-Book ($25.00 value) 
• EFT for Everyone E-book 

Click Here to Subscribe

So, here is a challenge I submit for your consideration. Look at your Human Design chart and the charts of your family members. Assess your best sleep strategy and commit to sleeping well and enough for the next four weeks and see how your life changes!

I’ll see you in my dreams!

Love,

 

Karen

Fighting Fire with Fire?????

This is the second part in my installment about Human Design and children. Last week I talked about the first step in shifting our paradigms about children. This week I’d like to talk about what I think is the most important first step in creating a revolution in the education system (or anywhere else in the world or your life...).

My passion, as a Human Design teacher, is all about keeping it simple, so while there is a lot of big vocabulary and woo-woo stuff I could stick in this post, I’m going to try to keep is succinct and easy to understand. If you want to get more information about all of this, stay tuned…more to come!

Let’s start with the basics. If we’re going to create change in the school system or in any system, for that matter, we have to start first with where we are putting our energy and attention. It’s so easy, when you are feeling frustrated or disempowered with a system to respond and react.

I find it fascinating that in Human Design the energy for Revolution (49th Gate) is also the energy for intimacy and agreements. The energy for revolution is located on the Emotional Solar Plexus and has the potential to be very cut and dry or black and white. It’s the, “That’s It, I’m Outa Here” gate but it can also be a gate that asks of us to be deliberate in re-working our agreements and connections.

If we stay focused on the intention and take our time (The Emotional Solar Plexus needs time for clarity.) we can come to new agreements that lead to harmony and peace.

I am absolutely certain that our education system is in need of a major revolution. When over 30 percent of the children in the system are diagnosed with psychological disorders and learning disabilities, it makes me suspicious of the system. How can one in three children have problems with learning?

If you look at the Human Design chart as the archetype for the potential for humanity, you will see that there are multiple combinations of ways people learn. It only makes sense that in an education system that has a limited approach to teaching and educating that a bunch of kids are going to fall through the cracks and be classified as “learning disabled.” (Want to learn more? http://www.karencurry.tsemedia.com/articles/article/2243258/30059.htm)

This shouldn’t be a revelation to any of us. Since the early 60’s, education experts have been saying that there are different kinds of learning styles and multiple kinds of intelligences. This isn’t news.

And, yes, it’s easy to want to pull your hair out and scream with frustration over the inadequacies of the system, especially if your child falls into the 1/3 that isn’t best served by our schools. (I have a couple of those kinds of kids myself.)

But, before we can start a revolution, we have to be thoughtful, clear and deliberate. We have to take time to focus our intention and start first with looking at what IS working in the system before we react and burn the whole building down.

Personally, I have had more than my fair share of run-ins with the public school system. I have five children ranging in age from 2 – 21. I homeschooled four of my kids for 11 years.

I have a couple of kids who LOVE school. I have one kid who claims that her public school education robbed her of her love of learning and another kid who is on the Every Other Year education program. (That means that I homeschool him every other year because he can only handle public school one year at a time before he starts to go insane.)

I have been visited by Child Protective Services because I withdrew my son from school without filing the right paperwork. I have gone head-to-head, toe-to-toe with school psychologists, teacher and principals. I’m not going to lie. I have been rude, irate, beside myself and very, very angry at times. (I have the 50-27 in my Human Design chart. I have big, big Mama Bear energy and if you hurt my kids, look out. I cannot guarantee you will live. And, no, it’s not rational. It’s all about survival.)

Here is what I learned. The more I yelled, the more I got in trouble with different administrative representatives and the less help and support I got. The “squeaky wheel” only got me sent to the principal’s office, literally. The more I focused on the problem, the bigger the problem got. And the “elegant solution” was never discovered.

We are all designed to be abundant. There are no gates for suffering, pain or trauma in the charts. Some of us, by nature, will make choices that are more challenging than others but for those of us designed to live that way, those challenges are a part of our own personal evolution. With awareness, those challenges can be met with delight and anticipation.

When you live your strategy and relax into your design, you open yourself up to a life that is abundant, more pleasant and reawakens you to “the possibility and the wonder of your life.” (Ra Uru Hu)

But it all has to start with deliberation, intention and focus. The more you trust life, your natural place in the order of life and abundance that is waiting for you, the faster you can embrace the possibility and wonder that is your life.

Your abundance will be uniquely tailored to you. Your life holds exactly what you need and want when you live your strategy.

But, I digress. (Sorry, got swept up in the possibility and wonder of it all…. ;-)

Revolution is deliberate and the archetype of humanity calls for careful action that feels correct. Before we can revolutionize our education system, we have to take a step back, get clear about what we want, focus on the things that ARE working, appreciate the teachers and all of those people in the system who have dedicated their lives to helping children.

You cannot fight fire with fire. We must ask ourselves what are we for, not what are we against. And then we can create what we intend, a system that honors and meets the needs of each individual within it.

Of course, this is only the very first step. We have a lot of evolving and very exciting creating to do.

Next week: Revisiting ADD, Human Design and other “learning disabilities”…

For Those of us who Used to be Children...

Here is an email that I received from one of my subscribers. I think this amazing woman poses some very, very important questions that we all need to be thinking about:

“I am the mother of a six year old autistic

child and a third grade teacher. I ask this of you because of a

workshop you offered some time ago and thought you would be able to

offer suggestions. If you would be so kind as to take the time to

question and answer what you believe we should be doing for our

children to prepare them for what they will be responsible for in

twenty years? What are you doing for yours, I know you have a few of

your own what are your thoughts? I would appreciate any time you could

offer to answering this question. It is a concern as I try to meet

their needs in the world of Public Education.” 

Over the next few weeks I will be posting some of my responses on my Human Design blog. I hope that you will join me in this conversation and that some of our collective insights might help you help the children in your life.

I will start with some of my personal thoughts and ideas and then follow up with some thoughts related to Human Design, as well as intentional parenting.

(If I sound radical or even slightly frustrated in sharing some of my ideas, please forgive me. This topic is a pretty hot topic for me personally as a mother of five children and a child development specialist. My intention is to offer some solutions and creative ideas but I can’t promise I won’t take off on a tangent periodically….)

My first thought in answering the question what should we be doing for our children to prepare them for what they will be responsible for is this. We have to “clean up” our own issues, conditioning and belief systems that keep us from seeing our children as the perfect creatures they are designed to be.

My dinner table has been a gathering place for many teenagers over the 8 years. I have borne witness to some pretty amazing conversations and brilliance coming out of the mouth of “babes”. If we are to deliver our world into the hands of the young adults, teens and children of today, I think that the world and its inhabitants are going to be in pretty good hands.

I think we are the ones we should be worried about first. I would argue that in order to effectively “raise” the next generation, we need to carefully examine some of our old beliefs that I believe no longer really apply to children of today.

Here are some basic beliefs that I invite us to think about releasing:

1. Children don’t have a natural urge to learn. If we leave them to their own devices, all they’ll do is play and goof off.

2. Children need to suffer to learn.

3. Discipline, rigor and repetition are the only ways a child can master anything.

4. Children misbehave because they want attention.

5. Children misbehave because they are spoiled.

6. Children misbehave because they are stubborn.

7. Children are selfish and self-centered and need to be trained to be compassionate, giving and to care about others.

8. Children can’t control how they behave.

9. Your child’s behavior is a reflection of your adequacy as a parent.

10. There is a formula to raising and education children “correctly”. Follow the formula and “poof”…you get a perfect child.

11. Play is a frivolous part of childhood. So is the freedom to experiment and explore.

12. Spanking and good, hard discipline = love to a child.

13. Total freedom = love to a child.

There are many more beliefs that we need to give some serious thought to. I welcome your thoughts and I propose a new paradigm for supporting children in the natural “unfolding” of who they are.

First and foremost, the most important question anyone who loves a child (or adults, even!) needs to ask is this:

Who are you and how can I best support you on your journey?

The second thing we need to consider is how has our own upbringing and social/collective conditioning contributed to our perception of children? How we are conditioned to “see” our children greatly influences our expectations and how we treat our children.

Let me clarify. Look at the picture below and see the image of two people’s faces looking at each other: 

Do you see them?

Now look at the image again. Do you see the vase?

Usually, when people look at this optical illusion, they will see the image that they expect to see. If I say faces, most people will see faces. If I say vase, most people will see a vase.

What you are conditioned to expect influences your perception.

This isn’t just woo-woo consciousness stuff. It’s actually neurobiology. Our brains contain an information selection system call the Reticular Activating System (RAS). At any given point in time, we have the potential to be overwhelmed by stimulation. The RAS creates an “information filter” in your brain so that you only pay attention to the stimulation that is alignment with your expectation.

How many times have you decided to purchase a new car and suddenly seen that car everywhere you go. Are there really more of those cars on the road or are you noticing them because that particular car is part of your information filter?

In relationships, people will often rise (or fail) to meet our expectation depending on our expectations and beliefs, i.e. our conditioning.

People have basic needs. Human Design shows us that in the highest expression of our True Self we are:

· Perceive ourselves as lovable

· Have high self-worth

· Live and express ourselves authentically

· We are courageous and take leaps of faith

· We know how to make effective decisions and have a sense of personal power

· We are emotionally wise

· We understand our own “knowingness” and trust our own insights

· We know how to leverage our energy so that we are sustainable in life

When children (and adults) are not being supported in expressing these energies appropriately, they will misbehave or in some way challenge the system.

In other words if a child (or adult) is not feeling, lovable, worthy, authentic or like their choices are respected and if they are frightened, emotional and tired, they will misbehave or have other challenges.

Misbehavior is simply a way to communicate that someone is not aligned with their Truth.

When we understand this, it helps us to rewrite some of our old beliefs about children. This awareness helps us understand that misbehavior is simply a child’s way of communicating that they aren’t feeling loved, valued, powerful and accepted for who they are.

When we, as teachers, parents, grandparents and people who used to be children ourselves understand these key needs, we can begin to support children in finding appropriate ways to communicate their needs and support the child in discovering ways to get their basic needs met.

I believe that each human being is a uniquely designed, magnificent being. (Children and adults alike.) The way in which we express and feel our lovability, power and worthiness will be different for each and every one of us.

True love comes when you accept and create space for someone to be exactly as they are created to be. Human Design is a powerful tool to help you truly see your Loved Ones (and yourself) and support them in expressing their Divine Magnificence.

When you understand how your child, parent, friends, lovers, partners are energetically wired, you learn how to honor who they are, treat them with respect and love them without the blinders of conditioned expectations.

Valentine’s Day is next week. (Truthfully, I’m not a huge fan of V-day. I prefer to love wildly every day of the year!)

In honor of True Love I am offering a Valentine’s Human Design Special. Book your Valentines Human Design reading for yourself, your child or your loved one (and, YES, we can also do a composite Relationship or Family Reading…) and receive %50 off the price of a full Human Design Reading (Normally $250.00).

In addition, you will receive the following bonues:
1. Soulmates By Design 2-hour MP3 recording

2. Composite charts for you and your partner or child

3. EFT for Parents E-Book

4. Notes from the Edge 1 and 2 E-books

5. Your Human Design chart

6. MP3 recording of your reading

7. The complete Empowered Family Training program, pre-recorded MP3’s

To purchase your reading, please click on the link below. (BTW, if this reading is a Valentine’s Gift, let me know. We will email your Valentine a beautiful Gift Certificate.)

http://www.marketerschoice.com/SecureCart/SecureCart.aspx?mid=C47CFCAC-4EFE-4576-BC3F-F7A8D02E8C65&pid=3c528328699543c4b2a8a75ff7dd90e2


**PLEASE NOTE** I will only be accepting 10 readings as my schedule is pretty full right now. (I’m getting ready to publish two new Human Design books.) I encourage you to register early for this special discounted reading. (Thanks for understanding!)

Stay tuned. Next week I will write more about supporting children. I want to share with you some thoughts on mutation and evolution and where I think we’re headed with these amazing kids!

Remember to hug each other tight and say, “I love you” at least 10 times a day!

Love, 

Karen