This is one powerful Dose. This is unusual in that usually I use the Doses to distract our painful thinking with fascinating things, but if we’re looking for something short and inspirational just shoot straight to the last video. But…
The first three entries work as a group and they’re there to demonstrate that children will shrink or expand to suit our expectations and that the difference between the two can be incredible.
These postings are longer in nature, but collectively they are extremely powerful and the one on blindness will almost be unbelievable to you. You can listen online or download the podcasts. This combination of offerings is brilliant and they’re designed to intersect in such a way as to have the sum equal more than the total of the parts, thereby exposing a larger idea about belief and its importance in all of our lives (even the non-religious).
This coming week I’ll be talking about the parenting process and how many adults get so caught up in superficial details and general busy-ness that they forget what parenting itself actually is.
Parents are teaching us quite literally how to be in the world. Kids don’t learn these things as word-based concepts, they simply learn it by watching their parents in the world and by believing what their parents tell them. So in the case below, some kids parents allowed their kids to walk to school but some other kid’s parents felt that that was too dangerous and so they called the police. It’s quite the discussion:
The Debate Over Free Range Parenting
*
Next we’ll meet the least fearful parent ever. But that lack of fear resulted in a bonafide miracle. And I mean an actual miracle. Because if a parent can smother a child’s life with the belief that they’re constantly in danger, this incredible mother helped create an actual miracle by believing in her son so much that he became the first blind person that ever developed the ability to actually see. And he’s taught other people to believe it too.
Now, when science watches them navigate very clearly around a room just like a sighted person, despite that their eyes do not work, the scientists see that it is their visual cortex that’s guiding them just as it would for a sighted person!
What we believe about ourselves changes us for better or for worse. So we need to be be extremely careful about how we talk to ourselves. Please take the time to download the podcast or online stream this incredibly inspirational documentary that just gets more and more amazing the longer it goes:
How a mother’s belief literally made a blind boy see
*
If you’ve listened to that documentary already then you know how amazing it is. And that stuff doesn’t just happen with blindness. World-famous percussionist Evelyn Glennie was deaf by the time she was a teenager. But all hearing really is, is your brain interpreting the vibrations of the bones in your ears.
Evelyn couldn’t do that, she learned to listen with her entire body and that turned her into the first-ever “deaf” student to attend Britain’s top music school. Fortunately, along with challenging our definition of “deaf,” Evelyn also plays for during the talk. Enjoy:
[ted id=103]
We’ve all had a turn at feeling like we don’t fit in. Well here is a wonderfully inspirational video about how one small change in what we believe about ourselves can make a massive change in our lives. You could do something like this in your life today. You’re worth it. The only question is, what’s it going to be and when are you going to start? 🙂
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIHtuKc3Gjg%5D
*
Don’t forget you’re awesome. And so is everyone else. So have a great one. All the best.
peace. s
