Click on Thumbnail to enlarge

Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier and More Secure Kids

At the Summit, Large Conference Room, 205 Sunnyview Lane, Kalispell
Lecture: Friday, Sept. 17 7 - 9 pm
Workshop: Saturday, Sept. 18 8:30 am - 12:30 pm

Montana OPI approved for 5 CEUs for attending BOTH lecture and workshop

Non-CEU Cost: $15 for Friday Lecture only, $45 for Saturday Workshop only or $45 for BOTH lecture and workshop
CEU Cost: $55 if register and pay at least 48 hours before Friday lecture, $65 if less than 48 hours - MUST ATTEND BOTH LECTURE AND WORKSHOP TO RECEIVE CEUs

TO REGISTER:
CALL CATHERINE, 406-756-0405 TO REGISTER,
OR,
Mail Check for proper amount (see cost info above) made out to GWS, attach a note stating your full name, your contact phone and email, and state if you are registering for CEUs or Non-CEUs (CEU: Continuing Education Units for professionals like teachers, social workers, health care, child care, counselors, etc.; non-CEU: not seeking continuing education credit).

Those registering for CEUs need to indicate this on attached note and make check out for $55 and mailed to be received by GWS PO Box 626, Kalispell, MT 59903 by Wednesday, Sept 15. If check will not be received in GWS PO Box by Wednesday, Sept. 15 and you are registering for CEUs then the amount must be $65. Please Call Catherine if you are a late (past Wednesday Sept 15 deadline) registrant for CEUs, 756-0405. You may also call Catherine to ask for further information or if you have questions about what to do for registering: 756-0405.

Kim John Payne, M.Ed, author, therapist and Waldorf educator, will be coming to Kalispell to lead this workshop based on his popular new book of the same title.

Kim has over 25 years of experience as a family counselor and education consultant. His extensive experience, his knowledge of contemporary research, and his own research all indicate that the pace and stress of modern life can produce “cumulative stress disorders” in children and their families.

Simplicity Parenting offers a simple, orderly, and effective pathway to simplifying in four realms at home, which reduces stress on children and their carers, and allows room for connection, creativity, and relaxation.

These four realms for simplifying are:

o Environment: Uncluttering too much stuff at home....

o Rhythm: Increasing predictability by introducing rhythmic moments for connection and calm...

o Scheduling: Soothing violent schedules brings moments for Being into all the ‘Doing’...

o Unplugging: Reducing the influence of adult concerns, media and consumerism on children and families to increase resilience, social and emotional intelligence.

Parents who take steps along this pathway to simplify their homes and their schedules, to introduce more predictable rhythms and to filter out concerns which children are not yet able to cope with, find that their children…

* Are calmer and happier

* Do better socially and emotionally

* Are more focused at school

* Find it easier to comply with family rules

* Become less picky eaters

These parents also find that they themselves:

* Have a clearer picture of what they value as parents

* Are more united with each other in their parenting

* Have more time and energy for connection, relaxation and fun

To check out more about Simplicity Parenting, visit the website: www.simplicityparenting.com.

Kim John Payne, M.Ed, is an Australian who has, for 27 years, worked throughout the world as a counselor, consultant, researcher, Waldorf educator, and university educator.

He has been helping children, adolescents and families explore issues such as social difficulties with siblings and classmates, attention and behavioral issues at home and school, and a range of emotional issues such as defiance, aggression, addiction and self-esteem.

He regularly gives keynote addresses at international conferences for educators, parents and therapists and runs workshops and trainings around the world. He is on faculty at Antioch University New England.

His latest book Simplicity Parenting (Random House) has received international media attention and has been featured in Time Magazine, Parenting Magazine, NPR, BBC, ABC, NBC & CBS television.

For more information, visit www.simplicityparenting.com.

Learn about The Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids, with Kim John Payne, MEd, based on his recent book Simplicity Parenting.

See announcement below for all the details.

Heads Up: read Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne over the summer as we will be discussing this at the SEPTEMBER 1 meeting. This will also prepare those who are planning to attend the Simplicity Parenting workshop September 17 and 18.

The next meeting is set for Wednesday, Sept. 1 from 6:00 -8:00 pm at Colters Coffee on Main in Kalispell for some knitting and book discussion. Bring a handwork project of some sort, even if it is some buttons that need to be sewn back on!

By age 12, I had a rote reply for grown-ups’ quizzical looks when they heard I went to a Waldorf school: “It’s based on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner.” Blank stare. “He was an Austrian philosopher who believed in teaching the whole student — mind, body and soul.” Luckily no one ever asked me to elaborate, because I’d have been at a loss for words — except to say that we students got to do lots of drawing and painting, which I loved, but we couldn’t skip eurythmy class (yuck). Any serious discussions of pedagogic method and what Steiner called his “spiritual science,” anthroposophy, took place out of earshot in the teachers’ room. My only mental picture of Steiner (1861-1925) came from a dim black and white photo showing a stern mouth and X-ray eyes that made me glad this guy wasn’t our headmaster. Oh, well, I reasoned, as soon as I enter the real world after graduation, it’s Goodbye, Dr. Steiner.

In fact, decades later, I keep bumping into him, and each encounter makes me want to deepen our acquaintance. A gardener I met praised the ecological marvels of biodynamic farming, a Steiner innovation. An art historian introduced me to the Goetheanum, a templelike edifice that Steiner — an expert on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theories of natural metamorphosis and the physiology of color — designed to anchor the anthroposophical community in Dornach, Switzerland. An English professor pointed out that Saul Bellow had been a Steiner devotee. These were mere hints, though, compared with the insights I expect to gain from “Rudolf Steiner: Alchemy of the Everyday,” a traveling exhibition organized by the Vitra Design Museum in collaboration with the Kunstmuseums of Wolfsburg and Stuttgart. When it opens on May 13 in Wolfsburg, Germany, it will be Steiner’s first major retrospective ever staged outside the anthroposophic community.
The images that Vitra’s chief curator and deputy director, Mateo Kries, sent me promise a vivid portrait in the round. Watercolors and sculptures, furniture and architectural models, stage sets and eurythmy robes, lab instruments and maps will flesh out Steiner’s ideas on (among other topics) prenatal existence and child development, environmentalism and economics, medicine and reincarnation. This polymath and mystic also found time to fit the design of necklaces, headache-remedy labels, stained-glass windows and radiator covers into his cosmic Gesamtkunstwerk.

“Today, design and architecture have become very focused on technology, removed from spiritual or social questions,” Kries said. “It is fascinating to examine how Steiner dared to develop this overall vision that included everything from metaphysics and natural science to art.”

I would never have dreamed that “hands-on” could apply to the remote Dr. Steiner of my boyhood. But there he is in a 1919 photograph, dressed in a workman’s smock and grasping a chisel as he contemplates the gigantic wooden statue “Representative of Man” that he was carving for the Goetheanum, then under construction. This was actually the first of two Goetheanums: a curvaceous, double-domed, mainly timber structure that burned down in 1922. The second, an angular outcropping of reinforced concrete, broke ground in 1924 and still stands. Vitra has delved into archives and private collections for little-known evidence of the creative processes that shaped them: terse pen-and-ink sketches aquiver with nervous urgency, lumps of plasticine molded by Steiner’s fingers. These maquettes were guides for the engineers, architects and artisans who assisted him on the dozen meticulously detailed studios, houses and utility buildings he clustered around the Goetheanum.

Interior photo of the Goetheanum, circa 1925

Located in Dornach (near Basel), Switzerland, the Goetheanum is the world center for anthroposophy, which is Steiner’s name for his philosophy (anthro – human, sophia – wisdom, “wisdom of the human being”). The Goetheanum, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, includes two performance halls (1500 seats), gallery and lecture spaces, a library, a bookstore, and administrative spaces for the Anthroposophical Society. Trainings and conferences are held here for teachers, farmers, doctors, therapists and other professions.

Anthroposophical ideas have been applied practically in many areas besides architecture, including Waldorf education, special education (Camphill schools), biodynamic agriculture, anthroposophical medicine, ethical banking and the arts.

That question refers to the Waldorf impulse here in Montana, as the impulse is quite large and thriving in other parts of the country and world. The first school in Stuttgart, Germany nearly 100 years ago, however, was in a similar mind frame then as it seems this area is now. After years of destruction by World War I, the people of Europe closely felt, because they lived it, the horrors of war in their own back yard. The destruction was visible all around them, the losses in their families deeply felt, the economic hardship as close and as palpable as the hunger pangs in the belly. My own grandfather fought in that war as a US soldier, was shot and gassed in trench warfare in France, lost a lung, and nearly died before the age of 19 years old. Today in our valley, while hardly a post-war environment, still, we see the yellow ribbons, the plaques and displays of support for our troops, and yes even some memorials for the recent combat activity in which our country is currently embroiled. The ubiquitous TV screen now found just about everywhere we go shows us constant reminders of the current destruction caused by war and other disasters. The current economic downtrend also reminds us of our fragility.

Many people flocked to Rudolf Steiner’s post-WWI lectures, in which he attempted to awaken them to idea of the underlying social chaos accompanying the war’s end. At least one among them, the director of the Waldorf factory, was able to hear Steiner’s call for moving our attention away from the preoccupation with fear of death and instead focus on the other end of life, birth.

The subsequent founding of the first Waldorf school in 1919 was based on Steiner’s philosophy that the basic task of education, indeed of all social renewal, was to overcome human self-interest, or egoism, and at the heart of this self-interest was the preoccupation with death. He contended that the best training for teachers and parents (who are also children’s teachers) was their own honest struggle for self-transformation. He also urged to view the task of the parent and the teacher as a moral spiritual task, learning how to continue the work of higher spiritual beings, done before birth, within the life of the children we have to raise and teach. The struggle for self-transformation can be reworded more simply: parents and teachers each must BE the person you wish your child(ren) to become. The view of the task of education can be better understood with the following excerpt from Steiner’s first lecture to the Waldorf faculty as part of their teacher training for opening the first Waldorf school:

“Although we can physically see children only after their birth, we need to be aware that birth is only a continuation. We do not want to only look at what the human being experiences after death, that is, at the spiritual continuation of the physical. We want to be aware that physical existence is a continuation of the spiritual, and that what we have to do in education is a continuation of what higher beings have done without our assistance. Our form of educating can have the correct attitude only when we are aware that our work with young people is a continuation of what higher beings have done before birth.”
Click READ MORE below to continue article

Click on thumbnail to view Poster

Kingfishers grades students will present Daniel in the Lion's Den, Friday, January 29 at 6:15 pm in the KM Theatre in Kalispell. Free for kids and by donation for adults. Come enjoy the timeless story of goodness, honor and having the courage to be true to oneself.