Waldorf News

Surviving to Thriving

Insights from a Workshop with Jaimen McMillan

Many teachers report that they experience situations that often wear them down and even “get under their skin.” Parents frequently report that they are exhausted. That they easily lose their patience. They feel “thin-skinned”, and even the smallest event can irritate them.

Teaching and parenting bring a myriad of real-life challenges with them.

There are ways, however, that we can create ever-widening safe spaces, around both the adult and the child, where we could learn, not merely to survive these encounters, but to move through them and thrive.

Using rippling space and spatial buffers in the right way, what once may have been experienced as argumentative or aggressive behavior can become clearer, non-confrontational, and even more enjoyable.

A person and her surrounding space has to be considered as a unit, as a fluid continuum.

Every individual is much more than her body. A person is her body and the other spaces she can learn to inhabit.

We need to learn to perceive the enveloping spaces as parts of us. These spaces are as real and as important as our visible body.

Master athletes and famous performing artists truly expanded the borders of their bodies into fluid space, enhancing their connection, ability, and accomplishments. Athletes, spectators, and fans live for these graceful moments of spatial transcendence.

A basic premise of Spacial Dynamics is that a person’s behavior and consciousness is strongly influenced by the spaces that she inhabits.

To make this point clearer, Jaimen McMillan gave the analogy of a person having different “skins” to live in. Spacial Dynamics suggests that it is possible to create five “skins” (or five surrounding spaces) to act and interact with. Each skin builds around and upon the previous spatial stage.

The first skin is the body space. The goal here is to inhabit one’s entire body as a unit, as a unified, enveloped gestalt.

Our modern world tends to fragment us. Information is often fed solely to the head, where one can easily get stuck. When segmented, one’s thoughts are not in communication with the heart.

There is also a common occurrence where the heart promises to do something, but there is a division in the body at the waist that makes it difficult for the person to actually stand up and do what they want to do.

Body image problems too can disrupt a harmonious experience of a healthy Body Space. Each part of the body offers us unique powers of perception. Children and youth are more likely to accept and listen to a person who stands with unified posture, wholesomely inhabiting her Body Space. 

Children can perceive when adults retract, ignore, retreat, isolate, or vacate parts of the body. Children will often direct their attention unswervingly to these very vulnerable parts of the body that the adult is not properly living in.

As adults we can, however, take the hint and learn to accept, integrate, and even celebrate our entire body as our unique space. Modeling embodiment gives the children security and a home base to learn from.

We practiced the Spacial Dynamics exercise called “The Silhouette” as a way for both an adult and a child to more fully embody this first skin, by awakening the contours of the body. This exercise outlines the entire body, and as one participant expressed it: “It made me feel connected from my head to my feet”.

The second skin is our Personal Space. It is easier to hold our own in the world when we learn to fill out our own personal space, which is a circular area about a meter in front of us. The “Swiss Clock” exercise was offered to help adults, youth, and children create, experience, and maintain their own personal space borders and those of others. It helps to keep what could have been perceived as an affront “at arm’s length”. No longer “in your face”.

The third skin is the Interpersonal Space. The interpersonal space begins by building invisible, but perceptible bridges in the spaces between two or more people.

We did hand clapping games as examples of how societies in the past imparted the culture of interpersonal space, rhythmically alternating between touch and distance in shared spaces.

We spoke about how important it is that parents, teachers, children, and youth find regular ways to create these delicate connections so that there are spatial bridges in place that can serve as channels of communication.

Playing catch, jumping rope, singing games, circus arts are simple examples of a myriad of movement activities that create spatial bonds, traces in space, that can help the children connect, and to re-connect in times when the challenging situations arise.

The importance of playing interactive and supportive games before teaching sports in school, became clear with this sentence: “Isn’t it a good idea to teach children to play together, before we teach them to compete against each other?” 

Games are inclusive, playful ways of developing interpersonal space. Once interpersonal spaces have been light-heartedly established, middle school youth are able to enter into sports in ways that they can challenge themselves and others fairly, respectfully, and effectively.

The fourth skin is called Peripheral Space or Social Skin. This is an inversion of space as we know it. It is space turned inside out.

Successful teaching, parenting, and leadership use Peripheral Space when they begin with the other person, by addressing the other at the place where that person is.

Outdated methods of teaching and parenting were often aimed towards the student: comments were frequently directed at children.

Adults can learn a spatial shift and use Peripheral Space, which is a child-centered approach to education and parenting. It involves leaving our own point of view and beginning with the “skin” or the space of the other, with the students, with your children.

Once one has learned to maintain one’s own Body Space, Personal Space, and Interpersonal Space it is possible to perceive the children where they are. By changing the focus of our spatial scope of perception to the child/ youth, we can get a better idea just “where they are coming from,” and where they may be able to go.

Geometry can be a helpful tool to become more objective in teaching or parenting: One could randomly designate the adult as “A”. One could designate the pupil or child as “B”. If an adult addresses a child in a pointed way, like an arrow from “A” (the adult) at “B” (the child), the child’s personal space often retracts and withdraws.

Worse yet, this spatial jab may elicit an immediate snap-back reflex at the adult. As inappropriate as the child’s/ youth’s response may be, it is an accurate imitation of the A>B geometry movement that was done towards them.

The child/ youth may experience this movement as confrontational, as it is coming directly at them from the adult and they have not yet acquired the necessary spaces to be able to buffer this straightforwardness.

This snap back can be experienced by the adult as unsolicited, uncalled for, hurtful, an unprovoked attack…be it a sullen, verbal, or even an impolite body gesture. In worst cases the response can even take on a reflexive, physical confrontation.

The A>B geometry has been used for ages as a method of teaching, parenting, correcting etc. and it is ingrained in our society, and often used as a default methodology. The Point A to Point B geometry just simply doesn’t work with the children and youth of today anymore. They simply cannot “take it”!

Enter “Point C”. Point C draws the attention away from the child/ youth, and away from the parent or educator to an external zone. Point A (the adult) brings the child’s awareness, Point B, to a neutral place in space.

For instance, children (B) can be helped to do chores, if the parent (A) puts a list on the fridge, (Point C). So instead of pointing at the teenager and saying, “It’s your day to take out the trash” (A>B), the parent can point to the list and say, “It’s trash day today”. Then both (A and B) are looking at the list, (Point C).

The youngster is more likely to respond with action because they did not retreat as they may have with an A>B directive, nor did they ricochet immediately on the A>B line back towards the adult. Placing the list outside the teenager’s personal space, in a neutral place, creates a new geometrical form of interaction, which is triangular in shape. 

This same geometry is even helpful when saying something positive, as in complimenting. When commenting on someone’s work (be it a drawing. handwork, an essay, and accomplishment etc.) it is different when the comments are made in the direction of the work in question (point C).

The location of the attention and conversation is then the work, and not the creator of the work (B). This makes it possible that parent/teacher (A) and child/ student (B) can meet at a safe place, (C), the work itself.

This fifth, and final, space is the Supra-Personal Space. With this last skin, one begins to sense that each person is a puzzle piece that is integral to a larger mysterious puzzle.

The space becomes truly Supra-Personal when one experiences that the entire puzzle is outside and inside one’s embodied space, one’s Body Space, at the same time. 

We have all experienced Supra-Personal Space. For some it was a moment when one feels one with nature. For another it might be experiencing the mystery of a piece of music. Perhaps the magic of mathematics.

For others, a moment in meditation or prayer where one experienced something limitless and yet deeply personal at the same time. Or maybe it was a poem. A simple phrase that spoke to your inner core yet knowing that this truth was there before you were born and will exist after you depart.

In these moments you were outside and inside at the same time. You were connected with what was greater than your personal self and yet, you could discover that very essence also inside your own body: Supra-Personal Space.

Children are looking for adults who cultivate their Supra-Personal Space. The children cannot name it, but they have a sense for it. They long to learn from an adult who “knows something by heart”. They are searching for adults who know something “inside and out”.

They recognize and respect an adult who has made friends with the essence behind what they are saying and doing…someone who is “walking their talk”. Someone who is walking in their Supra-Personal Space.

How an adult goes about cultivating their Supra-Personal life is deeply individual and personal. The wonder is that as different as the approaches are, permeating a subject until it speaks to you, leads to an experience of the universal. 

Getting to know and befriend the essence behind their subject is the homework of the teacher. Parents are asked to permeate the patterns and processes of child development.

The objectivity of these processes can help them not to get lost in singular, difficult moments, but to guide the children back on track by themselves modeling the ideals behind what and how they are parenting,

Teaching and parenting then have a simple task: introduce the children/ youth to their true friends: the essence behind the material they are teaching. The essence behind the ideals they are representing in their parenting.  

Once the children/youth have been introduced to these Supra-Personal Spaced friends, children/youth are free to form their own friendships with them (at Point C). Once formed, these ideals and ideas will become the children’s /youth’s true friends for life! 

Find out more about Spacial Dynamics® by visiting:
spacialdynamics.com

A newly released documentary, as well as exercise videos are available at:
spacial-dynamics.teachable.com