Do you have it in you?

"Are you in control when youre sleeping or when youre dreaming? No Are you in control of any other function in your body? Your heart is pumping all by itself. The food you stuff in the stomach gets digested all by itself. Do you have any control over them? Are you in control of the Sun and Moon moving around the globe or even the globe rotating on itself? Are you in control of the thoughts that come into your head?

So, when you realize you really do not have any control over all major things that are happening in you life, youll stand up and laugh. Oh, what am I thinking, am I in control of something? Then you will realize that the idea that you are in control is an illusion. And then you relax. And that relaxed state is called surrender.

When you cannot surrender, then you make effort, and effort makes you surrender. So when you say, I cannot relax, I will say, Ok, hold your fists tight and tight and tight. Then, when I ask you to make it tighter and you cannot do that, what do you do? Being tired, you just drop. This is coming to the other end with effort.

Judgment is very similar to self- blame and blaming others. We have to get out of this vicious circle of self-judgment. That is also the state of surrender. When you have surrendered to the Divine that means that you no longer judge yourself. Self-judgment is not necessary.

A child is so innocent, why? Because the child doesnt judge itself."

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Dreams

At night my mind does not much care

If what it thinks is here or there.

It tells me stories it invents

And makes up things that don't make sense.

I don't know why it does this stuff.

The real world seems quite weird enough.

- Bill WattersoN

The Indispensable Calvin & Hobbes

Yummy Shark Tummy

Saturday marked the end of a crazy week with Yuna (a very shy 3yr-old) walking into class jumping and giving me high-five’s. She was thrilled not to find Yuichi (an extremely hyper 4yr-old) in the class, who always comes into class with a long face but by the end of it has drained all energies out of Yuna and me with his notorious games and doings of throwing everything around the room.

Yuna was so excited that instead of our customary 3 nursery rhymes we did 5 with her jumping at the end of every song. I wouldn’t lie that was slightly relieved when 10 mins had gone and Yuichi hadn’t turned up, but even when he did that day, he was too sober and very sweet to both of us.

You see, most kids who come to study English (over the weekend of any weekday after school) dont really want to be there. They would rather be glued to their dear Nintendo or PS for an hour. Thus, there is a cold war between humans (i.e. me as a teacher) and these awesome mind-boggling gadgets to compete for the love and attention of a child. This is why we are told to have tons of games during lessons so that the kids feel like they’re playing instead of learning a foreign language.

Slam, Memory and Dice games are everyone’s favorites. Recently I introduced a game “Yummy Yummy in Shark Tummy”. Each student had a fish stickers with their name put on the board which was filled with 10 bubbles put in descending order. 1 being was lowest was in the shark’s mouth! Every wrong answer got the players closer to the shark and in the end, so they had to try and speak correctly. The game was a bit gruesome for some kids but most of them crazily enjoyable and laughed off their seats.

Without fail, no matter the age, students were thrilled seeing me be the first Yummy Yummy in Shark Tummy... kids today are wicked!!!

(Need to get back to work to take shots of the shark n fish cards. Will upload pictures in a day or two.)