The Law of Least Action for Nine-Year Olds.
When your mind and heart are truly open abundance will flow to you effortlessly and easily.
Question:
I attended the Seduction of Spirit seminar some time ago, and have had a meditation and yoga practice for about six months now. I am focusing on the seven spiritual laws – one each day – and have a question regarding the Law of Least Effort as it applies to parenting. I have a nine-year-old son, and he seems to reject doing anything that’s the least bit difficult. As an example, he doesn’t want to read. His assignments at school call for him to read each night for 30 minutes, and take tests on books he reads each week, accomplishing a certain amount of reading per grade period. Each day this exercise becomes a battle. When he sees the amount he has to read, he responds with tears, fits, and a sense of hopelessness. I have been forcing him into the exercise, hoping that by building a habit, things will get easier day by day. This has been my approach to most aspects of parenting. I am realizing, however, that this approach is very much centered in control – me imposing my will onto my son, forcing him to accept my opinion or my truth. I am confused about how to help my son develop good habits without force and resistance. How can I apply the law of least effort without having him simply give up?
Response:
I appreciate the difficulty you face here. Typically the applying the law of least effort is most useful where adults have a lifetime of habit of trying to get what they want by pushing, forcing, controlling, and manipulating. This ego conditioning obscures the natural course of evolution that is already flowing through their life, organizing what they truly need. The law of least effort serves as a corrective teaching showing us that with less individual effort, our inner nature is allowed to accomplish more.
In the case of your son, it is not ego drive that is obscuring his natural desire to learn, it is inertia rooted in some unexplored fear. His exaggerated reaction to reading with crying and fits suggests that there is something he is afraid of risking here. See what you can do to find out what bothers him so much about reading. Try different approaches to see if there are ways for him to read that don’t make him feel threatened. I’d suggest letting him select reading material that he likes, even if initially it is comic books. (Teachers will often get on board with this too.) Also, get two books and you or your husband can read along with him, in case it is a question of him not liking to read alone, or if it’s a matter of him getting frustrated with unknown words. What you want to do is find ways to remove the mental and emotional obstacles he has to finding his inner thirst for learning. Once he has found that joy from gaining knowledge, then he will be a life-long learner and he will be able to stay aligned to that natural flow of evolution in his life.
Love,
Deepak
