Why are kids fearless

While some adults engaged in movement in-between texts —tapping their foot or slapping their hand on their thigh—the children danced freely as if no one was watching. They were in their bodies, listening to and acting upon its impulses. Our resistance to dance and creative movement stems from being disconnected from the natural embodied state we once thrived in as children.

Children trust their body because they live more in their body and less in their head. They are not afraid to climb high walls, walk along railings, hang upside down from tree branches, and stand on top of the monkey bars.

They are not afraid to move with the creative impulses of their body. In our pursuit of knowledge we have lost contact with the body of knowledge that lies beneath the head. It is where the wild, reckless and free fool resides, the one that loves to let herself go, follow her intuition, and surrender to the naturally fluid and spontaneously expressive state that she is.

This YouTube video wonderfully depicts how children fully accept their body, and how adults easily find flaws in their own body. It reminds me how, as stated earlier, a child has no labels or expectations for her body until they are projected onto her either from people or the media.

She is happy with how she looks, which is an extension of being happy with who she is. This makes it quite easy for a child to run around naked without any thought of how she looks. Nakedness may in fact feel more natural to her than having clothes on. After all, she was born naked into the world. Nakedness is simply a metaphor for vulnerability, for openness, and yes, fearlessness. There is nothing to hide behind, nothing to protect oneself with. We are free to be as we are. Children do not have the shame adults have around their genitals.

They scratch and fondle themselves in public without a care in the world. They do so without any embarrassment if raised with a mature understanding of their body. Hence the popular euphemisms wee wee, tootie, front bottom, and doody! Children do not need these substitute names. Only we do! It is my opinion that as we learn to live with less fear and more love—as we learn to become childlike again—we will naturally, by extension, come back home into our bodies, and have less shame about our sexuality and physical appearance.

We will be like the children in the video, comfortable with our bodies, and the feelings within them. And we will have less judgment and fear about breast-feeding in public!! A child does not have these beliefs. Every child knows that he is an artist. That is because we are born Creative Spirits. We are Creators , born to create our lives. It is our natural impulse! A child has not forgotten this. She still feels, and is receptive to, the creative impulses of the infinite Ocean.

She has no problem expressing its nudges in the form of drawing, painting, building or sculpting. Her unbridled enthusiasm has no hints of self-judgment or self-evaluation. She simply wants you to love her creation as much as she does.

Social conditioning has caused us to sublimate our natural creative impulse, and the creative impulse of children. The need to ready children through excessive academia, and our various social pressures, is a topic that I, and others, have written about extensively. And they are both making the outcome—including grades—more important than the creative process itself.

Now, more than ever before, we need to reclaim the artist within so that we can nurture the artist in each child. In doing so, we help children cultivate their natural artistic gifts so that they can share them with the world.

Children remind us that play is not something we do. Rather, it is something we are! It is a state of being that we bring with us wherever we go. In our attempts to find time and money to play, children demonstrate how play can be experienced in the here and now. A child may suddenly come up to you wearing a box on his head. Another child may teach you how to relieve yourself of a massive booger using a pen. And another may walk down the street amusing himself by making little chirping sounds, then laughing out loud.

Children turn the mundane into the magical by being open to what wants to be expressed in any moment. Their incredible amounts of vital and imaginative energy act as a tremendous source of creativity that brings levity to the moment, and smiles to our faces.

When they hear this enough times, sadly, they will be less willing to give way to the spontaneous silliness that wants to emerge from their heart. They will live less in their heart and more in their head. Recently, while waiting for my flight to arrive, I had the pleasure of listening to a child while away the time by singing out loud, and without a care in the world. She walked, she bounced and she sang freely and beautifully to everyone at Gate 33, while bringing joy and smiles to all their faces.

At another departure gate, across from me sat two boys, laughing in hysterics while speaking gibberish to each other. What an absolute joy it was to see them lose themselves in the spirit of play! They laughed and laughed while conversing in their make-believe language as if no one else was around. Part of this is because we do not fully value or understand the deeper wisdom and gifts of play. When I think of this young girl singing, and the two boys conversing in gibberish, and how they did this without a care in the world, as if no one was in the room, I cannot help but see them as incredibly fearless and creative beings.

This is why remembering to play is a spiritual path—a path of growth and development for adults. It reviewed reports given by parents and teachers, and made observations of the children at their preschool locations, at home and in the lab. The study monitored children's tendency to fearlessness and their social-emotional characteristics at the beginning and end of one year, so as to determine the stability of this tendency. First it was revealed that the heart rate in children who showed a high level of fearless behavior was slow to start.

Next, the correlation between fearless behavior and social characteristics was evaluated, finding that the more fearless children revealed less empathy towards their peers and also had difficulty identifying facial expressions of fear, while they had no problem identifying other emotions such as anger, surprise, happiness or sadness.

These children also demonstrated higher levels of general aggression -- especially tending toward antisocial behavior such as taking advantage of friends, emotional shallowness and a lack of regret or guilt after doing something socially unacceptable. An interesting finding in this study was that despite their antisocial tendency, the children who show more fearlessness are quite sociable.

It seems that fearless behavior includes in it both positive and negative aspects," Dr. Kivenson-Baron explains. These findings appear in Psychological Medicine. The study in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry , which researchers conducted with a different set of two- and three-year-old Twin Study participants, compared instrumental and arbitrary imitation. The former means copying behaviors that serve a function, often done to learn a skill.

For this work, the team built a pair of experiments. In the first, children had to free a stuffed bird from a hard-to-open cage. Again, an adult modeled the steps, mixing essential and arbitrary directions. In both cases, researchers watched and coded which behaviors the children repeated and which they ignored. I was caught on the treadmill of more and more; status, money. I could never have predicted where I find myself now.

Now I am a meditation teacher, healer and author. I have written a book which I hope will help children around the world to never lose sight of who they really are so they can live their entire lives from authenticity. Lesley Phillips is a speaker, author, workshop leader, spiritual and meditation teacher based in Vancouver BC, Canada.

She can be reached at:- www. Your email address will not be published. Follow My Blog! Click here to follow this blog and view my other followers…. Tips to get pregnant. Diaper champ.

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