Twenty five years ago, I began a quest. I was 39, had been teaching for 17 years and writing off and on for the same time period. I had been watching high school kids struggling with school and parents and broken emotions. I had been watching adults around me tripping over divorce and alcohol and frustrated careers. I wondered if there was something that could help people find a path less crooked. I began to search for a natural, non-addictive aid that could help me, my family and others to become unstuck from bad habits and self-defeating thoughts. I sensed that the answer to positive change was not in a pill or a bottle. It was in the mind. But, how to reach it? How to get past years of negative thoughts that had carved ruts into our psyche? How to offer new choices for reflection and behavior to someone who was feeling hopeless and helpless?
My quest led me down several roads. One of these was hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). I began training with psychologists in PA and NJ to learn how to gently focus the mind on ways for achieving reasonable and desirable changes. Over three years I attended small seminars and international conferences where practitioners from Brazil to Italy to Canada shared their strategies. I became a registered hypnotherapist and a certified Master Practitioner of NLP. For four years, I offered consulting and counseling to several hundred clients and corporations. The needs ranged from improving communication skills for a thriving Philadelphia business to helping a woman deal with terminal cancer. If I hadn't taped the 60 minute trance sessions so that clients could listen in the future for reinforcement, few would have believed that more than several minutes had passed since I asked them to close their eyes. Buddha said: "The mind is everything. What you think, you become." I saw evidence of this over and over again, then and now.
Another road that I followed, and follow still, was seeking the internal spirit that lies in each of us. In Eastern cultures, this internal spirit or energy is called prana, chi and ki. I began to study Aikido, a Japanese martial art founded by Morihei Ueshiba. I attended a dojo in Philadehphia for a year until I broke my left collarbone one Sunday morning at class from a misplaced grand roll. Although I left Aikido, I embraced its powerful principles. I had not yet felt ki, the energy that the sensei (teachers) at the dojo spoke of often, but I believed that it existed. I saw tiny, third degree black belt women throw huge men across a mat with little effort. They touched spots on my arm to block my ki that made my legs buckle, and they threw themselves high through the air with complete abandon and never hurt themselves.
I began to study Tai Chi and Chi Gung with several sifu (teachers). Tai Chi is a form of moving meditation. Chi Gung is standing meditation. Both involve rhythmical, deep breathing. Breath is another translation for the word chi. Tai Chi, although beautiful and slow, is also a very powerful martial art. Lyrical names of movements like Snake Creeps Down and Playing the Guitar can translate into bone crunching strikes and joint pressures. After a decade of practice, I began to feel chi in my hands. It often felt like electric ants in my fingers and palms. After another five years of practice, I began to be aware of the skin temperature of people around me. Once, at a Chi Gung seminar, I was asked to place my hands near the body of a complete stranger in attendance. We were tasked with trying to feel any noticable differences of skin temperature. I felt nothing of significance until I placed my right hand over his right wrist. I quickly removed it because I felt a hot, almost burning sensation. When I asked him if he had any medical concerns that involved his right wrist, his eyes grew wide. "I have surgery scheduled for carpal tunnel syndrome on my right wrist tomorrow. How the heck did you know that?"
My quest continues. As health issues surface, as parents pass away, values change. There are new roads to explore and new wisdoms to discover. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross explains: "People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beaurty is revealed if there is light from within."
Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Until They're Not
In September 1969 I began my education career. I was 21 and looked 16. I was teaching English to 17 and 18 year old seniors at Kennett Junior/Senior High School in Kennett Square, PA. A moratorium peace demonstration against the war in Vietnam drew massive numbers in Washington, DC and other cities. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider were playing at the drive-in. A little, four day festival in Woodstock, NY had drawn 350,000 people only the month before, and a new TV show called Sesame Street was on National Educational Television (later to become PBS). Jimmy Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and Simon and Garfunkel were on the radio. Lloyd Alexander (who would later speak to one of my classes at Upper Darby High School and go on to endorse my writing) won the Newbery Award for The High King. A postage stamp was 6 cents, gas was 32.9 cents a gallon, and the median household income was $9,302.
It was a time of excitment and worry and change. Hair, including mine, was growing longer. Skirt lengths were growing shorter. I was spanking brand new and eager to try untried things.
One day, I presented this quote from Jules Verne in class: "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real."
"Your assigment," I said, with all of the confidence I could muster, "is to think ahead 25 years and come up with a new invention or a radical change on a current one. It has to be feasible and doable in 1994. You'll think through how it will work, who might buy it, and what it might cost. You'll have graphics or a working model, and you have to present your invention orally to the class."
I had no idea how this assignment would fly. I met with each student in advance to approve their original concept, and helped them, as best as I could, with their research. There was no internet then, although that's not quite true. ARPANET, the precursor of the internet, came online in 1969 to connect UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
Forty two years later, it has been my fascination and delight to remember the incredible inventions that hundreds of students at Kennett Junior/Senior High School, Upper Darby High School and Strath Haven Middle School presented to me and their peers. Many were prophetic, insightful and remarkable in their scope. These came from honors students and struggling students. They worked solo with me or had help from parents, grandparents and neighbors. Their drawings were complex or simple. And, sometimes, their audiences hooted with laughter at the seemingly outrageous concepts that these student dreamers were proposing to them.
I don't know if any members of those classroom audiences will recall those speeches, but, if they do, they won't be laughing now. Here are some of those seemingly implausible ideas that I heard for the first time from middle school and high school kids decades before they came to pass:
* Build a larger version of a toy, remote controlled airplace and attach video capability for recon on military missions in remote area. When the student inventor suggested arming them for combat missions, the class suggested that he had some screws loose. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have played a major role in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 10 years, as well as saving countless lives in wilderness rescues.
* Construct a rail on which a train would glide quickly and with little sound on magnetic levitation. There would be no conventional engines, no standard fuels, and no side rail or overhead wires. A number of students declared that this was impossible to pull off and would never happen. I wonder if any of them have ridden on the Maglev trains in Europe and Asia.
* Replace silicon chips in computers with light-driven sources and conduits of information. This was 18 years before I had heard of FIOS. And, the world's first photovoltain circuit was invented last year at the Univ of PA.
* Develop a steering system that would allow automobiles to assist in parking themselves in tight urban settings. Toyota introduced the IPAS (intelligent Parking Assist System) in 2004.
* Place wind collectors above signage on interstate highways so that tractor trailers, buses and other large vehicles would provide a constant source of wind energy to convert for lights on the road. Not yet invented, to my knowledge.
The list goes on and on, with many students over the last several years predicting holographic images projected from classroom walls, time travel to places of historical interest, and communication devices embedded inside our bodies. Electronic readers for E-Books, IPhones, and IPads are not revolutionary to them. They anticipate that their backpacks will completely disappear with DVDs and E-Books replacing their heavy textbooks. On-line college courses are standard fare, and cyber schools are commonplace.
For me, it is all revolutionary. The lastest issue of The Authors Guild Bulletin is devoted to apps. Before that, it was about the influence of digital publishing on conventional paper publishing. Borders bookstores are no more. Amazon and dozens of other sites offer free digital publishing with attractive royalities. The very length of writing is being influenced by the size of the screens of cell phones. Publishers and literary agents are scrambling to make sense of this reshaping of the delivery of text to readers. The fact that minutes after I type this, this blog can be read by anyone in the world with access to the web, is mind blowing to me.
And, I am delighted by it! In the very near future, I will be releasing my first digital book. My son, Jim, a MICA graduate and prize winning illustrator, is creating the cover. I hope to follow this first digital book with many more.
Had someone told me in 1969 that I would be communicating with people from Canada to China by electronic means through a digital format, I, like many of my former students, would have laughed at them. But, as Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the fabled USS Enterprise, said: "Things are only impossible until they're not."
Copyright (2011) by James Hugh Comey
It was a time of excitment and worry and change. Hair, including mine, was growing longer. Skirt lengths were growing shorter. I was spanking brand new and eager to try untried things.
One day, I presented this quote from Jules Verne in class: "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real."
"Your assigment," I said, with all of the confidence I could muster, "is to think ahead 25 years and come up with a new invention or a radical change on a current one. It has to be feasible and doable in 1994. You'll think through how it will work, who might buy it, and what it might cost. You'll have graphics or a working model, and you have to present your invention orally to the class."
I had no idea how this assignment would fly. I met with each student in advance to approve their original concept, and helped them, as best as I could, with their research. There was no internet then, although that's not quite true. ARPANET, the precursor of the internet, came online in 1969 to connect UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.
Forty two years later, it has been my fascination and delight to remember the incredible inventions that hundreds of students at Kennett Junior/Senior High School, Upper Darby High School and Strath Haven Middle School presented to me and their peers. Many were prophetic, insightful and remarkable in their scope. These came from honors students and struggling students. They worked solo with me or had help from parents, grandparents and neighbors. Their drawings were complex or simple. And, sometimes, their audiences hooted with laughter at the seemingly outrageous concepts that these student dreamers were proposing to them.
I don't know if any members of those classroom audiences will recall those speeches, but, if they do, they won't be laughing now. Here are some of those seemingly implausible ideas that I heard for the first time from middle school and high school kids decades before they came to pass:
* Build a larger version of a toy, remote controlled airplace and attach video capability for recon on military missions in remote area. When the student inventor suggested arming them for combat missions, the class suggested that he had some screws loose. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have played a major role in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 10 years, as well as saving countless lives in wilderness rescues.
* Construct a rail on which a train would glide quickly and with little sound on magnetic levitation. There would be no conventional engines, no standard fuels, and no side rail or overhead wires. A number of students declared that this was impossible to pull off and would never happen. I wonder if any of them have ridden on the Maglev trains in Europe and Asia.
* Replace silicon chips in computers with light-driven sources and conduits of information. This was 18 years before I had heard of FIOS. And, the world's first photovoltain circuit was invented last year at the Univ of PA.
* Develop a steering system that would allow automobiles to assist in parking themselves in tight urban settings. Toyota introduced the IPAS (intelligent Parking Assist System) in 2004.
* Place wind collectors above signage on interstate highways so that tractor trailers, buses and other large vehicles would provide a constant source of wind energy to convert for lights on the road. Not yet invented, to my knowledge.
The list goes on and on, with many students over the last several years predicting holographic images projected from classroom walls, time travel to places of historical interest, and communication devices embedded inside our bodies. Electronic readers for E-Books, IPhones, and IPads are not revolutionary to them. They anticipate that their backpacks will completely disappear with DVDs and E-Books replacing their heavy textbooks. On-line college courses are standard fare, and cyber schools are commonplace.
For me, it is all revolutionary. The lastest issue of The Authors Guild Bulletin is devoted to apps. Before that, it was about the influence of digital publishing on conventional paper publishing. Borders bookstores are no more. Amazon and dozens of other sites offer free digital publishing with attractive royalities. The very length of writing is being influenced by the size of the screens of cell phones. Publishers and literary agents are scrambling to make sense of this reshaping of the delivery of text to readers. The fact that minutes after I type this, this blog can be read by anyone in the world with access to the web, is mind blowing to me.
And, I am delighted by it! In the very near future, I will be releasing my first digital book. My son, Jim, a MICA graduate and prize winning illustrator, is creating the cover. I hope to follow this first digital book with many more.
Had someone told me in 1969 that I would be communicating with people from Canada to China by electronic means through a digital format, I, like many of my former students, would have laughed at them. But, as Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the fabled USS Enterprise, said: "Things are only impossible until they're not."
Copyright (2011) by James Hugh Comey
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