The Educating Parent (merging Beverley Paine's Homeschool Australia and Unschool Australia)

Unschooling and Trust: How do we reclaim our self-trust and thereby our trust also in others?

by Sally Lever, Fruitful
first published as part of the article Conscious Decision Making: Or, what on earth do I do now?

Presence: This is a deeply focussed and grounded way of being with ourselves. It's necessary, I believe, as a precursor for being open to knowing ourselves in our unique authenticity. To cultivate presence with ourselves involves spending quiet time alone and being able to relax with that. Once we can do that on our own and be comfortable with our own company, then we're ready to be present with others. One of the greatest gifts we can offer to others in their presence is unconditional positive regard and this can be very challenging to achieve if we are not at home with giving this quality to ourselves.

Awareness: Once we are present, it becomes easier to be aware - of how we're feeling (emotionally and physically), what our strengths and limitations are, what beliefs we're holding, the values we hold dear and the opportunities that are presenting themselves to us. In my experience, it's the opportunities that are most easily missed through lack of attention. We might also be sidestepping the fact that we're currently in a space where our energy is not matched by the people we're with or the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

Intuition: This is our connection to our High Selves or inner wisdom. By cultivating presence and awareness, we can master the art of being a witness to our actions and making consciously chosen decisions - choices that we engage with through deep trust of our inner wisdom and discernment. But something needs to feed our inner wisdom and discernment and this is where our intuition comes in. We can connect with it through being present, grounded and aware. It is that 'still, quiet voice' within that is always on our side, even if what it tells us does not make total sense to our minds in the moment.

Emotional Self-Sufficiency: In order to trust ourselves, we need to know that we are trustworthy. To be internally trustworthy means to give up any need to refer to others for our self-approval and to instead consult the wisdom of our own experiences and judgment, so discern for ourselves regardless of what others might think. It necessitates letting go of what we imagine, or what we know, to be other people's expectations of us.

'As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.'
Goethe

'Trust your instinct to the end, though you can render no reason .'
Ralph Waldo Emerson

'He who does not trust enough, Will not be trusted.'
Lao Tzu

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Beverley Paine with her children, and their home educated children, relaxing at home.

Together with the support of my family, my aim is to help parents educate their children in stress-free, nurturing environments. In addition to building and maintaing this website, I continue to create and manage local and national home educating networks, help to organise conferences and camps, as well as write for, edit and produce newsletters, resource directories and magazines. I am an active supporter of national, state, regional and local home education groups.