learning experiences that build empowerment, inner strength and will

What do you think?           Head     intellect
What do you feel?             Heart     emotion
What do you want?          Hara      intuition, will, intent

This is an essay about awareness: self-awareness, but also awareness projected out into space. It is about ways of being aware. It is also an invitation to you and your students to develop intention, power and resilience. It is an invitation to develop inner strength: willpower.

We in the west are well aware of our hearts and heads. Ask teachers what schools do and they will tell you they teach kids to think. Recognizing the emotional obstacles to that mission, we now tout social-emotional learning (SEL). The subtext there is that emotional control is necessary so that we may all learn how to think.

Curiously absent is any acknowledgment of will.

In fact, we expect our students to surrender any personal intention in order to adopt the institutional expectations of school. We expect them to behave, to study and to perform competitively and with zeal so that we may measure their degree of imperfection. If we ask at all “what do you WANT?”, we more often than not hear “I don’t know”.

We fail, in other words, to help our students to cultivate intuition, intention and will. We fail to empower them.

It may be worth considering:

Is student empowerment fundamental to the mission of your school?
What do you do to empower your students?

In contrast to western cultures that claim only head and heart, Japanese culture acknowledges three centers of awareness: head, heart and hara. The Japanese understand hara to be the body’s center of gravity, located a few inches below the belly button. They also understand this to be the center of deepest awareness. To think, speak and act from the hara in Japan is to do so from the most profound and most powerful awareness and intention. Powerful leaders lead from the hara, from deeply felt and considered intent. According to Karlfried Graf Durckheim, German diplomat, psychotherapist, Zen master, Nazi-sympathizer and student of Japan (in other words, a complicated man) “every born leader – whether in the sphere of politics, great enterprises or the spiritual life – draws his strength from the primordial forces of life” (Durckheim, 2004, p. 58). We access these forces, according to Durckheim, through hara.

In hara is found an imperturbability -  “an inner calm from which springs the greatest possible presence of mind and the greatest possible capacity for endurance” (Durckheim, 2004, p. 20). Unconditional calm, heightened sensitivity and receptivity, increased readiness to meet surprise and the capacity for making lightening decisions are all qualities attributed to hara (Durckheim, 2004, p. 44). If school is truly about empowerment, then it will connect students with their hara. Japanese philosopher Sato Tsuji considered hara a “primordial source of strength” (Durckheim, 2004, p. 177).

It may be worth considering:

Where in your body do you locate your willpower?
Where do you locate your resilience, energy and essential spirit?
Where do you locate your deepest powers of discernment and awareness?

Operationally, this requires a deep awareness of hara and an awareness emanating from hara. It demands a facility with moving awareness between head, heart and hara. We regularly admonish students to think and to do so critically. We encourage awareness and action centered on the head. Because it gets scarier, we less frequently (or perhaps never) admonish students to feel and to do so empathically. More so in the expressive arts, we encourage awareness and action centered on the heart. To seek an awareness centered on hara is to focus our attention even deeper: to the energy and tone of a space or interaction. This means to operate confidently in the realm of intuition. Awareness from hara is the most profound form of human perception.

It may be worth considering:

Can you, right now, assess your level of engagement or cynicism around this possibility?
To help your students build their powers of intuition and will– can you see the immense utility this offers?

Psychologist and philosopher Peter Wilberg in his book Head, Heart and Hara offers a series of practical exercises to engage hara. Hara breathing and hara meditation each focus on moving breathing and awareness from head to heart to hara. According to Wilberg:

Would that it were that easy. Fortunately for me, my father taught me hara breathing as a child, artfully concealing the spiritual intent. Inspiration, aspiration (together we might understand them as what animates us, our spirit): they come from the same Latin root spirare as respiration and expiration - to breathe. Hara breathing is the work of turning breath into spirit. Like a tree turning carbon dioxide into fiber and bark, I think my father hoped hara breathing would help me to become a man of substance.

Nurturing individuals of substance. Perhaps more than any other learning experience presented in this book, this seems a project worthy of public school.

My personal experience with hara has proven even more consequential than mere breathing however. For the longest time I stumbled through my first profession as an architect because I could not divine which of my initial design ideas would lead to something transcendent, and which would lead to mediocrity. It was very inefficient to follow ideas blindly and ultimately find no inspiration in them, to then go back to the drawing board and think of something else, this cycle often repeating itself more than I care to divulge. I noticed finally (finally!) that good ideas, powerful ideas, ideas that led to the promised land - they would elicit this curious energy in my abdomen, right between digestion and procreation: the hara. It was in figuring out whether this electricity in my abdomen was a personal eccentricity that I discovered hara awareness at all. It had never been named for me.

Consider the importance of this. Intuition can be a ghost. Elusive. Ephemeral. If it comes with a sensation however, something palpable and undeniable, then intuition becomes easier to grasp. Dr. Asta Raami, founder of Innerversity in Helsinki, Finland and someone who has done an immense amount of research into intuition explains how her research subjects describe intuition:

Intuitive information arrives in many forms, and not just for me, it arrives as a gut feeling. When mathematician Henri Poincaré (1914, p. 59-60) wrote of a “real aesthetic feeling that all mathematicians recognize” in identifying fruitful avenues for mathematical research, it may well have been this sensation. If we could tell that this or that choice would be fortuitous, if we could feel it, would that not be supremely useful? While intuition feels like a ghost, would it not be more reliable to count on a sensation to guide you? For me, this has proven to be the case. That possibility, that hara awareness might prove invaluable to creativity as well as to leadership, is what I will leave you with here.

There is nothing anti-intellectual or anti-emotional about learning from your gut and leading with your gut. It requires, on the contrary, heightened forms of perception bolstered by head and heart. To offer your students access to this locus of intuition, intention and will, and a practice of meditation and breathing to reinforce that access, this strikes me as a lesson that will reverberate and illuminate throughout their lives, as it has mine.

References

Durckheim, K. G. (2004). Hara; The vital center of man [S. M. von Kospoth & E. R. Healey, Trans.]. Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont.

Poincaré, H. (1914). Science and Method [F. Maitland, Trans.]. Thomas Nelson and Sons, New York.

Raami, A. (2021). Email correspondence with the author.

Wilberg, P. (2003). Head, Heart and Hara; The soul centres of west and east. New Gnosis Publications, London.

Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!