Dear Friends,

We hope your summer experience has lightened some of the burdens that we endured during our challenging previous school year. It is said the light of the summer is so bright that it allows our shadow to retreat and thus we might attain clearer judgment. In the sunshine of summer, I think we all are assimilating the journey through Covid and seeking ways to help the children we work with to find peace and wholeness as the anxiety and uncertainty of the time affected children, parents, and teachers. We are fortunate to have exercises to offer from the Extra Lesson, by Audrey E. McAllen, which bring harmony to our four bodies - physical, life, astral, and ego as a balm for children, and adults as well, in these times. Please see below information regarding our AHE Board Work and opportunities to engage in upcoming Support Work courses that may be experienced virtually or in-person.

BOARD NEWS
Through the duration of the pandemic, AHE continued to explore new ways to serve teachers in schools:

In April 2021, we held a successful online seminar with Dr. Bruno Callegaro from Germany, we completed our first series of monthly Sunday seminars, and we served five AWSNA certified schools through a series of online consulting.
When Erin McNamara (AHE cycle 11 grad) joined the board in November 2020, we gave her the responsibility of working with Jeff Tunkey to launch a new program. Jeff has restructured his popular one week course into a format to reach more teachers. See below for details.
Finally, we are looking forward to the completion of our 12th Educational Support Training Program over the next several months as our students complete their practicums; it was wonderful to have most of us meet in person for a final session in Ann Arbor in July. In October, we welcome a new cohort, Cycle 13, at our new location in New England.

Kindest Regards,
Betty Jane Enno
President
Association for a Healing Education

Our ESP Cycle 12 Graduates

INFORMATION ABOUT OUR NEW COURSES

AHE Education Support Program, Cycle 13

The 13th cycle of our three-year Educational Support Program will be held starting in October 2021 at a location in New England. Consider joining this cohort to learn how to serve children in today’s classrooms and group settings.

This is an in-depth three-year, part-time training program that provides certification in Waldorf Educational Support work, enabling teachers and education consultants to address learning challenges such as comprehension and memory weaknesses, social challenges, and neuro-developmental hindrances that impact vision, auditory processing, executive function, and motor skills. AHE graduates work as teachers in the grades, early childhood, high school or as educational support/Extra Lesson teachers and education consultants in private practice.

Dates in year 1: Oct.7-10, 2021, April 20-24, 2022, July 11-22, 2022
(Plus online sessions in between)
Location: TBD (New England location or online)

For information about fees and registration, visit our website www.healingeducation.org or email Connie Helms at registrar@healingeducation.org

Rethinking the Elements of a Balanced Day with Jeff Tunkey

The Association for a Healing Education welcomes our colleague Jeff Tunkey who will be teaching a Whole Class Enrichment Course, Rethinking the Elements of a Balanced Day. Designed as a practical course for class and resource teachers who are interested in strengthening their own class, or in becoming the “Enrichment Teacher” for their school, this course will guide participants to personal mastery of a broad repertoire of methods for strengthening student capacities. Course participants can return to their schools ready to provide an innovative and effective whole-class, or even whole-school, approach. The course will focus on hands-on learning, devoting more than 20 hours to classroom activities which participants can take back to their schools ready to work with and research.

The course takes place over a one year period which will include two in-person sessions and one remote session. Cost is $800, with discounts offered for multiple attendees from the same school.

We are offering two locations for two different cohorts of this course:

Location: Green Meadow Waldorf School, Chestnut Ridge, NY
Dates: Oct. 22-24, 2021, April 1-3, 2022
(Plus an online session in January 2022)

Location: Pine Hill Waldorf School, Wilton, NH
Dates: Nov. 12-14, 2021, April 8-10 2022
(Plus an online session in January 2022)

For information about fees and registration, visit our website www.healingeducation.org or contact Erin McNamara at Erin@healingeducation.org.

Monthly Sunday Seminar Resumes

AHE is excited to announce our second year of monthly online seminars geared for teachers and other professionals interested in current topics focused on meeting the changing learning needs of children today. Homeschooling parents are also warmly welcomed. We invite you to a free, one hour introductory online meeting on Sunday, Sept. 26, 2021 at 12 noon EDT.

Seminars will be online; cost is $30 per individual session or $120 if paid up front for all 6 sessions. Payment is made by PayPal or check. Dates are Sundays at noon EST: Oct. 17, Nov. 14, Dec. 12, 2021 and Jan. 9, Feb. 13, Mar. 13, 2022.

One past participant had this to say about the seminars: “...I am so grateful for that opportunity to connect with you all every month. In a year where nothing seemed familiar, having the guidance and support of the AHE group was very grounding. I hope my article convinces others to join the online platform in the future; it was truly a silver lining to the pandemic. Thank you again for your important work in the world!” -Kathy Fraser, California, Education Specialist and Resource Teacher. To download Kathy's article about her experience in the seminar, click here (you will need to log in to your site user account).

Please check the home page of our AHE website for updated information: www.healingeducation.org or email Renni Greenberg for more information at renni@healingeducation.org.

Launching our Online Consultation for Teachers

In the winter and spring of 2021, AHE initiated a new consulting program to accommodate the different questions faced by teachers working under challenging conditions, sometimes totally remotely, and striving to meet the individual needs of the children. This new program of online consulting is based on our in person workshop and consulting program but makes use of the online format provided by using zoom. After restructuring the program and getting grant source approval, we launched the program, keeping focus on personal contact between a teacher and an AHE learning support consultant.

We received many inquiries from teachers seeking more expertise to meet the array of children with learning and behavioral needs in their classes. With such a strong response, we generated both a list of schools with whom we could begin work immediately, and a waiting list which we will refer to when expanding this program into the upcoming school year, 2021-2022.

Experienced consultants included Betty Jane Enno, Renni Greenberg, Connie Helms and Mary Jo Oresti. These four AHE board members developed relationships with schools through one-on-one consulting sessions for early childhood teachers, grades teachers and educational support teachers. Two of the schools were in Canada, and the other three were in the U.S. The program was designed to support educators who were teaching online, in person, or in a hybrid model of both.

While discussing individuals and classes, we gave demonstrations of exercises from the Extra Lesson and from the realm of developmental movement, and provided handouts, videos and materials relevant to the teacher's specific needs in working with students and parents. Teachers reported that while in person meetings or workshops offer many benefits, they found these online consultations quite valuable. They shared that they saw results from implementing many of the suggestions and they reported that they were able to bring these ideas to colleagues and also engage in more sharing. There was an acknowledgment that certain deeper themes of discussion are not covered as much in trainings and/or schools; these include constitutional types, the developmental path, and inner aspects of processes that lead to success in reading and math.

Of several themes that emerged, working with parents was common. Not surprisingly, the concerns included working with emotional trauma, and also the effects of media and too much auditory stimulation. Additional themes included rhythms in the home life and how to encourage parents to engage their children in developmentally useful activities. One teacher especially appreciated suggestions on working with the overall theme of anxiety.

As consultants, we found that we served as a fresh “listening ear” for teachers discussing their concerns about students and parents. One teacher reported that her AHE mentor’s listening skills and deep caring about the children enabled her to feel empowered in her teaching in order to better serve the class. Another shared that the conversations helped her think more deeply about interpersonal relationships with parents and students in order to more deeply reflect on her own responses. In our work in Waldorf schools, we sometimes need reminders that the inner work of the teacher such as meditation or an intercessory prayer can be a powerful additional tool in creating opportunities for change.

We invite you to visit our website (www.healingeducation.org) to apply for this program for the 2021-22 school year (select "Online Consulting" from the drop down list under "School Services" in the website menu). We will consider every application and add you to our waiting list if we cannot meet your needs at present due to limited funding.

Anthroposophical Thoughts on Nutrition as Presented by Bruno Callegaro, M.D.

Written by Nancy Blanning and edited by Connie Helms

Nutrition is one of the seven life processes. When we think of this today, we are used to thinking about nutrition as substances, calories, and energy. These aspects are well known and researched. But the substances are only part of this. There is the living aspect and the process aspect as a life process. Nourishing/digesting is not conscious and is happening in a sleep consciousness. Thinking too much and knowing too much about digestion and nutrition actually works against this process. But we do have to think about it because we have lost the intuitive way of eating and digesting. Because food has been, and is being manipulated and changed a lot, we cannot just eat and trust that this is all proceeding according to plan, as we could in the last century. How do we consider these things and forget this (materialistic aspect) when we are working with children? Children are learning to eat and are not conscious in this process. We will disturb them with our attitudes (if we are too materialistic). We want to help them to enter into this life process and not be awake in their consciousness all the time.

There are so many diets and different recommendations in books on this subject, but how to help the child find her way of eating? In families, it is a challenge to find a common denominator in the meal. Families tend to separate the eating and preparation of food and we lose the aspect of eating together and sharing the meal. This would be the dreaming part of food, of this life process. Eating together could also be dreaming. In this night sphere of metabolism, the food can be digested and processed.

In these times, we are stuck in the awake consciousness because of the way food is produced and animals treated. But when we are “awake” like this, the children are drawn into our thoughts and prevented from diving into the metabolism. This will affect the sleeping process as well. We need to allow the child to dive into the “night process”. It is important to work with families to get back to this attitude. We first need to remember that eating is related to forgetting. In German, the word “forgetting” has “eating” embedded in it. Essen (eating) and Vergessen (forgetting).

No baby, preschool or school child is able to eat everything until the age of 12. It takes years to attain digestive maturation. There are so many organs, glands, and processes that it takes this long to work this all together. In homes, classrooms, etc. there is always the factor that something has been prepared and everyone is expected to eat this one meal together. But we must remember that no one can digest everything until age 12. When a child is not eating something, try not to make them conscious about this. We need to notice that the capacity for eating/digesting is not yet there. Eating, or not, can be an indicator to us of where the individual child is. Digesting is individual; eating together is social. Prayer, setting the table, the actual taking in of the food is social. But digesting is completely personal. There is no common digestion.

Every baby comes to earth, to birth, bringing the possibility of having mother’s milk as a first food, as a first bridge into earthly life. Steiner gives a picture of mother’s milk as a bridge from time before birth to living on the earth with the atmosphere, with the weather, etc. This is not yet nutrition; it is an invitation to dive into the organism and to meet the earth. Mother’s milk is a very chaste substance, prepared from the blood. Blood is very individual, full of individual substances. Out of this very personal, individual blood, the mother’s organism can transform this into a general human substance. It is not food; it is a general human substance. This is why it is possible for one mother to feed another baby - it is a general substance.

Human milk is very different from the milk of mammals. There is very little fat and protein in mother’s milk. It is a bit transparent. This transparency is full of light, of cosmic nature. Cosmos is the first sphere around the earth, where the elements and ethers are, where human and divine thoughts are, where memory is, all in the cosmic sphere. From that sphere, the cosmos enters into the earthly sphere. Beyond that sphere, there is the moon sphere. Cosmos is where the sky is blue. When we fly through the blue sky in space in travel, we come to darkness. Only where it is blue is the cosmic sphere which is closest to the earth. It is below the moon, so to say, and belongs to the earth. Mother’s milk is making a bridge from the periphery to the surroundings in the earth realm. It takes the first 12 years to get ready to really live on earth at puberty. We build the body in pregnancy from the surroundings. Then we begin to dive into the body. We hold the consciousness that there are so many qualities as human beings that deal with our surroundings.

Sweet and salt are part of breast milk. Every baby is born with the possibility to taste sweet and salty. The first substance that can be digested is carbohydrate, made from vegetable and plant substances. Carbohydrates are built from the climate, from the weather, from the earth. Carbohydrates are both (earth) ether and physical. Carbs taste sweet and salty; we need saliva from the mouth to digest carbs. This is the first entry just inside of the skin as food taken into the mouth meets saliva. We do not need to learn this as we already are born with this capacity. When a parent comes to Bruno and says that their child doesn’t eat anything, he asks, “What do they eat?”. The answer is commonly only carbohydrates. This indicates that the child is still in the first stage of the digestion process.

What does it mean to digest? The first step of digestion/nutrition is to destroy completely. Mother’s milk is not digested. It makes the mucous membrane of stomach and intestines warm and cozy and invites the baby to get into the body. To digest means to destroy completely what has come into our organism and then to use it to build up one’s own body. Nothing goes through the mucous membrane. There is a “zero” between what comes in and what has been individualized to become me. I destroy the foreign substance and build my own substance. We can call this the immune system. The immune system is not something in us; it is us. This word comes from Greek--it translates to “I am,” “me”, etc. To say “no” to everyone and everything else is saying “yes” to myself, to me. Destroying and building up is the central point of digestion.

When I cannot digest something--destroy it--it will enter my organism and it will poison me. Or I will have an allergy. My body will work to get rid of this foreign substance. The building up of substance is what allows us to live on earth. With every meal eaten and digested, we are reaffirming our presence here by building up our substance of earth--food, light, colors, smell, taste, sound--that we have inside of ourselves. These become all our own. But we do need the surroundings to take in, to destroy and to create our own individual nature. Intolerance and poisoning all belong here. These are serious things. Destroying the earth and nature is not okay, but we are doing this all the time within ourselves. This aspect of destruction of nature is occurring less and less in digestion and more and more happening in the world. There is a huge imbalance.

The first step of maturation comes from the world before birth. The Greek gods would only eat nectar and ambrosia. Flowers have nectar and are sweet and made from light. This is the part of the plant that is least “incarnated”, most ethereal. (No one knows what ambrosia is.) Just before birth we have met ambrosia and carry a memory of this when we come to earth. We encounter it again when we come to Mt. Olympus. Eating pasta and carbs is eating what we remember. Hence, pasta, rice, fries. Children might go to ketchup or mayo--all are sweet and salty.

The next step after sweet and salty, a second step, is sour--lemon juice, grapefruit, vinegar, sour cream (but that has fat already). To digest sour, we invite the stomach to produce good acid. People with weak production of acid in the stomach try to avoid acidic foods. But actually, it is good to add acid such as lemon juice, or some other drops of sour, into food. This works as a remedy. If someone cannot deal with proteins, adding anything that is sour will enhance the possibility of the stomach being able to cope with and to digest the protein. Protein is already a bit animal. There are some astral and soul elements in protein. We need this, so we learn to bind the soul to the organism, to ensoul our organism. In digesting protein, we produce qualities in the being that give qualities to the soul. It is not hard to digest protein, but it’s harder than carbohydrates.

We can eat plant protein, but the plant has not learned as well as animal protein how to bind soul qualities to the body. Plant protein is not produced by the plants. There are microorganisms that cooperate with the roots and the plant organism to produce proteins. These are more earthy and deal more with the earth, darkness and density. Animals and human beings are more able to bind qualities to the soul, so animal protein is different; it is closer to our organism. When someone is weak or sick, eating something with animal protein does not take much work; it is easier to digest than plant protein. There are light meals made out of chicken broth, etc. Animal proteins are closer to our organism and we (when weak) do not have to use so much energy to digest them. We will be nourished by this with less effort. This can be helpful information for us if a child just wants to eat protein.
Fish is further away from us because fish are less individualized. Animals are closer to the “I am” of the human being. Fish are closer to the group organism. Eating one fish is eating all fish. So, fish is harder to digest than chicken or beef.

The last group of substances is fat. To digest fat, we need the gallbladder. Fat needs bitter to digest. In the digestive sequence process, the mouth is almost outside of the body, the stomach is halfway in and the gall and liver are most deeply hidden and mysterious. Sweet, salty and carbs are awake; protein is a bit dreamy. Fats are related to the deepest night in us. There is a threshold to the digestion of fats. It is harder to digest fats but we need not be afraid of digesting them. When we digest fats, we are more present in the earth. It is not that the fat will be deposited all the time. It is not the amount of fat we eat, but how the destroying of the fat is working. There is a threshold with fat—we can feel nausea, not feel well when eating something fried or fatty, when warm milk gets a skin, or eating cream or some fatty cheese, etc. There is the threshold between day and night. Adding some bitters to the food invites our ego to get into this realm of being able to destroy fat. Fat is needed. It is part of the earth and of the night. We need it to recover from the day through sleep. We need to have the courage organically to deal with fat and digest it properly. Bitters invite the gallbladder to digest fat in this night process.

Regarding spices and herbs, some spices are very mild and are good friends. Most of these also smell good. We taste liquids and smell fragrance in the air. Some plants smell as well as taste. Herbs make the bridge for this middle realm between liquid and air. They both smell and taste. Pepper, ginger, curry--these invite us to go further down into the organism. A pasta/pizza child might have hunger for these strong spices, like rice with curry. When we do not dive into the realm of the gall and liver, they are hungry for these other spices that enable us to dive down deeper into the metabolic realm. But be careful with these - Dr. Callegaro rather recommends staying with herbs.

Q: How tiny is an infant’s stomach?
A: At birth it is only the size of a marble. Lungs also are very small. The lung is built through breathing in and out; it takes 9 years to do this. The rhythmical system is ready in about 9-11 years for the heart, lungs, and liver. For the rest of our organs, we need 12 years. It is maturation by doing. The nervous system is ready at birth, it is actually mature 2 months before birth. The brain will grow, of course, but the nerves are ready. Nerves are the past in us. Earthly experience will mature the other organs. But maturation is never finished, the organs are never done.

Q: Do we have more allergies nowadays or are we just more awake to this?
A: There are more allergies today; this has increased vastly. It was not like this when Bruno began medical study. It has to do with children being much more individualized, much more awakened even at birth. We are less related to groups now (families, groups, languages, churches, etc.) We are more solitary than in the past. Individualization is occurring faster. There is also the fact that foods have been changing since WW II. Corn and wheat are no longer the same plant. Roots and plant are changed. The allergy is to this new plant which is strange and different. Many of these plants are “artificial” so to say, they are no longer of the same nature. For example, no one in Brazil eats soy beans and never has, but tons of soy beans are being grown to export. This is now in the air, in the environment, etc. The global economy is exporting foods, so we eat foods at times when we would never have done so in the past. The better thing to do with infants and children is to eat seasonally and regionally. We are intending to help the child to link to the earth via foods grown in the place, geography and family where we have incarnated.

Q: What about children who are not breastfed, who are getting formula instead?
A: The formulas are more food-like, not like breast milk. It is a dilemma when the baby cries and you think that the baby is hungry. We think that breast milk is insufficient - we mistakenly think that babies need to eat “food”. But babies grow not by eating. It is hard to say whether the milk is enough or not. With starting formula and measuring weight gain, you are measuring average weight but not the individual baby. There is also the question of industry profits for formula producers. The taste can be manipulated to set things up for the next step of eating (extra sweet). Almond milk or rice milk are better than the formulas. Cow milk is very earthy and strong, but donkey’s milk is closer to human milk. Another aspect not mentioned so far, is that we only think of earthly substances with calories, etc. but in the first year of life the babies grow from cosmic nourishment. Cosmic nutrition is not gone when we are adults. This means the table setting: dishes, colors, flowers, prayer, the same time for meals, etc can become our cosmic nourishment. Only at adolescence is nutrition food. This mood around the child nourishes or damages and is connected to cosmic nutrition.

Q: Practical applications, such as adding lemon juice to rice. Can we add other things?
A: Yes, olive and sunflower oils are cosmic and full of light. Peanut or soy oils are more earthy, not cosmic at all. Check the plant, is it a sun-produced oil or an earthy, dense oil? Preparing the food and cooking around children nourishes them, too. Seeing or smelling when something is ready or not are also important. What accompanies the food preparation (such as care and joy) is what nourishes.

Q: What about nuts and seeds for young children? Milk?
A: This is very individual. Some children will look for milk, but there is the whole industrial world that stands behind this and influences things--too much processing, freezing, etc. Demeter [Biodynamically produced] cow milk is also too much for young children. It is better to predigest the milk as kefir or yogurt which makes it sour. These are friendlier for the stomach. I would add some jam or sweet fruit to this as well. Do not give it cold but serve it at room temperature. Our inside temperature is very warm and we have to warm the food up with energy that we would otherwise use to digest with. It wears the person out to use energy for warming up the food. Bruno would use warm meals for all people--children and adults--all the time. Nuts are good with fat. Some children look for this. Children do not need to look for nuts so early. Preschool children do not need to eat nuts but they can if they can seek them. Nuts are a regional thing. Seeds? These are crunchy and will not be digested. It is good to chew them but they are hard to digest, so give the seeds cooked or roasted, not raw.

Q: How about working with families who are vegetarian, who have chosen this because of the ill-treatment animals receive? How can one talk about this?
A. This is an important question. There is no general “recipe” for this. We are treating animals and plants both very badly. And there is a world-wide initiative to treat animals and plants well to reverse this. We want to acknowledge and support this. The best thing to do is to look to quality rather than quantity. We can work with local and seasonal foods. We can associate with local producers who are doing good work. We want to reinforce this attitude of being human beings working with nature. We are human beings who are citizens of both the spiritual world and the earthly world. There are many cultural rituals that thank and express gratitude. Giving thanks is powerful. All cereals have been developed (domesticated) by human beings from grasses. This is also true about fruits--out of the rose have come apples, pears, etc. This has been a respectful relationship between humans domesticating plants that have been wild and cultivating them. It was not so long ago that we still had this relationship. We want to recover this love relationship. We want children to grow together with farm life and processes. This is the best. We want to get back to recognizing and supporting the organisms, globally as well as locally. Wholeness is health. This new attitude has changed the world; we have to change the attitude again to restore health and wholeness.

Q: What about giving children vitamins and supplements?
A: It is important to see the single, individual case and not make generalized recommendations. What are vitamins? Fresh fruit juice is living. There is vitality there. People in time struggled to understand this “life” and called it “vitamins.” Then there was a step to concentrate the substance into “vitamins.” Vita means “life,” but is no longer true because in vitamins today there is no more life. Everyone would like to reinforce the life forces but this does not happen with vitamins. But sometimes what we are eating is not enough. For a while it might be good to take the substance to remind the body what it is trying to do. But we do not really take in the vitamins but excrete them out into the soil and water. Support of the life energies or forces does not occur through vitamins, instead, it comes out of activities such as of gardening, cooking, nurturing our children, caring for sick people, etc. This is how we support strengthening the life forces. We do have a hunger/interest for knowing what the weather is. We can look at others, at children, and how they are doing to “read their weather.” We are looking to a different way to relate to life. Mainstream medicine, vitamins and foods are not doing this effectively anymore. We do need anthroposophical science and medicine, biodynamic gardening/agriculture to create this new healing. We need a new understanding of our etheric life forces.

Nutrition is one of the seven life processes. When we think of this today, we are used to thinking about nutrition as substances, calories, and energy. These aspects are well known and researched. But the substances are only part of this. There is the living aspect and the process aspect as a life process. Nourishing/digesting is not conscious and is happening in a sleep consciousness. Thinking too much and knowing too much about digestion and nutrition actually works against this process. But we do have to think about it because we have lost the intuitive way of eating and digesting. Because food has been, and is being manipulated and changed a lot, we cannot just eat and trust that this is all proceeding according to plan, as we could in the last century. How do we consider these things and forget this (materialistic aspect) when we are working with children? Children are learning to eat and are not conscious in this process. We will disturb them with our attitudes (if we are too materialistic.) We want to help them to enter into this life process and not be awake in their consciousness all the time.

There are so many diets and different recommendations in books on this subject, but how to help the child find her way of eating? In families, it is a challenge to find a common denominator in the meal. Families tend to separate the eating and preparation of food and we lose the aspect of eating together and sharing the meal. This would be the dreaming part of food, of this life process. Eating together could also be dreaming. In this night sphere of metabolism, the food can be digested and processed.

In these times, we are stuck in the awake consciousness because of the way food is produced and animals treated. But when we are “awake” like this, the children are drawn into our thoughts and prevented from diving into the metabolism. This will affect the sleeping process as well. We need to allow the child to dive into the “night process”. It is important to work with families to get back to this attitude. We first need to remember that eating is related to forgetting. In German, the word “forgetting” has “eating” embedded in it. Essen (eating) and Vergessen (forgetting).

No baby, preschool or school child is able to eat everything until the age of 12. It takes years to attain digestive maturation. There are so many organs, glands, and processes that it takes this long to work this all together. In homes, classrooms, etc. there is always the factor that something has been prepared and everyone is expected to eat this one meal together. But we must remember that no one can digest everything until age 12. When a child is not eating something, try not to make them conscious about this. We need to notice that the capacity for eating/digesting is not yet there. Eating, or not, can be an indicator to us of where the individual child is. Digesting is individual; eating together is social. Prayer, setting the table, the actual taking in of the food is social. But digesting is completely personal. There is no common digestion.

Every baby comes to earth, to birth, bringing the possibility of having mother’s milk as a first food, as a first bridge into earthly life. Steiner gives a picture of mother’s milk as a bridge from time before birth to living on the earth with the atmosphere, with the weather, etc. This is not yet nutrition; it is an invitation to dive into the organism and to meet the earth. Mother’s milk is a very chaste substance, prepared from the blood. Blood is very individual, full of individual substances. Out of this very personal, individual blood, the mother’s organism can transform this into a general human substance. It is not food; it is a general human substance. This is why it is possible for one mother to feed another baby - it is a general substance.

Human milk is very different from the milk of mammals. There is very little fat and protein in mother’s milk. It is a bit transparent. This transparency is full of light, of cosmic nature. Cosmos is the first sphere around the earth, where the elements and ethers are, where human and divine thoughts are, where memory is, all in the cosmic sphere. From that sphere, the cosmos enters into the earthly sphere. Beyond that sphere, there is the moon sphere. Cosmos is where the sky is blue. When we fly through the blue sky in space in travel, we come to darkness. Only where it is blue is the cosmic sphere which is closest to the earth. It is below the moon, so to say, and belongs to the earth. Mother’s milk is making a bridge from the periphery to the surroundings in the earth realm. It takes the first 12 years to get ready to really live on earth at puberty. We build the body in pregnancy from the surroundings. Then we begin to dive into the body. We hold the consciousness that there are so many qualities as human beings that deal with our surroundings--social, etc.

Sweet and salt are part of breast milk. Every baby is born with the possibility to taste sweet and salty. The first substance that can be digested is carbohydrate, made from vegetable and plant substances. Carbohydrates are built from the climate, from the weather, from the earth. Carbohydrates are both (earth) ether and physical. Carbs taste sweet and salty; we need saliva from the mouth to digest carbs. This is the first entry just inside of the skin as food taken into the mouth meets saliva. We do not need to learn this as we already are born with this capacity. When a parent comes to Bruno and says that their child doesn’t eat anything, he asks, “What they do eat?”. The answer is commonly only carbohydrates. This indicates that the child is still in the first stage of the digestion process.

What does it mean to digest? The first step of digestion/nutrition is to destroy completely. Mother’s milk is not digested. It makes the mucous membrane of stomach and intestines warm and cozy and invites the baby to get into the body. To digest means to destroy completely what has come into our organism and then to use it to build up one’s own body. Nothing goes through the mucous membrane. There is a “zero” between what comes in and what has been individualized to become me. I destroy the foreign substance and build my own substance. We can call this the immune system. The immune system is not something in us; it is us. This word comes from Greek--it translates to “I am,” “me”, etc. To say “no” to everyone and everything else is saying “yes” to myself, to me. Destroying and building up is the central point of digestion.

When I cannot digest something--destroy it--it will enter my organism and it will poison me. Or I will have an allergy. My body will work to get rid of this foreign substance. The building up of substance is what allows us to live on earth. With every meal eaten and digested, we are reaffirming our presence here by building up our substance of earth--food, light, colors, smell, taste, sound--that we have inside of ourselves. These become all our own. But we do need the surroundings to take in,destroy and create our own individual nature. Intolerance and poisoning all belong here. These are serious things. Destroying the earth and nature is not okay, but we are doing this all the time within ourselves. This aspect of destruction of nature is occurring less and less in digestion and more and more happening in the world. There is a huge imbalance.

The first step of maturation comes from the world before birth. The Greek gods would only eat nectar and ambrosia. Flowers have nectar and are sweet and made from light. This is the part of the plant that is least “incarnated”, most ethereal. (No one knows what ambrosia is.) Just before birth we have met ambrosia and carry a memory of this when we come to earth. We encounter it again when we come to Mt. Olympus. Eating pasta and carbs is eating what we remember. Hence, pasta, rice, fries. Children might go to ketchup or mayo--all are sweet and salty.

The next step after sweet and salty, a second step, is sour--lemon juice, grapefruit, vinegar, sour cream (but that has fat already). To digest sour, we invite the stomach to produce good acid. People with weak production of acid in the stomach try to avoid acidic foods. But actually, it is good to add acid such as lemon juice, or some other drops of sour, into food. This works as a remedy. If someone cannot deal with proteins, adding anything that is sour will enhance the possibility of the stomach being able to cope with and to digest the protein. Protein is already a bit animal. There are some astral and soul elements in protein. We need this, so we learn to bind the soul to the organism, to ensoul our organism. In digesting protein, we produce qualities in the being that give qualities to the soul. It is not hard to digest protein, but it’s harder than carbohydrates.

We can eat plant protein, but the plant has not learned as well as animal protein how to bind soul qualities to the body. Plant protein is not produced by the plants. There are microorganisms that cooperate with the roots and the plant organism to produce proteins. These are more earthy and deal more with the earth, darkness and density. Animals and human beings are more able to bind qualities to the soul, so animal protein is different; it is closer to our organism. When someone is weak or sick, eating something with animal protein does not take much work; it is easier to digest than plant protein. There are light meals made out of chicken broth, etc. Animal proteins are closer to our organism and we (when weak) do not have to use so much energy to digest them. We will be nourished by this with less effort. This can be helpful information for us if a child just wants to eat protein.

Fish is further away from us because fish are less individualized. Animals are closer to the “I am” of the human being. Fish are closer to the group organism. Eating one fish is eating all fish. So, fish is harder to digest than chicken or beef.

The last group of substances is fat. To digest fat, we need the gallbladder. Fat needs bitter to digest. In the digestive sequence process, the mouth is almost outside of the body, the stomach is halfway in and the gall and liver are most deeply hidden and mysterious. Sweet, salty and carbs are awake; protein is a bit dreamy. Fats are related to the deepest night in us. There is a threshold to the digestion of fats. It is harder to digest fats but we need not be afraid of digesting them. When we digest fats, we are more present in the earth. It is not that the fat will be deposited all the time. It is not the amount of fat we eat, but how the destroying of the fat is working. There is a threshold with fat—we can feel nausea, not feel well when eating something fried or fatty, when warm milk gets a skin, or eating cream or some fatty cheese, etc. There is the threshold between day and night. Adding some bitters to the food invites our ego to get into this realm of being able to destroy fat. Fat is needed. It is part of the earth and of the night. We need it to recover from the day through sleep. We need to have the courage organically to deal with fat and digest it properly. Bitters invite the gallbladder to digest fat in this night process.

Regarding spices and herbs, some spices are very mild and are good friends. Most of these also smell good. We taste liquids and smell fragrance in the air. Some plants smell as well as taste. Herbs make the bridge for this middle realm between liquid and air. They both smell and taste. Pepper, ginger, curry--these invite us to go further down into the organism. A pasta/pizza child might have hunger for these strong spices, like rice with curry. When we do not dive into the realm of the gall and liver, they are hungry for these other spices that enable us to dive down deeper into the metabolic realm. But be careful with these - Dr. Callegaro rather recommends staying with herbs.

Q: How tiny is an infant’s stomach?
A: At birth it is only the size of a marble. Lungs also are very small. The lung is built through breathing in and out; it takes 9 years to do this. The rhythmical system is ready in about 9-11 years for the heart, lungs, and liver. For the rest of our organs, we need 12 years. It is maturation by doing. The nervous system is ready at birth, it is actually mature 2 months before birth. The brain will grow, of course, but the nerves are ready. Nerves are the past in us. Earthly experience will mature the other organs. But maturation is never finished, the organs are never done.

Q: Do we have more allergies or are we just more awake to this?
A: There are more allergies today; this has increased vastly. It was not like this when Bruno began medical study. It has to do with children being much more individualized, much more awakened even at birth. We are less related to groups now (families, groups, languages, churches, etc.) We are more solitary than in the past. Individualization is occurring faster. There is also the fact that foods have been changing since WW II. Corn and wheat are no longer the same plant. Roots and plant are changed. The allergy is to this new plant which is strange and different. Many of these plants are “artificial” so to say, they are no longer of the same nature. For example, no one in Brazil eats soy beans and never has, but tons of soy beans are being grown to export. This is now in the air, in the environment, etc. The global economy is exporting foods, so we eat foods at times when we would never have done so in the past. The better thing to do with infants and children is to eat seasonally and regionally. We are intending to help the child to link to the earth via foods grown in the place, geography and family where we have incarnated.

Q: What about children who are not breastfed, who are getting formula instead?
A: The formulas are more food-like, not like breast milk. It is a dilemma when the baby cries and you think that the baby is hungry. We think that breast milk is insufficient - we mistakenly think that babies need to eat “food”. But babies grow not by eating. It is hard to say whether the milk is enough or not. With starting formula and measuring weight gain, you are measuring average weight but not the individual baby. There is also the question of industry profits for formula producers. The taste can be manipulated to set things up for the next step of eating (extra sweet). Almond milk or rice milk are better than the formulas. Cow milk is very earthy and strong, but donkey’s milk is closer to human milk. Another aspect not mentioned so far, is that we only think of earthly substances with calories, etc. but in the first year of life the babies grow from cosmic nourishment. Cosmic nutrition is not gone when we are adults. This means the table setting: dishes, colors, flowers, prayer, the same time for meals, etc can become our cosmic nourishment. Only at adolescence is nutrition food. This mood around the child nourishes or damages and is connected to cosmic nutrition.

Q: Practical applications, such as adding lemon juice to rice. Can we add other things?
A: Yes, olive and sunflower oils are cosmic and full of light. Peanut or soy oils are more earthy, not cosmic at all. Check the plant, is it a sun-produced oil or an earthy, dense oil? Preparing the food and cooking around children nourishes them, too. Seeing or smelling when something is ready or not are also important. What accompanies the food preparation (such as care and joy) is what nourishes.

Q: What about nuts and seeds for young children? Milk?
A: This is very individual. Some children will look for milk, but there is the whole industrial world that stands behind this and influences things--too much processing, freezing, etc. Demeter [Biodynamically produced] cow milk is also too much for young children. It is better to predigest the milk as kefir or yogurt which makes it sour. These are friendlier for the stomach. I would add some jam or sweet fruit to this as well. Do not give it cold but serve it at room temperature. Our inside temperature is very warm and we have to warm the food up with energy that we would otherwise use to digest with. It wears the person out to use energy for warming up the food. Bruno would use warm meals for all people--children and adults--all the time. Nuts are good with fat. Some children look for this. Children do not need to look for nuts so early. Preschool children do not need to eat nuts but they can if they can seek them. Nuts are a regional thing. Seeds? These are crunchy and will not be digested. It is good to chew them but they are hard to digest, so give the seeds cooked or roasted, not raw.

Q: How about working with families who are vegetarian, who have chosen this because of the ill-treatment animals receive? How can one talk about this?
A. This is an important question. There is no general “recipe” for this. We are treating animals and plants both very badly. And there is a world-wide initiative to treat animals and plants well to reverse this. We want to acknowledge and support this. The best thing to do is to look to quality rather than quantity. We can work with local and seasonal foods. We can associate with local producers who are doing good work. We want to reinforce this attitude of being human beings working with nature. We are human beings who are citizens of both the spiritual world and the earthly world. There are many cultural rituals that thank and express gratitude. Giving thanks is powerful. All cereals have been developed (domesticated) by human beings from grasses. This is also true about fruits--out of the rose have come apples, pears, etc. This has been a respectful relationship between humans domesticating plants that have been wild and cultivating them. It was not so long ago that we still had this relationship. We want to recover this love relationship. We want children to grow together with farm life and processes. This is the best. We want to get back to recognizing and supporting the organisms, globally as well as locally. Wholeness is health. This new attitude has changed the world; we have to change the attitude again to restore health and wholeness.

Q: What about giving children vitamins and supplements?
A: It is important to see the single, individual case and not make generalized recommendations. What are vitamins? Fresh fruit juice is living. There is vitality there. People in time struggled to understand this “life” and called it “vitamins.” Then there was a step to concentrate the substance into “vitamins.” Vita means “life,” but is no longer true because in vitamins today there is no more life. Everyone would like to reinforce the life forces but this does not happen with vitamins. But sometimes what we are eating is not enough. For a while it might be good to take the substance to remind the body what it is trying to do. But we do not really take in the vitamins but excrete them out into the soil and water. Support of the life energies or forces does not occur through vitamins, instead, it comes out of activities such as of gardening, cooking, nurturing our children, caring for sick people, etc. This is how we support strengthening the life forces. We do have a hunger/interest for knowing what the weather is. We can look at others, at children, and how they are doing to “read their weather.” We are looking to a different way to relate to life. Mainstream medicine and vitamins and foods are not doing this effectively anymore. We do need anthroposophical science and medicine, biodynamic gardening/agriculture to create this new healing. We need a new understanding of our etheric life forces.

OUR MISSION STATEMENT

To bridge the expertise between the medical profession, art therapists,
and remedial professionals
in the service of healing.
To foster remedial education with the pedagogical principles of Waldorf Education.
To deepen and further
the study of human development as described
by Rudolf Steiner and to incorporate appropriate modalities of mainstream methodologies.
To facilitate cooperation
and exchange between therapeutic educators, classroom teachers,
caregivers, parents and individuals trained in
curative education.

WHO WE ARE

For over thirty years, the Association for a Healing Education has served as an agent of change in the culture of education for children with individual needs. It has acted as a “listening ear” to the needs and questions of classroom teachers, parents and therapists who are involved with providing care for the child of today. Our main work is with children in regular classrooms who, faced with the challenges of their destiny and the world environment, often require some help for a time. Our intent is to help caregivers provide right practices in education, therapy and medicine through a deeper understanding of child development and hindrances to that development. We also serve as a bridge to the Camphill movement for Curative Education.

Articles from AHE Contributors
Note: you will need to create a (free) Site User account to view this content.

Information on Grant Supported Workshops

Publications, Videos, and Membership

Order Back Issues of
the AHE News

Each issue is devoted to one subject and features articles, essays and studies by some of the leading therapists and educators in the world. Hard copy back issues of the newsletter (dated 2000 - 2015) can be ordered by emailing Connie Helms: registrar@healingeducation.org.

SERVICES

The Association provides the following services: workshops and lecture presentations; Remedial Teacher Development programs, which are part-time three-year programs in the U.S. and
abroad; a bi-annual newsletter; a Care Group Manual; activity books for teachers and parents; workshops for parents; and school or individual consulting services. If you are interested in these services, please contact us.

More information on services for schools

We are a non-profit organization and rely on memberships, gifts and volunteers to complete our work. Membership is open to everyone and includes the newsletter, notification of conferences and discounts on conferences and publications.

BOARD MEMBERS
President: Betty Jane Enno
Vice-President: Elyce Perico
Treasurer: Rob Kushler
Secretary: Barbara Bresette-Mills
Mary Jo Oresti
Connie Helms
Renni Greenberg
Erin McNamara

CONTACTS
Administration Office:
Connie Helms
Co-director AHE-ESP Cycle 12
registrar@healingeducation.org
Membership Office:
2886 Mountain Road, Bristol, VT 05443

Dear Friends,

Order Back Issues of the AHE News

Order Back Issues of
the AHE News