Tag: eurythmy

Eurythmy for Well-being and Stress Management

By Saraphir Legind

The world is changing and the pace of change seems to be increasing every year. Advances in technology are creating permanent, but ever-changing, developments in how we live and work and we are living with the constant threat and awareness of ecological breakdown, international political tensions and the rise of the new far right. On top of that everyone has their own, individual challenges to do with areas such work, family and personal life and finances. The last four years in Britain has brought further uncertainty in the form of Brexit and the consequences this may bring once it happens and this year the spread of COVID-19 and the national lockdowns around the world has created much anxiety – although for many it has also been an opportunity to slow down and re-evaluate their lifestyle. It is no wonder the western world is said to be in the middle of a stress epidemic.

While it is essential to look at what positive changes we can make in our lives to reduce stress, it is also necessary to look at what practices and strategies we can learn and use to manage it better. While some of the most common stressors such as work-related pressure, relationship breakdowns or difficulties, loss, and financial difficulties are universal, how we deal with them is entirely individual, as is which ones constitute the most difficult area for us. Thus, one definition of stress is: “Stress occurs when pressure exceeds your perceived ability to cope.” (Palmer and Cooper). The actual manifestation of stress is the negative effects this pressure has on your physical body, behaviour, and mental and emotional state. In the long run, stress can have serious consequences for your physical and mental health, and with the world being as unpredictable as it is today, it is essential for us all to find ways of managing how we cope with the pressures of life and increase our personal sense of well-being.

Eurythmy for well-being and stress management
© Saraphir Legind. All Rights Reserved.

Many people around the world have turned to practices such as mindfulness and various movement forms that enhance our mind-body connection and awareness of ourselves. With its focus on harmony, consciousness and flowing movements, Eurythmy is ideally positioned to work in this area. Stress makes our bodies tense up, our movements constricted and unfree, our breathing shallow and arrhythmical and our minds fragmented and scattered. Eurythmy can provide a calming and soothing effect in that it helps us to relax and free our movements and re-establish a sense of flow and connection. It can also help our breathing become deeper and more rhythmical and create a sense of spaciousness and calmness in ourselves. When focusing on our movements, our minds calm down and stop racing and we can become aware of how the stressful situation affected our body as well as how it restricted our ability to feel well and rest within ourselves. This effect increases over time and with practice and you eventually become able to notice the stress reactions when they happen and counteract them sooner. This is why it is so important to establish a practice before major stressful situations occur, as it is hard for most people to establish practices like that when they are in the middle of the stress reaction.

While Eurythmy started as a performance art, it has many other aspects to it, one being the positive influence on well-being through the development of an increasingly flowing and inwardly connected way of moving. It brings harmony and balance to your physicality in that it can improve your posture and help you achieve a sense of centeredness and alignment in your body and physical space, and when practised consciously can be very grounding. It can nurture and strengthen your life-forces, bringing them into a more rhythmical flow, which mostly has an enlivening and at the same time calming effect. On the soul-level it can harmonise and calm your emotions and bring increased consciousness to the different levels of your being.

You don’t need to have completed a training in Eurythmy to experience these benefits. Practising a sequence of exercises under the guidance of a eurythmist or participating in regular classes and workshop can provide the beginning of a regular practice that with focus and dedication will deepen and grow over time.


Saraphir Legind (Qaa-Rishi) studied Eurythmy in England at Eurythmy West Midlands and then Camphill Eurythmy School. She graduated in 2013 and since 2014 has been based in Edinburgh, where she works as a Eurythmist at Garvald Edinburgh and The Columcille Centre, providing regular Eurythmy Sessions to people in need of extra support. She also works regularly with staff groups, is a tutor on the annual Introduction to Social Therapy Course and teaches regularly on other training seminars for staff in both organisations. She has a deep interest in Eurythmy for wellbeing and Eurythmy in Social/Working Life and has worked with this both in her regular workplaces and in other organisations. She runs public workshops on different themes and has taught in various other organisations around Edinburgh. Saraphir has a degree in Social Science and has recently completed a Diploma in Coaching and Mentoring (SCQF level 8). She set up this website and the websites for the Eurythmy Association and the Eurythmy Therapy Association and still manages this website and the Facebook page. You can see more about her work on her website www.movingpresence.co.uk and on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Spiritual Perspectives in Education – Breathing

By Chrystal Hayn

As the Soul – Spirit and Physical – Life aspects of the human being are drawn together through education, we come to the boundary between the spiritual and the physical which is the area of breathing. Taking a breath is the first thing we do in life and the last thing we do as we die. The first and last breaths have a certain focus, drama, tension and deep and momentous mystery to them: That relief as the baby gives its first cry and breathing and life now fully begin! That moment of tension and release as the last breath is taken and the soul leaves our body as we die.

Breathing connects us with our blood and circulation and via this we connect to our metabolism. This is one perspective of the process of breathing taking place within the human being. Another perspective is the connection to our nerve sense organisation. The harmony and rhythm needed for healthy breathing is not necessarily simply there. Through education and good life style the child or young person needs help to establish balanced and harmonious breathing rhythms.

Rudolf Steiner tells us that the true function of Education is to establish authentic harmonious and right breathing! He tells us that we can achieve this by bringing the Soul – Spirit and the Life – Physical into a real and living relationship with each other and of course he then builds up a complete curriculum based on this tenet of breathing.We are not talking here only of the physical activity of breathing, but as stated above; the focus on the drawing into life of the Spirit – Soul and the bringing towards these two elements, the Life – Physical as described by Steiner in the first lecture of The Foundations of Human Experience.

‘By harmonising the breathing with the nerve-sense process we draw all that is soul and spirit into the physical life of the child. To express it roughly we may say: The child cannot yet breathe in the right inner way, and education will have to consist in teaching the child to breathe rightly.’

Rudolf Steiner: The Study of Man / The Foundations of Human Experience. Lecture 1, paragraph 13.

Today in our present crisis we can surely draw much from this stand point, not just for the education of the child, but for all of our teaching, ways of living and conducting ourselves generally. I personally am endeavouring to take this question into my preparation for the young people with special needs whom I teach, into the preparation of public classes that I hold, for tutoring and teaching students in India who are doing the eurythmy training, into the work of facilitating meetings, into supervision sessions or bringing eurythmy to the working environment. Handling the balance between deadlines and outcomes and allowing for real process is all part and parcel of gaining capacity and skill at addressing the human being in specific and conscious ways.


Chrystal Hayn studied Waldorf Education in Stuttgart in the 80’s and after class teaching for 7 years trained in Eurythmy at the Ringwood Botton Eurythmy School with Chas Bamford, Monica Dorrington and Evamaria Rascher. She went on to be part of many national and international performing projects with the Botton Stage Group, Eskdale Eurythmy, Peredur Stage Group and London Eurythmy over 22 years, working mainly with Hajo Deker. She taught courses at the London College Of Eurythmy and workshops at Steiner House for several years and is part of the Foundation Stone Meditation performing work with London Eurythmy. She lives and works at The Mount Camphill Community, where she also teaches young people with special needs at the Mount Independent Specialist Residential College and is co-founder of Eurythmy India.

 

Spiritual Perspectives in Education

By Chrystal Hayn

Should we be educating the child in the womb? This is the question that the AI community and others are asking and beginning to research. How could this education in the womb be effective and what technology could be used to take the question of pre-birth education further? In his first lecture of the series ‘The Foundations of Human Experience’, Rudolf Steiner describes the pre-birth education that is necessary which is in line with a spiritual perception of the Human Being: He addresses this question and issues a challenge to parents and in particular the mother. How do we live our lives before and after conception? He suggests that how we live our lives, what our thoughts are, what we eat, how we sleep, our sense impressions, all have an educative and powerful influence on the growing human being within the womb. In other places he takes this concept of pre-birth education in a further direction when he describes the ‘Pedagogical Law’. Here he is very specific about which parts of our being as the parent or educator educate the child or young person. 

So if we look at life and education from a spiritual perspective, we can take into consideration that the Spirit – Soul aspect of the human being unites with the Life – Physical aspect of the human being at birth. But this is not a simple and vague notion, each part of the Spirit and Soul aspects have specific characteristics as does more obviously each part of the Life and Physical aspects. The joining and integrating of all these parts is where educating from a spiritual perspective begins. Steiner purports that ” The task of education conceived in the spiritual sense is to bring the Soul-Spirit into harmony with the Life-Body. They must come into harmony with one another. They must be attuned to one another; for when the child is born into the physical world, they do not as yet fit one another. The task of the educator and of the teacher too, is the mutual attuning of these two members.”

spiritual perspectives in education
Photo of session at the Mount Camphill Community. © Chrystal Hayn. All Rights Reserved.

Can I bring the tuning and harmonising of these two but manifold aspects of the human being into my teaching? My endeavour is that every aspect of all Eurythmy sessions, workshops and lessons that I offer, addresses this basic question: The harmonising and bringing together of the aspects mentioned above in an age appropriate and socially integrated way. This is also surely why any Steiner School, College or Steiner related education requires Eurythmy pedagogy as part of any spiritually inspired curricula.


Chrystal Hayn studied Waldorf Education in Stuttgart in the 80’s and after class teaching for 7 years trained in Eurythmy at the Ringwood Botton Eurythmy School with Chas Bamford, Monica Dorrington and Evamaria Rascher. She went on to be part of many national and international performing projects with the Botton Stage Group, Eskdale Eurythmy, Peredur Stage Group and London Eurythmy over 22 years, working mainly with Hajo Deker. She taught courses at the London College Of Eurythmy and workshops at Steiner House for several years and is part of the Foundation Stone Meditation performing work with London Eurythmy. She lives and works at The Mount Camphill Community, where she also teaches young people with special needs at the Mount Independent Specialist Residential College and is co-founder of Eurythmy India.

 

Working with Steiner’s Principles Towards Perceptive and Imaginative Teaching Approaches

By Chrystal Hayn

Thoughts that have inspired me that arise through reading the Foundations of Human Experience: Lectures on Education by Rudolf Steiner. Thoughts like these are timeless and allow strength and persistence for teaching the special needs young people with whom I work at the Mount Camphill Community.

In the spiritual world before birth we are helped by spirit beings in manifold ways to prepare for our birth. We arrive here on earth and meet the age of the Consciousness Soul which is also an age of deep egoism. Do we have pre-birthly intentions? How can we remember them? How can education help us to know what we are really about and what we truly intend for our lives?

working with Steiner's principles
Students from The Mount Camphill Community.

We are born and clothed with physical and life forces. As educators we continue the work of spiritual beings: ‘ We will be conscious that physical existence is a continuation of the spiritual. In educating we carry on the work of higher beings. The right mood will be engendered when we fill ourselves with the consciousness that I continue the work of higher beings that was done before the birth of the one I am educating.’


Chrystal Hayn studied Waldorf Education in Stuttgart in the 80’s and after class teaching for 7 years trained in Eurythmy at the Ringwood Botton Eurythmy School with Chas Bamford, Monica Dorrington and Evamaria Rascher. She went on to be part of many national and international performing projects with the Botton Stage Group, Eskdale Eurythmy, Peredur Stage Group and London Eurythmy over 22 years, working mainly with Hajo Deker. She taught courses at the London College Of Eurythmy and workshops at Steiner House for several years and is part of the Foundation Stone Meditation performing work with London Eurythmy. She lives and works at The Mount Camphill Community, where she also teaches young people with special needs at the Mount Independent Specialist Residential College and is co-founder of Eurythmy India.