training empathy
The Danish Association for promoting life wisdom in children
The Danish Association for promoting life wisdom in children is a small non-profit organisation working to advance children’s capacity to remain in contact with themselves and their inner sense of judgment in the midst of daily lives filled with demands and impressions.
Our vision is to create a learning environment where the capacity for self-reliance and empathy can be practiced and developed.
training programme
germany
Training Empathy
Throughout the curriculum we will pay close attention to group-building/teambuilding. In our experience, whenever you want to create a good environment for learning and development, it is necessary to create an atmosphere that is both safe and dynamic. These qualitites are important in the context of our own training as well as for the groups the participants are supposed to work with after the education. To create an environment free of prejudice and suffused with joy and cordiality we will make use of play and creativity, and also in this way make the training programme a kind of laboratory for personal growth and development.
The entire programme is based on insights from contemporary psychology, neuro-affective psychology and pedagogy in combination with the traditional knowledge and wisdom that lies at the heart of meditation traditions. The training programme will runs over two years, and consist of nine 4-day residential workshop modules, comprising a total of 36 days.
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about
our vision • who we are • activities
The Danish Association for promoting life wisdom in children works to promote childrens’ possibilities for maintaining and developing contact with themselves and their own inner sense of judgment in the context of their busy and outwardly oriented daily lives in which they are met with many demands and impressions. We collaborate with professionals – primarily teachers and pedagogues – who are together with children on a daily basis. And we operate on the basis of the knowledge now available in psychology and pedagogy regarding the significance of relationships for a good environment for learning and development. We also draw on the knowledge and experience gathered over centuries through contemplative practice about the significance of remaining in contact with the innate competences – the heart, consciousness, the body, the breath and creativity – in order to be able to keep one’s balance in a busy life.
Societies all over the world are today facing numerous major challenges. Hence there is a need for reorientation and change in the coming decades. We must work together toward a future in which respect for life and its processes becomes the key principle and goal. Especially for young people, taking responsibility for the processes of life and of community is a major challenge and one that will grow in the coming years.
In order to take on this responsibility it is necessary to be in good contact with oneself and with each other. Most children and young people need support in order to develop self-accord. By self-accord we mean a way of being in which one is at peace with the core of one’s being. This is the only place from where a person can relate deeply to other people and to a complex world in the midst of processes of profound transformation. One of the ways in which self-accord expresses itself when we are in the company of others is through empathy.
framework
the pentagon model • relational competencies • UN sustainability goals • shift of paradigm
What is needed most of all in the development of children is self-accord, being able to sense one’s center of being and from there to come into genuine contact with other people. Self-accord rests on a number of innate capacities that we are all endowed with from birth. The best way to help children to establish greater inner authority is therefore not to teach them anything new, but rather to support them in not losing what they have had from the beginning.
To put it simply: self-accord and genuine understanding between people happen when we settle into and sense our whole being and come into contact with others from this wholeness. Unfortunately, experience has shown that putting this into practice, to reach and maintain our wholeness, is not so simple.