Let’s take a journey into the South East. This is a place of rapid growth, deeper orientation, electricity, rapid growth, a child’s passions, motivation, and Vitality. The Ordinal directions represent a place of transitions from one direction to the next. If the East is new growth and birth the southeast represents the rapid growth and adolescence. The first step is to inspire your student the second is to motivate them.
Kids often leave our Summer Camps inspired and excited to continue working on the skills they’ve learned that week. But recently I’ve been hearing from campers that this only happens for a couple days or weeks until, eventually, the inspiration wears off and there aren’t people around to help motivate them.
So how do we motivate? Here at the Wilderness Awareness School, we do this in many ways. One of the most powerful ways is through a child’s passions, like games!! We teach many core routines, daily practices, at our school that deep our student’s connection with themselves, each other and the natural world.
We have found that is not always enough to just tell the students to go and do these things because they will make you healthy and happier. I know that running every morning is good for me but I don’t always have the personal motivation to do it, right? I’m sure we all have something like this in our lives we can relate to.
So what we have done is intermixed all of our core routines into games and activities. This way the students are experiencing all the core routines, overcoming fears, learning the curriculum, developing trust, being quiet, listening, team building, pushing their edges, and they don’t even really know it, until maybe after the fact. This is all done through the motivation to win or play the game.
On a teaching team, the South East is the person in charge of facilitating games, activities, and helping with transitions. This person also, tends to have a natural child-like curiosity and vitality about them. They are playful and ask questions with genuine curiosity and lead by example.
The Indicator of Awareness for this shield is aliveness and agility. I’ve also heard it describe as the health and vitality of a wolf or coyote. This shows up in our students as putting one’s whole self into something, awakened bodies channeled into meaningful connections, and quick reflexes.
Things associated with the SE: rapid growth, adolescence, child’s passions, games, play, health, vitality, aliveness, agility, motivation, deeper orientation, YouTube phase, late spring/early summer, porcupine, otters.
Now that we have cultivated the Motivation, it is time to dive into the perspiration and hard work of the South Shield.