something that is largely out of his control. You know, he’s seven years old! It doesn’t really matter
if he’s doing these things on purpose, he’s only seven! So, from the practice and the reflection, I
could start to see that it’s impossible for him to turn himself around without love and guidance.”
A few weeks later, Linda was excited to share a remarkable turnaround she experienced with
Adam. After practicing kindness and compassion in class and at home, she found herself
responding quite differently than she had in the past:
“Adam was having a total and utter meltdown on the bus on the way back from a field trip and I
was doing my usual, ‘I’m not going to put up with it, this is not appropriate, and I’m just going to
ignore you’ and he just wouldn’t stop. So then I thought, well this isn’t working and he is giving me
a headache so I said, ‘you know Adam, put your head here (pointing to her shoulder), put your
head here and just relax’. He fell asleep in, like, 30 seconds. Once I softened with him and stopped
being mad at him with that face of ‘I’m definitely mad at you’, he could let go. Just like that, his
head on my shoulder. It was so clear that he needed me to be more tender with him and, though I
may not have a great batting average overall, I’m really proud of the moments that I’ve had like that
with him. They’ve turned things around so quickly! They wouldn’t have happened without the role
modeling in class, the discussions around kindness and forgiveness, and all the practices we did.
Once I understood him as
unskillful
rather than
bad
, it became a question of how to deal with his
unskillfulness. Not by being unskillful myself, right? But the part that was so frustrating for me
before the course was that I
knew
I was being unskillful but I didn’t know how to stop being
unskillful, right? And the answer came, not from a technique or a strategy, but from being tender
and kind, and honest with
myself
.”
During our class on compassion, I shared a story from the Babemba tribe in Africa. Linda’s facial
expressions were almost comical in their exaggeration: first skepticism, then scorn, then disdain,
but then it looked like the light bulb went on over
her
head. Also in the exit interview, Linda shared
this remarkable story involving another student, Sam, and the power of responding to bad behavior
with love and compassion:
“Another thing that I was highly skeptical of was the story she told us about a tribe in Africa – I can’t
remember the name, but she said that when someone in that tribe does something wrong,
everybody in the whole village stops what they’re doing and makes a big circle. The culprit is put in
the center of the circle and everybody just reminds them of what is good about them until they
remember their own goodness. You’re a wonderful son, you’re this, you’re that. Right? And I’m
rolling my eyes as I listen to this because it sounds so flakey and Pollyana – you don’t do that with
children who are misbehaving! And then, I don’t know, some part of me that had been pushed
down a long time ago actually felt touched by the story. And I started to ask myself, ‘Why do I need
to be so scathing about this? I mean, what’s in it for me to be immediately dismissive of this?’
When I went to school the next day, I told my colleagues about that moment and they all just said,
‘Are you kidding? Are you going to try that in your class?’ And I said, ‘No, I don’t think so. I don’t
think it’s going to present itself but, hey, it’s a different idea and I’m not sure about it. Maybe it
will
come up.’
Two weeks later, another child, Sam, not my most problematic child, was having a really difficult
recess. He’d gotten into some kind of conflict with his friends. This was surprising because he’s
generally well-liked, but he came back miserable, they all came back miserable, and I knew no
teaching was really going to happen because there had been so much upset over the recess
break. We were kind of skirting around the issue but it seemed to come down to the fact that this
kid was just being a pest, you know? Not letting people play the way they wanted to play,
interrupting and calling out – you know, the sort of things that happen when you get pesty. So I
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