Listening is Where Love Begins...and the Night Jaime's Big Sister Stabbed her Boyfriend for Driving his Car Through the Front Door

In my fourth year of teaching, my second grade student, Jaime, raised his hand and asked to read his morning journal aloud.

Jaime had been held back in first grade. He was a year older than his classmates and was already large for his age. He had begun the school year hitting, pushing, and overpowering his classmates on a daily basis. 

Now, after several months in the role we’d given him as a Peacemaker for younger students in the school, he had transformed from a sullen bully into a funny, mostly enjoyable student. But today his usual goofy grin had been replaced with a deep, heavy frown.

As Jaime read his journal, we learned that the evening before, his sister’s boyfriend had driven a car through their front door. 

His sister then stabbed her angry boyfriend in the stomach with a kitchen knife.  

Jaime and his family had spent most of the night in the ER with his family, while his sister’s boyfriend got stitches. 

Jaime had gotten hardly any sleep last night.

Jaime’s fellow classmates listened with rapt attention. You could have heard a pin drop. Some of them turned to look my way, unsure of what to do next. 

I took a deep breath. I grasped for the first thing that came to mind.  

“Jaime, do you get to control the choices that members of your family make?” I asked.

He shook his head and stared at his feet.

I then asked “Jaime, did YOU choose to use violence to solve your problems last night?”

Jaime looked up at me. Then he looked around at the class, who were all listening intently to hear what he would say. 

Jaime puffed his chest up high and declared, "No, because I’M A PEACEMAKER!”

Then his fellow classmates, unprompted, stood to their feet and clapped for him. Jaime beamed, soaking in the love of classmates for a few more seconds, then scampered to his seat. He went on to have a great day.

Tears are rolling down my cheeks as I write this. 20 years later, I'm still unable to share this story without tearing up. 

The listening that our class provided for Jaime had created some kind of magical protective bubble for this boy, who faced many challenges in his day-to-day life.

Deep listening is powerful medicine.

Fred Rogers was right…listening is a beautiful starting place for love.

Fred Rogers would be proud of my good friend and mentor, Zoe Alowan. She is offering a new online course in which listening as love is a core tenet. 

Grandma Zoe teaches how to create magical listening moments to grandparents, divorced parents, aunts & uncles, godparents, and those who have children they care about who live far away.

 She has masterfully connected with her long-distance grandchildren, providing key emotional support, while relieving some of this pressure from their parents during the pandemic. 

She's now offering a live course to teach you how to do the same with your loved ones. 

The 5-week interactive course starts this Thursday, Feb. 25, and will teach you how to better interact and play with kids ages 2-13 through any video platform (FaceTime, Zoom, Skype, etc). 

This course offers important lessons on how to listen to and engage with children in a way that strengthens and deepens loving relationships.

To make this course available to everyone, Zoe is offering a half price scholarship. Instead of $240, the course is only $120. Simply click on the single price payment and enter the code: LOVE (case sensitive). 

Please share Zoe’s generous offer with anyone you know who may have children they care about who may benefit. Thank you for being a place of listening and love for children.

Click the link below to learn more and register:

Grandma Zoe's FaceTime! Playtime course

Also in the spirit of Fred Rogers, I have my own offering that is built on deep listening to the wisdom of the body, the unconscious mind, and the emotions.

It’s a free 90 minute BreakThrough Circle training specifically for highly sensitive holistic healers. It’s designed for chiropractors, integrative physicians, acupuncturists, energy healers, body workers, and health & life coaches.

It’s also open to anyone who is on a path of healing who is also a highly-sensitive person (HSP) or who knows an HSP and would like to understand them better.

Sensitive healers have special needs that must be met in order to bring our gifts fully into the world. Often, these needs go unmet due to childhood conditioning, guilt about the level of self-care required, or the demands of a life that is too busy or too extroverted for a sensitive nervous system.

For sensitive healers to thrive, they require a community that understands their unique needs and a set of tools that really works for them.

This 90 minute BreakThrough Circle is designed to optimize your nervous system for the kind of life a sensitive healer dreams of...one where you feel:

• calm and at ease in your body
• confident in your choices
• deeply connected to your purpose
• and full of energy and joy even after a full day of working. 

This allows you to create a life where you no longer give away your power in order to maintain connection with extroverts and an insensitive world.

You'll leave with a playbook for listening more deeply to your body wisdom so you can nurture the specific BreakThroughs needed to move through your triggers, to create feelings of connection within, and to cultivate authentic power in your body...all within a fantastic community of heart-centered professionals. 

 And it’s all FREE…my gift to the sensitive healers of the world.

Sensitive & Happy Holistic Healers: A Free 90 Minute BreakThrough Circle Training for Healers

Choose from 3 Different Live Training Dates:

Tues Feb 23 at 8pm ET

Tues March 2 at Noon ET

Tues March 2 at 8pm ET

To learn more and to hear from other sensitive healers about how this work has transformed their lives, go to:

Sensitive & Happy Holistic Healers Free Training

Now, go forth and listen deeply. It really is a form of magic and it really does heal.

Blessings,

James

James Mayfield Smith

Somatic BreakThrough Facilitator

      [email protected]

      816. 645. 2600

      BreakThroughCircle.com