Intimacy Is the Healing Principle

When children exhibit negative behavior, the tendency is to try to change the undesirable behaviors in and of themselves. This is like trying to treat the symptoms of a disease without understanding its cause. Instead, the first thing to do is understand what is behind the bad behavior. Avatar Adi Da provides insight into why children act out:

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Basically, there is one thing that children are reacting to, and that is the absence of intimacy. Reactive emotions and inappropriate behavior, in general, are secondary symptoms of a primary frustration. What is being frustrated is intimacy—or life-positive, associative energy. Thus, you cannot deal with these secondary, reactive emotions directly, as if they were the point. What the child is actually suffering is the point, and that is what must be addressed in him or her. A circumstance must be provided in which the primary emotion of love can be expressed or chosen in any moment.

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Intimacy is the healing principle. Parents and teachers must live an intimate life with children. It only creates a vacuum, a “problem”, if this does not happen. You must establish your relationships on the basis of emotional intimacy. Children become more and more exaggerated when caring intimacy is lacking. When the basic pleasure of relational intimacy is not present, they are reduced to manipulation . . . As parents and teachers, you must create and bring to children the real value of intimacy with people, the “world”, and the Divine Mystery.

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A child transcends his or her reactive emotions and anger only when you bring him or her into a condition of sensitivity and relational intimacy. For instance, anger is not transcended through suppression or release but only by bringing the individual into awareness of his or her feeling--relationship to others and the “world”. In other words, you must constantly deal with the primary emotion of relatedness, or love, and enhance that sensitivity, rather than deal “problematically” with secondary reactive emotions.

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Throughout His instruction on conscious childrearing, Avatar Adi Da provides guidelines for establishing loving interactions with children who are acting out, including helping children:

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             feel they are connected positively to others in the moment

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             express whatever negative feelings are coming up constructively

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             trust that they are loved and sustained in life altogether

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             find the creative strength to meet the demands of life happily

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