Happy Kids & Spirituality

Study Suggests That Spirituality Is Key To Kids’ Happiness

A professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, and his colleagues Ben Coleman and Judi Wallace have conducted a study which suggests that spirituality is key to children’s happiness.(1) Over the past few years, scientists have been able to measure the affect of positive emotions and feelings of joy within our biology, so it is key to find out what best produces these feelings within us.

Just to be clear, they define spirituality as internal characteristics, an inner belief system that a person relies on for strength and comfort. Understanding happiness has been subjected to large amounts of research for a number of years. This particular one suggests that the processes that influence happiness are not guided by external factors, but internal characteristics and qualities.

320 children aged 8-12 were assessed to examine the relationship between spirituality and happiness, from both public and private schools. You can read the full abstract and study for methods used here. The study concluded that children’s spirituality,  not their religious practices (e.g., attending church, praying, and meditating), was strongly linked to their happiness. The results parallel studies of adult happiness and suggest strategies to enhance happiness in children.

The authors found that the children who said they were more spiritual were happier. In particular, the personal (i.e. meaning and value in one’s own life) and communal (i.e. quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) aspects of spirituality were strong predictors of children’s happiness. Spirituality explained up to 27 percent of the differences in happiness levels among children.

Researchers have identified many ways in which spirituality enhances and promotes subjective well-being. One of these ways of enhancing well-being is to increase personal meaning in one’s life. Spirituality may produce a sense of meaning that is worth living or dying for.

“If spirituality enhances happiness by increasing personal meaning, this may suggest strategies to enhance happiness. For example, strategies aimed at enhancing personal meaning in children’s lives may promote happiness. Future studies could have children engage in activities that might promote personal meaning. For example, children might volunteer to help others or record their contributions to the community in a journal. Then changes in happiness and personal meaning before and after these activities could be compared. If personal meaning is critical to happiness, one might see that these activities particularly enhances happiness for those children who showed increases in personal meaning” (1)

Again, spirituality is not just another ‘thing’ to latch on to, in the context of this article it refers to an inner belief system that a person relies on for strength and comfort.

If we look at the planet today, from the day we are born we are bombarded with marketing, advertising, television and more; our wants and desires are literally programmed into us. We constantly seek external factors for self satisfaction and happiness (i.e., money), but after we acquire these external characteristics we instantly move on to something else outside of us in order to feel happy or fulfilled. This is a result of the mass conditioning we are exposed to throughout our lives.

Have you ever wondered why a majority of people on the planet want and desire the same thing? They want money, cars, clothes and a big house. What happens when nobody wants these things anymore? What happens when nobody truly has a desire to acquire materialistic gains? What happens to an individual when they come to the understanding that nothing external can bring us joy? It’s a process of great transformation, awakening and realization. It’s a path towards true fulfillment. It forces one to look within themselves for a feeling they could once only receive temporarily, from ‘things’ outside of themselves. It also forces one to create a new experience, one that can provide a better experience, one that resonates more with our internal being.

As we grow up, we pay no attention to our inner voice, neglecting it and pushing it to the side. We seem to always be following instructions. This internal voice is the key to joy, it’s your intuition, your belief systems, your heart. Many of us haven’t even had the time to develop or listen to it, many of us don’t even know how because we are told what to believe, how to live our lives and what makes us happy. We are not given the opportunity to examine and explore these things on our own, through our own inner guidance.

Constantly looking for happiness and fulfillment outside of ourselves, or having a certain external criteria for achieving a state of happiness keeps us in a cycle of depression, and sadness because these things can never provide us with real feelings of fulfillment and joy. We are always feeling that something is lacking, and that we need to acquire something to make it better.  Sure, they may provide something temporary, but in order to vibe in the energetic frequency of joy more often you will have to find it within yourself, something many of us continue to do, and something that is not easy.

I do not believe that one needs to be,  or even can be in a constant  joyful state. There is also a neutral state of peace which can be perceived as a state of sadness by some. This is  our natural state, an observer state.

Because we’ve been programmed and conditioned to seek fulfillment outside of ourselves for most of our lives, this process is extremely difficult and hard. A while ago now, I realized that nothing external on the planet could really make me ‘happy,’ that I would have to find joy in just being, existing, and having the opportunity to experience this life on this planet at this time. When nothing truly outside of yourself can provide you with joy, you will be hurled towards self discovery, but only when truly nothing outside of yourself does the trick anymore. It can be a dark place at first, but if you find yourself going through this process remember that nothing is wrong with you, and you are on the correct path. It’s perfectly normal to not be able to find joy from anything in the external world, it doesn’t mean you are depressed or not ‘normal.’ Pretty soon you will learn to find joy from the simple gift of being able to experience life. It just means that you have outgrown this experience, and you seek something new, something different, and something that fulfills your soul as apposed to your mind.

I don’t want to make it seem like completely nothing outside of myself provides me with joy. There is love, relationships with other individuals, friends, beautiful planet Earth, sports and more. But these are all feelings that come from within, and cannot be produced by materialistic gains. These are empirical experiences producing these feelings, the joy that comes from the simplicity of EXPERIENCING life, rather than acquiring. These are indeed spiritual experiences.

Next time you are feeling down ask yourself, is this feeling coming from a place where you feel you are lacking something? Because the truth is, all you need is within you, and it has been there all along.

from:    http://www.theveritasmagazine.com/article_content_mgmts/view_article/84

Kids Making A BIG Difference

8 Courageous Things Harry Potter Fans Did to Fight Real-Life Dark Forces

If Harry Potter were a real person, he’d fight child labor, voter suppression, and poverty. Here are our favorite ways Harry’s fans have taken his values from the page to the real world.
posted Nov 22, 2013
Lego Harry Potter

Photo courtesy of Alex Eylar / Flickr.

Andrew Slack finally read the Harry Potter series when he gave in to pressure from his students who were obsessed with Harry, the teenage wizard who uses magic, courage, and wit to confront dark forces and save the world.

Though the plot is fantastical, Slack, like millions before him, couldn’t stop talking about the books. But then he realized that if Harry Potter were a real person, he wouldn’t just stand around talking about himself. Harry Potter, Slack said, would “fight injustice in our world the way he fought injustice in his.”

Rowling created a world that made “fun of normalcy as an aspiration” and believed that “the weapon we have is love.”

That’s when Slack had the idea to mobilize Harry Potter fans around real-world problems—and it was easy for Slack to find parallels between the fictional stories and real-life issues.

In the Harry Potter series, author J.K. Rowling, who worked at Amnesty International prior to writing the books, wrote about inequality and even ethnic cleansing between pure-blood, half-blood, and muggle-born wizards, as well as non-magical people; werewolves forced to conceal their true identities from a culture that shames them; house elves that are enslaved and inherited down through generations; prisoners tortured in Azkaban, the wizard prison; and the use of consolidated media to control public opinion.

Most of all, says Slack, Rowling created a world that made “fun of normalcy as an aspiration” and believed that “the weapon we have is love.”

Just as Hermione Granger started the activist Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare (SPEW) to try to end the slavery of house elves and Harry started Dumbledore’s Army to fight Lord Voldemort, Slack started the Harry Potter Alliance—a movement of Harry Potter fans turning their deep love of the stories into real-world action in order to “fight injustice in our world.”

Today, the HPA has 190 chapters in 35 U.S. states and eight countries and participation in the group spans all ages.

Slack and the HPA believe in the power of story to change the world and they believe that activism can be fun and lighthearted, even when the societal issues they’re confronting are serious. Slack calls this method of making the world a better place through popular culture, “cultural acupuncture.”

“Imagine people working to end global warming, racism, and genocide as energetically as they flock to movies,” wrote Slack for the Huffington Post. “Imagine them walking out of Avatar with an organization that says, ‘Here’s how we can band together to protect Pandora by fighting the “Sky People” in the Coal Industry.'”

Here are eight issues the HPA has already taken on:

1. Labor rights

The Harry Potter Alliance took off when Slack and his friend Seth Soulstein, from their traveling comedy group, the Late Night Players, joined with the group Walmart Watch and created “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord Waldemart” YouTube videos.

The featured main character is a cloaked figure with a Walmart smiley face for a head, the evil Waldemart. The videos describe Walmart’s unjust labor practices and how their low prices force local shops out of business.

Just as Lord Voldemort treats his servants poorly (for example, SPOILER ALERT!, he chops off Wormtail’s hand and murders Professor Snape), Walmart, the world’s largest private employer, treats its workers unfairly.

2. Fascism and genocide

The group rose in popularity when Slack and Soulstein combined efforts with Harry and the Potters, a rock band based on the books. Their first move was to mobilize already existing Harry Potter fan groups around ending genocide in Darfur.

This theme shows up in the books when, controlled by Voldemort and his Deatheaters, the Ministry of Magic establishes a policy of ethnic cleansing, believing people with impure or non-wizard blood have no worth.

The group worked with Sifa Nsengimana, a Rwandan human rights activist. With her help, in addition to creating a podcast, raising awareness, and sending letters to end genocide, the group established a library in Rwanda for children who were orphaned because of the genocide.

3. Disaster relief

With the help of the Wizard Rock community, HPA raised more than $123,000 in two weeks for Partners In Health following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. With this money, PIH was able to fly five planes full of emergency medical supplies to Haiti. Four of the planes had Harry Potter names—Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Dumbledore—while the fifth was named DFTBA (Don’t Forget to Be Awesome) in honor of Nerdfighters, a group that joined with the HPA on the campaign.

4. Education

The Harry Potter series largely takes place at Hogwarts, the school of witchcraft and wizardry. In the books, education plays a central role and the lead heroine is Hermione Granger, a young witch who demonstrates the role of books and education in fighting injustice and empowering people.

The Alliance has donated more than 120,000 books to kids in Rwanda, the Mississippi Delta, and New York City through its “Accio Books” campaign. They also helped build libraries at the New Beginnings Charter School in Brooklyn and in community centers across the Mississippi Delta.

5. Modern-day slavery and child labor

Dobby the house elf, one of the series’ most beloved characters, is a slave who has been passed down through generations in the Malfoy family. When Harry tricks Lucius Malfoy, the family patriarch, into freeing Dobby, Harry earns the elf’s undying loyalty. Dobby, as a free elf, achieves self-realization.

And Harry Potter fans have made the connection between house elf slavery and modern-day slavery.

HPA is currently pressuring Warner Brothers, which sells Harry Potter chocolate frogs (a common sweet in the books), to prove there is no child slavery in their cocoa supply chain. The Alliance even sells their own version of chocolate frogs made from fair-trade chocolate.

6. Voter registration

The Harry Potter books demonstrate the importance of civic participation by highlighting the government’s role and its potential to overreach. More often than not, Harry Potter and his friends are at odds with the Ministry of Magic.

The HPA has used this connection in their “Wizard Rock the Vote” campaign. At 70 Wizard Rock shows across the nation, HPA volunteers walked around with clipboards registering more than 1,100 Harry Potter fans to vote.

7. Immigration and marriage equality

In the Harry Potter series, many “people have to live in the closet for simply being who they are,” explains Slack. “Lupin has to live in the closet for his identity as a werewolf, Hagrid has to live in the closet for his identity as a half-giant, and Harry Potter is forced to live in the closet for his identity as a wizard. We all live in closets for multiple reasons. No one should have to, including for their immigration status or for their sexual or gender orientation.” That’s why the HPA raised more than $94,800 for equality initiatives.

In the 2012 election, club members helped in phone banks to add 900 calls to the Maryland DREAM Act to grant an in-state tuition discount to undocumented college students and to add support of marriage equality in Maine. In 2011 they made 6,200 phone calls and processed 214 digital postcards in support of marriage equality in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The HPA also currently has a “Superman Is an Immigrant” campaign to support immigrant rights.

8. Structural poverty

The HPA is branching out into other books too. The “Hunger is Not a Game” campaign joined with Oxfam and the Hunger Games fandom to help end hunger. Their newest campaign is “The Odds Are In Our Favor” to raise awareness about inequality.


Katrina Rabeler headshotKatrina Rabeler wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Katrina is a freelance reporter and writer.

from:    http://www.yesmagazine.org/happiness/8-courageous-things-harry-potter-fans-did-to-fight-real-life-dark-forces