Law of Rhythm

Leveraging laws of nature to make life easier is something I love to talk about.  The Law of Rhythm (described in The Kybalion and other Hermetic texts) is a Universal Principle that we should all be aware of. It needs to form the foundation of education, as it’s one of the gateways to the freedom and ease that most people want in their life.

Imagine going through life knowing that you can use natural cycles - the ebbs and flows, the fact that everything is either growing or dying - to support any result you’re heading towards. It’s the equivalent of surfing a wave instead of fighting a tide.

Wouldn’t that be a good thing to learn early in life?

For most people life feels like a fight. We’re trained to push, force, try hard to get results in the most unnatural ways.

Never mind that it leads to exhaustion, depression, giving up on goals and yourself, believing that you can’t, settling for less than what you wanted out of life. We still, as a society, seem compelled to try harder, do more, start earlier, believing that it’s the only way to somehow get ahead - despite evidence for the exact opposite.

Is this really what we want our young people to take on? Is this how we want them to live their life too?  Believing that life is a struggle and that they’ll have it even worse than we did?  That they’ll have to kill themselves trying to get through life?

Some parents try to give their children a head-start to counteract this perception of a “difficult world”.  It’s a sad thing to watch because they go about it totally the wrong way.

One mum I know, for example, tried to convince me that her 2-year-old LOVES learning letters. She was shocked when I informed her that her daughter “loves” whatever pleases her. (A child’s mind is wired to endear to the parent, and so children reflect our often-unconscious agendas.  This can also be leveraged - but it’s an aside here and a topic for another newsletter.)

To bring it back to one of my “favourite” Universal Laws:

The Law of Rhythm dictates that any child pushed to achieve early in life will inevitably swing the other way. The swing of the pendulum is inevitable and nobody escapes. We see the first round of this around Year 3, when many a star-child’s performance suddenly drops. This wave is usually the result of developmental gaps, when academics and higher-level skills are introduced too early at a cost of foundational skills and movements that connect the body and brain.

Other waves of the pendulum-swing occur throughout life: rebellion, depression, burnout, midlife crisis - whatever the reason or length of the pendulum swing, it’s going to hit and send the person backwards, unless you know what you’re dealing with and how to leverage the natural force.

What if, instead of cramming as much as we can into each day, we learned to respect the natural cycles, realising that night must follow day?

Imagine knowing early in life that a 30-minute lesson followed by 10-minute chat (integrate), 15-minute rest (ponder and assimilate) and 5 minutes of movement (circulate), results in more learning than a full hour of work?

Imagine learning early in life that emotions come and go, and that making decisions to avoid unpleasant emotions never gets you what you want?

Wouldn't you love to have known, long before now, that wishing for anything to be stable or permanent is futile and only leads to stagnation and pain?

Wouldn’t it be useful to know that you can achieve more with less effort?  That you can leverage a natural force? That you can work with nature (and your human nature) rather than battling against it?

So why doesn't today's "education" include that?

Thankfully the Law of Rhythm does not discriminate and therefore takes care of human dysfunction (including in “education”). No matter how much anxiety, stress and dissatisfaction the schooling system causes, the pendulum will swing the other way - and we’re already noticing this.

The Law of Rhythm is the basis of sayings like “This too shall pass” and “All things must come to an end”. It’s inevitable that tides and cycles go on - and we can either choose to be victim to it, subject to circumstance - or we can choose to use the energy that already exists to create more of what we want in life.

I write about lessons from life and about life, that I believe form part of any complete foundational education. True Education needs to prepare a young person for any future - no matter what it brings. The 7 Seeds of Success®️ model is, I believe, both universal and timeless, developing the 7 Seed Skills from which all learning sprouts.

If Education is your passion, subscribe, comment and share in the journey with me.