SPIRITUAL TOOLKIT WORK WITH CHILDREN

Could you be a mentor or "safe person" for a child?

‘If the young are not initiated in the tribe, they will burn down the village just to feel its warmth.’ - African Proverb

Have you ever considered being a mentor or “safe person” for a child?

I often lie in bed at night, kept awake by the meteoric rise in mental health statistics for children and young people. I see a cross-section (or microscopic “slice”) of that in the emails I personally receive. I am painfully aware that (even) Western governments, of the most wealthy countries, will never allocate the amount of funding that is really needed to reach all young people who live with a serious mental health issue. After much soul-searching I have arrived at the conclusion that a (voluntary) mentoring system with supervision and safeguarding built in is our only realistic option.

Some people have space in their heart and home to adopt children and give them a new start in life and a forever family. As a biological parent I have always felt tremendous admiration for people who do so, because adopted children arrive with a traumatic history that you can (probably) never heal fully. But you can still make a huge difference in terms of their life outcomes - and you can enjoy watching them grow up.

This blog was set in motion by a recent email I received from someone who works with young people aged 10 - 14 years old. She wanted to know whether I am willing to teach a course in facilitating spiritual toolkit work with young people or another form of mentoring (perhaps a small group of facilitators just starting out). My answer is that I am willing to do this, but only if there is enough interest and my teaching schedule does not allow me to schedule this before 2025. This essay is to put the idea “out there” and test the waters in my community.

My own three children are my greatest teachers in this life! I have said this over and over in the countless interviews I have done (since the publication of my first book, Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life, in 2016). I was asking my eldest son (who is 24) only yesterday to “keep the tutorials coming”. He laughed and said: “Of course! I want a Mum who stays with the times, who understands the world my friends and I live in!”

Children, tweens and teens have an innate wisdom that inevitably blows away anyone who truly listens (without projecting or lecturing). That is not to say that they don’t need need careful nurturing and teaching, guidance and protection, mentors and role models.

Every person alive (of any age) needs a confidante, a person they can trust absolutely and show their vulnerabilities, worries and messy pieces of self (that are a work in process). We all need people we can tell: “I messed up” without being judged or the information being used against us at some future time.

Even children from solid or supportive homes often need an outsider as a compassionate mentor but children who are neglected, abused, parentified (meaning role reversal, situations where the children look after the parents or prioritise the emotional wellbeing of the parents), scapegoated or bullied need such mentors far more badly.

Why do I feel this so strongly? Well, because I have closely observed my own children from birth until the present time (at the time of writing they are 24, 22 and 20). But also because I did not have such a “safe person” when I was child and teen, in a very unsafe and unmanageable home environment. What I did have was passionate subject teachers at the Grammar School I attended, who saw talent in me and encouraged me to develop my interests and intellectual abilities. I was an A* star student, interested in every subject (except economics!) In other words, they helped me joyfully cultivate a piece of self that was healthy and thriving: my inquisitive self and my freak talent for learning foreign languages. In supporting that “self which was so hungry for learning” they gave me areas of joy and self-confidence. In later life I could work from those places of strength to start healing the parts of me that didn’t know what personal boundaries were, or what healthy relationships look like.

During the Covid-19 Pandemic I often said in interviews (and wrote in articles) that there was an even worse invisible pandemic unfolding: a crisis of immense proportions in the mental health of young people.

Statistics (from the US) show a 40% increase in (reported) mental health issues (in the 10 years leading up to the Pandemic) but of course a lot of misery goes unreported. Feelings of persistent sadness and hopelessness increased, as did suicidal ideation and self-harm behaviours.

There has been a similar rise in the number of young adults in England who report feelings of severe distress. A recent study found one in five 18 to 24-year-olds said they experienced severe distress at the end of 2022, compared to around one in seven in 2021. (The research actually reported that severe distress rose across all age groups, except for those over 65!) Source

People who work on a professional level with children, tweens and teens confirm this at grassroot level, in every possible way. But clearly no person is an island and no young person (or family) exists in isolation. This make the situation very complex. To understand what is going on we need to map a lot of aspects in any given situation. Let’s name some (but this list is far from exhaustive):

• The “pandemic aftermath”: in addition to the social isolation and academic disruption nearly all children and teens faced, many also lost caregivers to COVID-19, had a parent lose their job, or were victims of physical or emotional abuse at home. (Domestic abuse and violence rose because people were cooped up together for long periods).

• Some very young children received key “imprinting” (cultural messaging) during the Pandemic, at one of the most formative times of their life. (“You could kill your grandparents by hugging them! Stay well clear to save their lives!) The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget did ground-breaking work in terms of identifying key time frames in child development. Those times frames are like windows opening and closing again. I often wonder how this will affect a generation of children (and also how much work is done to unravel the programming and frankly toxic messages absorbed at a very tender age). No wonder many young children live with an imminent sense of doom…

• Since 2012 children and young people have spent shocking amounts of time online and they live their lives on social media platforms (and psychologists are still mapping the far-reaching consequences of that).

• Children and are plugged to screens which deliver a 24/7 tsunami of bad news (war, death, disasters and climate change) to their bedrooms, without taking into account their ability to process this (of course many good parents try hard to impose limits on this - but children often have clever ways of subverting this!)

• Online gaming (and a great popularity of games with a “kill score”).

• Easy access to porn (these days you have to make an effort to keep it off your computer!)

• Political polarisation and culture wars.

• And last but least the normal up and downs of childhood and adolescence (quite potent hormonal soup in its own right!)

To this laundry list I would personally add the fact that due to secularization many people choose not to pass on the religion of their childhood (or family of origin) but offer children no other spiritual tools instead. I observe that children then grow up with a void where the spiritual dimension should be. Leaving aside extreme belief systems that violate human rights and personal liberty, some exposure to religion keeps the “spiritual wiring of the human joined up” and makes it easier for people to embrace (understand and learn) a chosen spirituality, religion, cosmology or belief system later on in life. (I have had people in my own classes who grew up without any exposure to religion or spiritual thought, and they really struggled with the late start. The learning process was slow and laborious - and they would compare themselves unfavourably with fellow participants, which did not help!)

It also means that we no longer offer (safely and expertly held) experiences of initiation or Rites of Passage to children, meaning that the innate wiring of the human psyche drives them to (very unsafe) experiences of self-initiation (and transcendental experiences). Examples are drugtaking, sex in early puberty, joy-riding, vandalism, youth gangs etc.

This takes me back to where I started:

‘If the young are not initiated in the tribe, they will burn down the village just to feel its warmth.’ - African Proverb

Plant spirit communication

Could you be a person who has the time and resources to mentor a child (ideally in-person, a child or young person in your immediate surroundings, but this could also be done online)?

Are you willing to share your own spiritual tools with a small group of children (and consent from their parents)? Or perhaps to take children out in nature (in a city that would be the local park) and teach them the medicine of plants and names of birds? Tell them stories of people who shaped the local area (ancestors of location)?

And if so, would you welcome some kind of mentoring, support, supervision or guidance (by means of structured classes) for yourself? Obviously shared sessions are much more affordable than one-on-one sessions. They could be as-and-when and Q &A based, or they could have content, a curriculum.

Same thing if you would like to connect with other people who are exploring all this. Please let me know in the comments (or email me, every Substack post shows my email address). I could create a file of names and email addresses and put likeminded people in touch with each other.

Let me also name the Shadow (as I always try to do): of course there are paedophiles out there (I am not willing to cooperate with the demand we call them MAPS, Minor Attracted People) who approach (and cleverly groom!) children for all the wrong reasons. This too gives me sleepless nights. But after much soul-searching I believe that offending paedophiles (and I acknowledge that there are also non-offending paedophiles, people who feel the attraction but don’t act on those impulses) will reach out to children anyway. My call to action will not have an impact on that. The core issue goes back to children having trusted adults in their lives who can monitor them, educate them about grooming (all the subtle ways it happens) and matters of bodily autonomy. Parents sometimes get busy (or diagnosed, unemployed, or involved in caring for their own elderly parents lunging from crisis to crises etc.) Then it is even more important that a neutral but compassionate outsider helps children read warning signals, in times of increased vulnerability.

My closing observation is that we live in an incredibly ageist society: old(er) people are made to feel grey (to the point of invisible) and superfluous to the collective requirements. Actually they have lived and survived, love and survived loss, often they have parented and grand-parented, they hold the knowledge of family history and ancestors. Not infrequently they are also time-rich and comfortably retired (financially speaking). Assuming they want to, they could play a stellar role in solving this societal conundrum, and it would make them feel valued and respected in return. Win-win!

I try (but sometimes fail) to get out one essay a week, due to travel, international teaching commitments and family care responsibilities (our family lives with Alzheimer’s and I have written several posts about that). If you would like to see regular posts about about sacred art, Nordic spirituality and my life as a Forest Witch (and of course short videos of the wildlife here!), please follow me on Instagram or Facebook, thank you!

Imelda, Forest House and Forest School, Sweden

BIO FOR IMELDA ALMQVIST

Imelda Almqvist is an international teacher of Sacred Art and Seiðr/Old Norse Traditions (the ancestral wisdom teachings of Northern Europe). So far she has written four non-fiction books and two picture books for children. Natural Born Shamans: A Spiritual Toolkit for Life (Using shamanism creatively with young people of all ages) in 2016, Sacred Art: A Hollow Bone for Spirit (Where Art Meets Shamanism) in 2019, Medicine of the Imagination - Dwelling in Possibility (an impassioned plea for fearless imagination) in 2020 and North Sea Water In My Veins (The Pre-Christian spirituality of the Low Countries) was published in June 2022.

The Green Bear is a series of picture book for children, aged 3 – 8 years. The stories and vibrant artwork, set in Scandinavia, invite children to explore enchanting parallel worlds and to keep their sense of magic alive as they grow up.

Imelda has presented her work on both The Shift Network and Sounds True. She appears in a TV program, titled Ice Age Shaman, made for the Smithsonian Museum, in the series Mystic Britain, talking about Mesolithic arctic deer shamanism.

Imelda is currently working on a handbook for rune magicians (about the runes of the Elder Futhark) and on more books in the Green Bear Series. Imelda runs an on-line school called Pregnant Hag Teachings, where all classes she teaches remain available as recordings, which can be watched any time.

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Online School:                  https://pregnant-hag-teachings.teachable.com/courses/

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Twitter: @ImeldaAlmqvist