Agenda of the Sunday School
The Sunday School is a long term project of self-governed learning for children, adolescents and adults in search of their inner child. We do a multitude of practical things following old Cherokee wisdom: What good is it, if it doesn't make the corn grow?
Each child, actually everyone is searching for their place in life and for a way to grow up. The elders believe that each child chooses his or her own time and space for learning particular skills. And all the answers can be found within. Elders and friends provide guidance, counselling and teaching but they always respect the inner rhythms of each student.
The souls of all human beings experience the same windows of opportunity for environmental conditioning, orientation as well as an individual readiness during childhood and youth. Inner settings are stabilized and work as precursors into adult life. Over millenia many cultures have successfully shaped these inner settings through conscious acts and with the help of explicit forms and ceremonies. Children in these cultures went to schools or had teachers that taught their minds, bodies and souls.
There are traces of these cultures in our time but most ceremonies and traditions did not survive the “new” civilisation of the past 400 years. What has remained is not clear enough to serve as a pathway to a spiritually and emotionally stable and self determined adult existence. Today's school system barely touches these realms of life, despite the efforts of many brave people in the field of education.
Therefore it can be helpful to have access to the practices and skills of unbroken traditions in the field of initiation. Here at the Sunday School we partake in native North American cultures.
Despite this Indian sponsorship for our methods, we know exactly who we are and where we come from. We are confident that the inner wisdom of our own ancestors will manifest itself as needed skills to meet tomorrows challenges. Until that time, we gratefully appreciate the means other cultures have to offer to benefit our children on their way into adulthood.
Initiation
The Sunday School offers adolescents an opportunity to consciously make the transition from child to adult by taking a ceremonial test after a year of preparation (Coming of Age Ceremomy)
Kilian Keller will provide all necessary information at info@diesonntagsschule.de
Our children are our future
The Sunday School started in 2005 as a playful way to experience nature on the banks of the Isar river. It is now beginning to provide boys and girls with clear pathways and transition rites on their way to becoming a man or a woman. Even adult will be given time and space, to rediscover and revisit stations of their own lives, that they for whatever reason hadn't been able to live completely or had to experience in an unhealthy manner.
In a native American context “medicine” contains a system of teachings and practical skills that benefit the “whole” being. It can contain general skills or particular branches as healing, building or music. As of now only few medicine bundles have been opened. But when the time is right young people will ask for the medicine they need for their next steps.
There will be few boundaries then on the journey of discovering the width and depth of one's own consciousness and experiencing one's potentials.
Currently our monthly practice consists of:
Ceremonial opening and closure with songs from the Ywahoo tradition
making and tending a fire
building with a variety of tools
dances from the Ywahoo tradition (Dance of the four directions, Stick dance)
