Rhythm Is Life
- Sharifa Oppenheimer
- Sep 4
- 5 min read
In LifeWays principles much focus is given to rhythm. Our twenty-first century lives have become so a-rhythmic, it is sometimes hard to understand why rhythm is considered foundational to every aspect of well-being. Humanity’s earliest ancestors evolved in the generous and rhythmic cycles of the natural world, and these life-supporting systems ~ the living beings that are waters, winds, seasons, migrations, sunrise and sunset ~ remain essential. A frenetic pace endangers the balance conferred by these life-giving circadian rhythms in which we have always been held and nurtured. People of all ages, but especially young children continue to depend upon rhythm, repetition and ritual as their foundation. Physical, emotional, social, mental, spiritual ~ our entire being is dependent upon steady, reliable rhythms. Not rigid rules to adhere to, rather, rhythms that reflect the organic flow we experience when we live within the ancient rhythms of the natural world.
Life begins as rhythm, with the rhythm of our heartbeat and our breath. Have you noticed that when your breath is steady, even and rhythmic your external life reflect this? When you join me in the upcoming class, Rhythm is Life, we will begin by experiencing heart-breathing, a simple open-eye meditation focused on the breath moving through the heart. Steadying the breath through heart-breathing is one way to reap the harvest of rhythm in our moment-by-moment lives.
Let’s take the metaphor of the inhalation and exhalation as a way to explore our movements through time, our life-rhythms. Although we are rarely aware at this level, the exhalation is the aspect of the breath cycle in which we move, act, make relationship with life and have impact in the world. The inhalation is the moment in which we are “filled full of again” with life sustaining oxygen as well as the minerals contained in stardust. Every moment of every day we move through this cycle: we are filled full of life force on the inhalation, and on the exhalation we give our living breath to the world. If we make this physiological fact conscious, if we choose to participate with awareness, we can experience the flooding-in of goodness, as the oxygen brings nutrients to the whole body. Perhaps sometimes when you are tired and life simply requires that you keep going, you pause for just a breath or two. We rest deeply, being held and nourished on the inhalation, and then we feel the wash of good fresh energy move through us on the exhalation.
Our classroom and family rhythms can balance on this swing of inhalation and exhalation as well. We can think of the inhalations as the times we gather together, pause and are nourished by the quiet nutrition of each other’s presence. The exhalations are times we turn toward the world full of busy work and play, when we offer our nutrient-enriched energy to life.
What would working with the inhalation and exhalation look like, in a day, a week, a season and a year? This is what we will study in depth in Rhythm is Life. It seems to me times of inhalation would include quiet snuggly morning waking-up times, mealtimes together especially meal blessings, nap time with all of its quiet lead-up, story and book times, and the sacred bed-time rituals. Exhalations could include play times, working together times, weekend family outings, a weekly field trip to the library or park, gardening, leaf-raking, snow shoveling, feeding the birds, and every other sort of fun.
The correct balance for your family or your classroom will depend upon the age of your children and the wonderful tapestry of your individual temperaments! This balance will grow and evolve as your children do. A baby will need much more of the snuggling-in inhalation and will show you through crankiness and restlessness if you have stretched too far into the great fun of the exhalation. A toddler can handle more of the outwardly-directed work and play times, but still needs plenty of time to be gathered-in and nourished by you. The pre-schooler becomes more sturdy and is now ready for a small rhythmic world of creative play with friends and siblings, perhaps in your local LifeWays center. Now the times of exhalation become longer as they learn to sustain play. Kindergarteners reigns supreme in the world of make-believe, as they grow and mature. This is evidenced by giving up the afternoon nap, and needing less of the inhalation times. This is because their interior activity ~ the ability to concentrate and hold the story-line of the game in their mind ~ which we can see as an inhalation ~ begins to permeate their play time. And so, in a way, the focused-energy of the inhalation becomes woven into the expansive time of play. They have reached a particular type of integration. We see this integration in athletes, who in the midst of great exertion find an inner place of quiet peace….they are in the zone. When children play in this focused way, they also are in the zone, and their games can go on all day, or sometimes for weeks. In Heaven on Earth I tell the story of my sons who played a never-ending- game ~ called with elegant simplicity The Game ~ which went on for years! In my classroom, the older children would beg at clean-up time that their elaborate game constructions be preserved, to be continued the next day. We would tuck the necessary items away in a corner, ready to be revived again soon.
When we begin the study of Rhythm is Life, we will begin at the beginning, with the rhythm of our heartbeat. Then we’ll move to the rhythm ~ the language ~ of our gestures. Following these we’ll turn toward the rhythms of the day, the week, the seasons of the year and the celebration of Festivals, these great round cycles of life on our beautiful planet Earth. I hope to see you there!
Sharifa Oppenheimer was the founding teacher of the Charlottesville Waldorf School as well as The Rose Garden, a Waldorf early childhood home-program. She is the author of numerous well-received articles and books, including Heaven on Earth: A Handbook for Parents of Young Children and its companion workbook How To Create The Star of Your Family Culture, as well as With Stars in Their Eyes: Brain Science and Your Child’s Journey Toward the Self. Her research is devoted to exploring the ways in which the latest findings in brain science support Steiner principles. She now teaches collaboratively with LifeWays and continues to explore and write about other aspects of profound connection, particularly the family’s need for deep connection to Nature. She teaches online Kinship with Nature classes, and her most recent books A Litany of Wild Graces and Rewilding the Human Heart explore the family’s biological and spiritual inter-being with our other-than-human relations.
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