MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Life changed for 12 year-old Careino Gurley the day Jane Barrash from The Continuum Center walked into his classroom in 1991. Placed in Harrison Secondary in north Minneapolis, a school for seriously emotionally and behaviorally disordered kids at the bottom 3% of state scholastic performance, Gurley, like every other kid in the room, had slid down the academic rungs to the last place the system would manage him.
Primarily kids of color, all the students at Harrison had been kicked out of treatment centers, other schools or hospitals. They represented the full range of problems coming from the inner city: poverty, domestic dysfunction, illiteracy, drug addiction, alcoholism and crime.
To say Barrash was met with disbelief when she started talking about how science shows humans are connected at the subatomic levels, and how thoughts and emotions and attitudes are connected to results in life, is an understatement.
“They called me ‘Crazy Lady’ at first,” says Barrash. “But after about three weeks they were intrigued.”
Following a workbook designed by Barrash and Continuum Center of Minneapolis, the children learned about concepts including the illusion of matter, the quantum leap, synchronicity, metaphor, and paradox. Pulling in West African, East Indian, Asian and Native American cultural perspectives and inner disciplines, blended with Western scientifically based self-regulation and imagery techniques, the children also learned diaphragmatic breathing and focusing strategies over the nine month course.
“We go through the concepts in the workbook with baby steps to make the material easier to digest,” says Barrash. “But at the end of it, they really understand that there is a different set of operating assumptions at play in the universe, and it's not about manipulating all the external variables - but more about developing what you've got on the inside.”
The proof of the course’s effectiveness, of course, lay in the lives of the children themselves. Although the course was only introduced for two years, and no scientific objective measurements were done formally assessing students’ performances and mental health after the course was taught, for Gurley, everything changed. Next > 1 2 3
