Making a living

One of the difficult decisions we've made in relation to the announcement in my last blog entry is that next year I get to work part-time. I'm absolutely thrilled about it. I know I'll still be incredibly busy with all of the changes coming up, but a full-time week teaching is just exhausting. I've been discovering that there are little things I can do on the side to make as much money in far fewer hours including tutoring which pays very very well in the east. I always feel conflicted about accepting this kind of money since I know that a lot of the kids who need it the most could never dream of affording it. On the other hand, this part of the country contains money and I might as well get in on it from those who can pay.

Yes, I feel guilty writing that, but it's what I've got to do now and does not preclude my making a difference in the world in other ways.

So on that note, I've been daydreaming this morning (and doing a lot of math) to figure out my ideal way of making a living in the next few years for fewer hours per week. Within my brainstorming is a dream I've had for several years but am very uncertain of how to realize and would love your help.

I want to teach meditation to kids.

I don't just mean teaching kids to sit and stare at the wall. That's for adults (and I do it every morning for at least 5 minutes, sometimes much more). But in addition to my own practice which is more extensive than what I've just described, I've done lots of reading about meditation with children and have sort of subversively brought it into classrooms before in the form of relaxation exercises, yoga and visualizations. This stuff works wonders and sometimes makes kids and parents fall in love with me. So it certainly seems useful.

On the west coast I think people would have loved to enroll their kids with me if I had ever gotten the courage to start a class. But that's the way the west coast thinks. The east does not think that way except, I guess, for some trendy New Yorkers. But all the more reason I think kids here NEED it. They run from this to that all the time. Kids in yeshiva have to do twice as much with academics with less time in the day and they are constantly rushing. So are their parents who often seem frantic and are talking on their cell. phones every minute. Many of these kids desparately need help with grounding themselves in all this chaos, and this kind of shift could pay off in the long-run with creating much healthier and more sensitive adults.

As for me, I only love some parts of teaching and want to make a shift. I love being with the children, but I wish I had more spiritual interactions with them and had to deal less with producing academic perfection. This is a long subject for another time and for professional reasons I probably ought not to write too much here. But I wish I could work with children more from the heart and less from the head.

So my very important question to you...

How can I market this? What should I do? If you have kids, what kind of ad would you respond to? I won't start doing this until I get a handle on my new life, but I want to start thinking about it now. It's such a lovely daydream.