I saw Artur Rubinstein play a concert when I was eight years old. It must have made an impression on me – Rubinstein is still my favorite pianist!

But all I remember is meeting my piano teacher in the audience. I didn’t know that she even existed outside the boundaries of that little room with the two spinets, the bench with the needlepoint cover, the can of multi-colored ballpoint pens with which she wrote each week’s lesson . . . Still, there she was, very tall (she must have been wearing

My son sings in a high school choral group, and last Friday night it opened for a community production of A Christmas Carol. I can’t remember the last time I saw that play. But I must have been a lot younger than I am now. And so was the economy.

“Are there no prisons?” I watch Scrooge interrogate the women who knock on his door, soliciting contributions for the poor. “Are there no workhouses?” What I do remember, is that the last time I watched A Christmas Carol, Scrooge was a caricature.

We love to celebrate holidays – birthdays, Christmas, Hanukkah, Halloween, and many others. And, of course, we want to share our celebrations with our babies. We want them to grow up enjoying the same things that give us pleasure. But, developmentally speaking, the concept of a holiday is not really something a baby or toddler understands.  Very young children live in that blessed “now” where everything is already special.

Of course, children are always happy to get new toys or treats. But,

I had the good fortune to spend last week in Pittsburgh at the annual conference of the American Orff-Schulwerk Association. It’s a BIG conference, and it was in a BIG venue – a seven-acre conference center right on one of the three rivers that come together in the middle of downtown. I won’t try to do the event justice – but here are a few memories and impressions, old and recent . . .

Xylophones. And glockenspiels . . . I’ve never seen so many! The exhibit hall is full of vendors selling

Please, Thank you, I’m sorry . . . these conventional phrases help us to lubricate the sticking points in relationship. When we want something, we ask nicely. When we receive something, we express gratitude. And when we have transgressed, in however minor a way, we apologize.

As we grow up, these words begin to elicit in us a kind of Pavlovian response. Just as the dog had learned to associate the sound of the bell with food, we learn to associate these words with meanings. When we hear

When someone begins to yawn, our mirror neurons instruct our own jaws to open. As someone shoulders a car out of a ditch, our mirror neurons tell our own muscles to tighten in concert. When our friend’s forehead knits in thought, it is our mirror neurons that cause our own brows to furrow involuntarily. Frowns, smiles, tears, laughter – all stimulate a reflection in our own brain/body systems. Mirror neurons create the neurological map of empathy.

When our mirror neurons are not functioning

In Mirror Neurons Part I, I talked about the way mirror neurons create a neurological correlate of whatever we observe in others.  Through these internal recording devices, everything we notice in another person – from facial expressions to body language to vocal inflection – is replicated in our own brainwaves and muscles. Through mirror neurons, we literally become what we experience others to be.

But the way we experience others to be is not necessarily the way they experience

In the 1990’s, mirror neurons were “discovered” by accident, when an Italian brain researcher reached for his lunch. His macaque monkey subjects were watching him, implanted with electrodes. The researcher noticed with astonishment that, as he extended his arm, the same areas of their brains lit up as his - even though they were sitting still.

In the past twenty years, research has suggested that everything we notice in the others around us registers in our own brain/body systems. It is as

I grew up with my maternal grandmother. She worked nearby as a receptionist, and she would come home at lunchtime. My mother was a writer; she worked mornings in her bedroom up on the second floor. When she heard the front door open, my mother would stop her typing. She’d walk downstairs, past the paper bags of groceries my grandmother would have just placed on the kitchen counters, and begin to talk.

There is a vignette locked in my memory: my grandmother is washing the dishes with her

Once in a while, I get to hold a newborn. Most recently, it was an emergency visit at the end of my day - but as the miraculous baby girl was placed in my arms, all my tiredness fell away. As our hour together went on, twilight turned to darkness – yet it seemed that the room was increasingly filled with light. But the time the family left, my whole office was humming.

When they are only a day or two old, babies are still mostly in that other place they lived before they were born. It is a

The developmental difference between “intention” and “affirmation” became clear to me yesterday. It was during a break in a seminar. I was saying to a colleague that the most important factor in healing and education was to want to be well, to want to grow. I said that, before I do work with children, even very young children, I have them set an intention. Of course, I don’t tell them that! I might say, “Remember some really fun, happy time!” Sometimes, with older children, I’ll add, “Put

I’ve just come back from visiting my parents. It is a difficult time; my mother is in a “moderately advanced” stage of dementia, and it is odd to see the layers of mind falling away like autumn leaves. The experience has caused me to reflect. What part of us is the sturdy trunk? the living sap? the invisible life energy?

The Trunk. The trunk is movement. The still-myelinated neural pathways of small habitual movements, ordinary activities, can remain intact. For instance, the night before I