Learn to feel and to nurture feeling.

 Recently through the community of Arunika I got an opportunity to explore an artistic experience in some sharing session to public. There are many challenges when preparing the material, especially because I am not an artist nor teacher, but it made me understand that the essence of the artistic experience is not in the theory but in the experience itself.

To touch the feeling realm is to feel first. When I start doing the artistic experience on my own, I realize that the truth of the experience is the most important aspect to deliver, to manage feeling in Waldorf pedagogy is something abstract and very individual.

In Islam, my religion, there are three-fold of foundation which is Iman, Islam and Ihsan. Iman constitutes faith which is in line with the concept of truth, Islam constitutes goodness and Ihsan constitutes beauty, these three aspects strengthening my belief that spiritual, science and art must be going together for a balance in life.

Without goodness, the value of truth and beauty would be diminished. Without truth, goodness and beauty will be useless. Without beauty, goodness and truth will be something boring and lifeless. 

It is clearer now why children must be taught about and through beauty when they are starting to enter the academic life to the early puberty age, because the beauty aspect is becoming something like a bridge for the knowledge that is being delivered. In that stage, nurturing the feeling will nurture empathy and appreciation which is the foundation of care. The knowledge that is delivered through art will cultivate peace instead of dogma. 

Feeling that is nurtured in this phase made me understand that when care is nurtured, student will move for knowledge into action because we need to care about what is being learned. The human being that will grow later is someone who can see the positive side of whatever he/she found in this life, transform it becoming alive and beautiful. 

We need to present true beauty instead of the materialistic beauty that is more temporary. Understanding and apricating true beauty, then we will care for life and the life after, we will care of the environment and stand up for its cycle and its existence. That is the capacity that we need in people today.