Fire in the Heart by Deepak Chopra

Author:Deepak Chopra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2004-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT I LEARNED

This lesson is about bonding, which doesn’t happen in what you do or say or think. The moment an animal is born, it bonds with the first living creature it sees. You can hatch baby geese, for example, away from their mother, and if a man is watching them emerge from the shell, they will follow him for the rest of their early life as if he were their mother. A human baby learns to recognize its mother’s smile within a few hours of being born, and soon the baby’s eyes will go to that face and watch it over any other face. Mother and child must bond, for that is how the baby’s brain develops, by paying attention to when the mother smiles or frowns. Your whole sense of who you are originally came from watching your mother’s reactions in those first days of life.

Probably the most fascinating story I’ve heard about bonding has to do with autistic children. Autism is a condition that causes babies to go inside themselves and pay no attention to the outside world. Such babies show no interest in other people. They blank out music and television. It is sad to see an autistic child spend an entire day sitting in one place bobbing back and forth, a prisoner in a silent world.

These children were considered unreachable for a long time, and then some wonderful exceptions showed up. In one case an autistic boy from India began to write beautiful poetry even though he could barely speak. In another case a father got down on the floor and imitated all the strange twitches and twiddles that his son made, and after many months the son started paying attention—he came out of his inner world and began to show signs of life.

In other words, someone bonded with these kids, silently saying, I am here for you. And in one case an autistic boy who had shown barely any interest in the outside world suddenly began to write and do math, skills he had learned all by himself. When asked how he had done that, he tapped out a message with one finger on his alphabet board: “I’ve been listening.” I felt a lump in my throat when I heard that story, because I suddenly knew that a child inside us is always listening, no matter what we see on the outside.

Autism is related to a brain disorder, a disease, but even in normal people the power of bonding is amazing. I can think of a famous moment in World War I when the enemy troops had been facing each other from the trenches for years, at great cost of life, without either side advancing so much as half a mile. Christmas Eve arrived, and on either side the soldiers emerged from the trenches to sing carols. The feelings of war fell away for that magical moment, and although this happened in several places on the front lines, in one particular place many soldiers

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