Nature Does Not Force Calm, It Allows Motion

Nature Does Not Force Calm, It Allows Motion

Working with boys as an OT has taught me something about the intelligence of nature and the way it restores balance when we give it the space to do so.

There is a belief that emotional maturity comes from stillness, from sitting quietly, from holding it together and thinking harder. But boys are not built to regulate through stillness first. Their nervous systems speak through movement, and their clarity often arrives after motion, not before it.

In Vedic Meditation we do not try to make the mind quiet or discipline it into silence. The mind is designed to follow charm, to move toward what feels expansive and easeful, and in doing so it naturally finds its way back to calm. When we use a particular mantra or sound, in an effortless way, we give the mind permission to de-excite, to release, to flow as it needs to, and in that freedom, stillness arises on its own.

The same truth lives in the bodies of boys.

When a boy feels overwhelmed, what he most needs is to move that energy through his system. Running, climbing, pacing, bouncing, pushing, pulling, kicking a ball; these are not misbehaviours, they are biology. This is how his body completes a cycle and how his nervous system brings him back into balance. If we interrupt that process and insist on quiet before the energy has moved, we are not teaching emotional regulation, we are teaching suppression.

A suppressed boy is not a calm boy. He is simply a boy whose storm has been pushed underground.

What we want instead is completion, release and then calm. The nervous system softens only when the energy has somewhere to go, and the mind settles only after it has been allowed to roam.

Just as meditation honours the natural flow of the mind, supporting boys means honouring the natural flow of their bodies. We need to let them move first. We need to let the wave crest before it dissolves. Then stillness will come, not as obedience, but as authenticity.

We are not raising boys who shut down emotion. We are nurturing young men who understand energy, who feel deeply, and who return to groundedness because they know the way there, not because they were told to sit still.

Nature does not regulate by force.

It regulates by flow.

Boys are nature in motion.