Indigo Children

I'd like to take a timeout from my normal discussions of living with ADD to talk to you all about Indigo Children.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Indigo Children is (to quote Wikipedia), "...a pseudoscientific label given to children who are claimed to possess special, unusual and/or supernatural traits or abilities."

In other words, it's a New Age fad. And as it happens, it's associated with ADD. The basic idea is, ADD is a label given to children who fail to conform to expected norms because really, they are Chosen Ones. They are spiritually designated to lead humanity into a more evolved spiritual reality, and THAT's the real reason they can't conform.

*facepalms*

Okay...where do I start?

First off, I want to make it known that I'm not some dyed-in-the-wool skeptic or anti-spiritual. Far from it; I'm a pretty highly spiritual person, and it wouldn't even be entirely inaccurate to call me New Age-y (though I prefer labels like "Pagan," "ecclectic" or "shamanistic"). However, whatever I might believe about the spiritual realities of the universe, I believe that it's important to keep yourself grounded in worldly realities. I'm not opposed to making mundane, real-life decisions based on spiritual consideration, but you have to take everything with a grain of salt and question it...especially your own conclusions.

This is all especially important when it comes to the ways in which you expose your children to spiritual realities. Kids rely on their parents to form a healthy understanding of the reality around them. Without proper guidance, they won't understand the difference between the statement, "There's a president who lives in the White House," and "There are angels who live in Heaven."

So what's a poor child to do when her mother tells her she's a savior of humanity? Believe it, of course.

This problem becomes all the more serious when you take into account the new connections being made between stressed or dysfunctional households and occurrences of ADD. ADD children are desperate for attention and approval, and they live in severe fear that their parents' love comes to them only upon conditional terms. Because of this, they alternately bend over backwards to please their parents, then rebel against them to test them.

So..."Indigo" parents? Here's something I can promise you: if your child seems to enjoy the idea that he is one of the most vitally important people in the universe, it is only because he hopes this will make him good enough to be vitally important to you.

I mean...talk about sending a message of conditional love.

What's perhaps the most sad about this phenomenon is how easy it is to see what makes it happen. You see, if you spend as much time as I do learning about New Age/Pagan/occult/shamanic traditions, you encounter a lot of people with spiritual delusions. You learn pretty quickly that the more more grandiose the fantasy, the more intense the insecurity the person is trying to cope with. Given the amount of unfair scrutiny, blame and ignorant assumptions that get launched at the parents of ADD kids, it's not hard to see why some of them would jump at the chance to see their child in this "improved" light.

This is certainly foolishness, but I think the real blame for this phenomenon falls on the shoulders of the spiritual charlatans who profit from this nonsense. They are, in essence, profiting from pain.

Meditation for ADHD: A Brief Introduction

Of all the natural coping methods I commonly see recommended for those with ADD, one that, to me, doesn't get nearly enough props is meditation.

I don't know why this is. Perhaps it's because it's just too New Age-y for some folks. Maybe it's because those acquainted with the issues of ADD find the idea of prescribing intense concentration to treat focus problems as lofty, perhaps even laughably so.

Whatever difficulties can come in learning to meditate (I'll get to those in a moment), I still think it's a shame not to try. The benefits of meditation to the ADD mind are profound in both a practical and emotional sense. First and foremost, it helps with hyperactivity, teaching one the art of stillness and calm. It's also a highly comforting balm to the emotional distress we so often experience, while creating a mental state excellent for gaining insight and unraveling bad habits. And of course, it helps with focus.

I myself learned to meditate via a hypnotist (hypnotism and meditation are essentially the same things; the differences between them split hairs along the lines of how the trance states are used, but that's really up to the user either way). He was actually an entertainer, and with trademark ADHD "look at me!"-ism, I volunteered to be a "subject" for his stage show. I found the experience of hypnosis so profound, I bought some of his CDs and started to learn self-hypnosis. The CDs contained ambient electronic music as well as progressive relaxation hypnotic inductions and instructions, including guided visualizations and behavior-modification exercises. Pretty basic stuff.

Chances are, I wouldn't have been able to learn the discipline if I'd tried to start from scratch, no music, no direction, just me sitting down, closing my eyes, and trying it. I needed the voice on the CD to give me direction and keep me focused until I'd been doing it for quite some time on my own. But that's what worked for me. For many people, visual stimulus is required to get into a meditative state, or some kind of meditative physical activity, like yoga, or a repetitive action. Things like drawing, getting lost in music, light housework, gardening, working with your hands, can all be good ways to get into the mindset.

Some good resources:

Pandora Internet Radio. Design an ambient music station of your own to help you with meditation. (I use "Kitaro" as my foundation, personally.)

Frederick Winters. This is the guy I learned hypnosis from.

Self-Hypnotism. This is an instructional article I wrote for eHow.com.

Illuminescence on YouTube. This user creates videos with hypnotic visualization and binaural beat music to assist in achieving a trance state. Just sit somewhere comfortable and watch and listen, preferably in the dark.