Thursday, April 29, 2021
I slept beautifully until 3:30. Then I was revved up and ready to go. I tried to meditate and dozed on and off until 5:30. I thought about my new client and what I had to do to help him. I suspect he is ridiculously right-brain dominant- a little balance would go a long way to fix many of his problems. However, my intuition said not to dive in with the BrainManagementSkills. He's a bright boy, mature for his age. He has good family support from his extended family. He has a career mapped out; he'll follow his father into the electrician business. He only has to make it through the next four years of schooling before he can go on with his life. His mom is worried about specific skills he's missing, particularly in handwriting. He has difficulty writing his name. His mom is leaving it at one appointment a week. I'm good, but I don't think I can do much for him with just half an hour a week. If he were much younger or closer to grade level in many of his skills, that would be different.
Yoga as usual. I emailed my letter from the Hawaii department of taxation to my accountant. The letter said I had not paid the estimated tax I claimed. I called Raymond James. They emailed me a copy of the canceled check, which I forwarded to my accountant. I called her and asked her what to do. She told me to call the number on the letter from the state tax department. I got through quickly. The agent reported that my payment showed up, but I hadn't checked the estimated tax on the form I sent in with the check. They were confused. I am getting that estimated tax back, plus. With all my deductions, they owed me money. I called the accountant back to tell her it was all good. I was still calming my nervous system from the shock I got this morning when I got the report from the accountant.
I had K at noon. He doesn't need help academically, at least not with his reading. He needs help with his attention. Today he wasn't exhausted as we worked, and he could sit up. Yay! He said he didn't see any improvement in his ability to sit still and pay attention. Today I asked him if he was distracted by things around him or his thoughts. He said by things going on around him. If I remember correctly, he said the opposite some other time. Working with the idea that he was distracted by environmental distractions, I introduced the bull's eye exercise. I developed this visualization in the 70s with a young boy working in one of the Princeton private schools.
I draw a bull's eye. What we are focused on should be in the center of the bull's eye. We still perceive the other things in our surroundings: movement and sounds. Those stimulants should be relegated to one of the outer rings of the bull's eye. The problem for people who have trouble regulating their attention is that something comes shooting into the center ring and pushes out what we want to focus on. People who can regulate their attention acknowledge the distraction until they have identified it and then relegate it to one of the outer rings. People with ADD don't seem to be able to push it out. I tell the children to think of the spring on a pinball machine. They pull the plunger back and release it to shoot the ball up the track. I tell the kids to shoot the distractor out with a 'pinball plunger,' shooting the distracting thought to one of the outer rings.
I was supposed to have I at 4:30 today instead of Friday because of the change in her soccer schedule. She was a no-show. I wrote her mom asking if everything was okay. She apologized. She hadn't marked the change on her calendar.
I started watching Endeavor again. It is a wonderful show. I highly recommend it.
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