Disrupted Rhythm: Feeding the Mind While Starving the Soul

Recently, my second daughter qualified for scholarship placement at the Eumundi School of Music.

As part of supporting her development, I found a beautiful second-hand Yamaha STAGEPAS 400BT PA system and wireless microphone through Marketplace. We brought it home a few days ago and set it up in Studio 2.

Ever since then, she has been singing at every opportunity she can get.

Before school.

After school.

Between things.

Any spare moment.

This morning — five minutes before school — she disappeared into the studio again.

My eldest daughter and I had just finished making porridge. Breakfast was ready. Bags were packed. Shoes were near the door. We were already cutting timing fine for the school run.

Then we heard singing.

Not casual singing.

Full singing.

Microphone on.

PA system on.

Music up.

She had decided she needed to sing before school.

My eldest daughter was immediately frustrated.

“She hasn’t even eaten breakfast. We’re gonna be late.”

And reasonably so.

From the perspective of efficiency, routine, punctuality, and school readiness, it made no sense.

But standing there listening to her sing in the studio, I found myself reflecting on something I understand very deeply from my own life.

I said:

“She needs to do this.”

Not simply wants to. Needs to.

Because once she gets to school, she may not sing again for the rest of the day.Possibly not even for the rest of the week in the way her nervous system and Soul naturally long to.

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And that matters more deeply than we often realise.

Growing up, my own household was heavily academically driven.

My father was a violent man.

The environment at home was unpredictable and explosive.

He would erupt in anger every few minutes.

At the same time, my mother — herself shaped by survival structures and cultural conditioning — pushed academic performance relentlessly.

By primary school, I found myself studying late into the night under enormous pressure to achieve perfect scores on quizzes and exams daily.

And after the house finally went quiet — often around 1am — I would draw.

That became the only uninterrupted space where I could fully breathe.

Not because drawing was a hobby.

Because my Soul needed it.

Long before kindergarten, I had been drawing constantly.

Creating constantly.

But as institutional schooling intensified, and as survival adaptation increasingly took over, something subtle began happening.

The deeper parts of myself slowly became secondary to performance, productivity, academic pressure, and external achievement.

** Eventually, my Soul buckled under the weight of it all.

Somewhere between high school and becoming a practising solicitor, I had largely stopped drawing altogether.

Externally, I was highly functional.

Internally, I had become profoundly disconnected from myself.

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Working one-on-one with clients throughout the years, I’ve realised how many people quietly experience this exact fracture:

The gradual abandonment of the deepest self in order to survive systems they depend upon.

Then decades later, many wonder why they feel numb, anxious, depressed, fragmented, exhausted, creatively blocked, or spiritually displaced.

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This is no longer merely a conversation about schooling.

It becomes an inquiry into:

• nervous system suppression

• developmental fragmentation

• institutional conditioning

• survival adaptation

• creative exile

• Soul deprivation

• and the long road back to oneself

Because what has struck me time and again across the board with clients — and again this morning listening to my daughter sing — is this:

Modern health models and systems know how to feed the body and train the mind — but they rarely account for feeding the Soul.

We are a culture where Soul-starvation has become normalised.

We speak often about nutrition, exercise, academic performance, discipline, resilience, literacy, achievement, and outcomes.

But almost nowhere do we ask:

**What nourishes the intrinsic blueprint of the human being?

** What happens when the deepest parts of ourselves are repeatedly postponed, compressed, redirected, or denied in order to fit institutional rhythm?

Because singing, painting, building, imagining, moving, exploring, creating, and immersing are not extracurricular impulses for many children.

They are regulation.

They are nourishment.

They are orientation.

They are life force itself.

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I have watched this natural rhythm in both of my daughters since they were very young.

[1] When my eldest daughter was two years old, the first thing she wanted to do every morning was paint.

I would lay giant sheets across the deck, set up easels, and she would paint for hours — with brushes, fingers, hands, colour everywhere.

Not because anyone instructed her to.

Because something intrinsic inside her was moving toward expression.

[2] My youngest daughter was similar in a different way.

As soon as she could sit upright, she would pull books from shelves every morning, turning pages slowly and curiously for long stretches of time.

And she sang constantly.

Not for performance.

Not for praise.

Because singing was part of her natural state.

** Those rhythms shifted once school became the dominant structure around them — and I’ve found myself constantly navigating the tension between honouring their Soul health and meeting the efficiency demands of modern systems.

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Over time, as institutional structures become dominant, something subtle often begins to happen.

** The natural rhythm of the child becomes increasingly secondary to external rhythm.

Bell times.

Lesson blocks.

Transitions.

Schedules.

Outcomes.

Performance metrics.

Uniform pacing.

And while these systems may create order at scale, they often do so by fragmenting the deeper immersion states through which creativity, integration, and self-hood naturally emerge.

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Maria Montessori spoke about this beautifully.

*** Real creative process does not unfold neatly inside 30-minute blocks.

Artists know this intuitively.

I am an artist-sculptor.

We begin slowly.

We warm up.

We wander.

We make tea.

We stare into space.

We circle around the work before fully entering it.

Often the deepest creative emergence happens several hours after the process begins.

For me personally, if I begin creating at 8am, my strongest immersion often arrives somewhere between 11am and 2pm.

That is not inefficiency.

That is incubation.

** For many children moving through mainstream schooling, this natural incubation period for creativity becomes increasingly unfamiliar — often interrupted and thus forgotten long before deeper immersion can fully emerge.

Click-and-swipe culture and instant gratification patterns do not help either.

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Increasingly, modern culture conditions human beings away from sustained immersion and toward fragmentation.

Toward interruption.

Toward productivity cycles disconnected from natural rhythm.

Toward performance over presence.

And perhaps this is part of why so many adults eventually lose contact with the very things that once made them feel most alive.

Not because those parts disappeared.

But because they were repeatedly overridden for so long that eventually the nervous system stopped reaching toward them.

** This is not an argument against education, structure, or responsibility.

Human beings need all three.

----- *** But perhaps we also need new developmental models that recognise that the human being is not merely a cognitive machine to be filled with information and trained toward output. -----

For the sake of Health and Sustainability (which is what eventually everything boils down to) we as a society need to recognize -

We are rhythmic beings.

Creative beings.

Emotional beings.

Embodied beings.

Relational beings.

And perhaps most importantly:

Beings with intrinsic architecture.

The question is not whether systems are necessary.

The question is whether the systems we have built still honour the deeper nature of the human being moving through them.

Because when intrinsic rhythm is continually overridden, something important slowly goes quiet inside us.

And many adults spend decades trying to rediscover what they once naturally knew as children.