The Rock and Water program is aimed at raising self-awareness of personal strengths and abilities and at learning how to play, work and live together with others in a changing multicultural society.
Rock and Water:
- Prevents bullying behaviour and/or effectively addresses this
- Positively strengthens teacher-pupil relationships
- Strengthens the social-emotional development of children
- Allows children to feel safe, play, work and learn together
Physical exercises are constantly linked with mental and social skills. The Rock and Water program leads from games, simple self defence, boundary and communication exercises to a strong notion of self-confidence.
The program offers a framework of exercises and ideas about how to assist boys to become aware of purpose and motivation in their life.
Topics include: Intuition, mental strength, body language, empathy and positivity
Four leading threads are inter-related in the program:
- Grounding, centering and focussing: Learning how to stand firm and relaxed. How to concentrate your breath in your stomach and focus attention (first external, later transformed to an internal goal)
- The golden triangle of - body awareness - emotional awareness - self awareness: Emotions are expressed in the body by way of muscular tension, high breath/low breath etc. Therefore, increasing body-awareness can lead to more insight and experience of one's own patterns of reaction which in turn, can offer a chance to deepen and further develop emotional awareness and self awareness.
- Communication: The development of physical forms of communication as a basis for the development of other, more verbally orientated, forms of communication.
- The Rock and Water concept: The tough immovable attitude versus the mobile, communicative water attitude. This concept can be developed and applied at various levels: the physical, the mental and the social level. At a physical level it means that an attack can be parried by firmly strained muscles (rock) but also - and often even more effectively - by moving along with the energy of the assailant (water). At a social level - for instance in a conversation - it is also possible to choose between a rock or a water attitude and the same choice applies to the way in which one maintains relationships with others. Finally, at a spiritual level, the apparent opposites between rock and water disappear. Insight and experience come about when a realisation occurs that both ways are needed to reach self-fulfillment and that people, in their deepest essence, are connected to each other and travel along a path together.