This month at Omega school, the focus is on love and compassion.  In this segment, students will be guided to:

• To develop a core open-heartedness that leads naturally to kindness, caring, sharing, generosity, and selflessness.
• To develop increasing capacity for empathy and understanding others, including those who are different from oneself and from the majority.
• To develop tolerance by finding alternatives to judgment, stereotypes and prejudice.
• To build brotherhood and friendliness across all personal and cultural divides.
• To learn to cooperate in order to work productively and play enjoyably with one another.
• To experience the joy of giving freely and understand that giving and receiving are one.
• To learn to forgive and apologize open-heartedly.

The Value for August being Love and Compassion, the students of Omega are involved this month in a project, quite well known in the west, called "Random Act of Kindness". During the second week of August at the school, everyone - students, teachers and non teaching staff - will be participating in this project with the hope that the experience of being kind in small, often anonymous ways, will be felt as an opening and warmth in the heart, and that this will permeate the atmosphere, and make a lasting change.

As always, students will also learn through games, stories, dialogues and other experiential activities that are suitable for their age group.

"Love is not something to be given and taken. It is a very wrong idea of love. Love is something to be created in your heart. And when your heart is full of love, you cannot stop people from coming to you, like bees going to flowers. So if you want to avoid douleur (pain), you must substitute douceur (sweetness), and then you will find beautiful things that spirituality can create in you. And when the heart is full of this douceur, amour, even God comes."
"Revealing the Personality", by Shri P. Rajagopalachari

"If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion."
-Dalai Lama

"Kind hearts are the gardens, Kind thoughts are the roots, Kind words are the flowers, Kind deeds are the fruits. Take care of your garden and keep out the weeds, Fill it with sunshine, kind words and kind deeds. " --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet

"Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile." -Mother Teresa

"Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind." -Henry James, American author