Our Na‘au, Our Inner Workings of What Makes Us, Us

Our Na‘au is our inner workings of what makes us, us. As part of our fifth grade year, we get the experience of learning about ourselves more deeply than we have yet as we transition toward middle school. The students have worked so hard to figure out what makes them unique and what they will do with that information as they move on toward new beginnings.

To help with understanding our Na‘au, we spent some time this school year looking at the 8 intelligences of Howard Gardner. Students took a survey that would help them determine which three of the 8 were most predominant in their lives. After doing this, students spent time researching and learning about which types of activities and challenges would be consistent with their strengths. Finally, we created “t-shirts” to help express who we are through our intelligences as a way to create a visual representation about ourselves.

Next we spent time learning about how our brains work when it comes to stressful, scary or upsetting situations. A great visual to understand how our brains work in this capacity is to imagine your arm leading to your hand as your brainstem which sends signals and messages to your brain. Your thumb represents your limbic system, which controls your emotions. Hold your thumb in toward the palm of your hand. Your four fingers are your cortex, which is the thinking side of your brain. Fold those four fingers over your thumb to make a fist. This represents the thinking part of your brain working with the emotion part of your brain, allowing your brain to make great decisions. When you are faced with a sudden fright or fear or big emotion, you can imagine that your cortex and your limbic system no longer communicate, so to represent this, flip your four fingers up right while leaving your thumb against the palm of your hand. This is us “flipping our lid,” meaning that our thinking brain is no longer working with our emotions and our emotions take over.

After this, we talked about the idea that in these moments, when our lid is flipped, we have a fight, flight, or freeze response, and we can’t make great decisions. Students determined what type of response they typically have, then figured out what they need to do to help their lid go back into place. After that, we generated a list of self-care strategies that we could use to help keep our lid from flipping again, or to do once we’ve gotten our thinking brain and emotion brain back together. Because it’s often hard to ask for what we need when this is happening, we created Handle With Care tags to go along with our TShirts just like the wash tags on our clothing.

Connecting with our Na‘au will help us better understand ourselves, particularly when we are not in the best frame of mind.