Kairos Institute: Healing in a World of Need

by Karine Munk Finser, MEd

The Kairos Institute is a new initiative of the Center for Anthroposophy in collaboration with the Transdisciplinary Healing Education Program at Antioch University New England.

Artistic therapies informed by anthroposophy are mostly invisible in our independent and public Waldorf schools. Yet the need for them is clearer than ever before.

Though there are strong healing forces in the Waldorf curriculum, we are receiving more and more children who need one-on-one help beyond tutoring or another IEP (“individualized education program”). [1] The still untapped resource of the artistic therapies can offer great support in helping our children regain their sense of self, their inner resilience, joy, and readiness for learning.

1 “The Individualized Education Program (IEP) is a legal document under United States law that is developed for each public school child in the U.S. who needs special education.” — Wikipedia.

Recently, a Washington Post article detailed how SEL (the educational movement we know as “social-emotional learning,” once so popular) is simply not sufficient to meet the evolving needs of our children.

In the face of rampant racism, digital addiction, a climate change crisis that threatens our entire species, and the greatest economic inequalities in 50 years, positive psychology books that urge us to manage our behavior with calmness, resilience, and grit have been flying off the self-help shelves. [2]

2 “Why social-emotional learning isn’t enough to help students today” by Valerie Strauss, The Washington Post, December 17, 2021 — free access at

We need to see every child as an individual mystery whose eternal “I being” needs to find a harmonious way into its sheaths (the physical, etheric, and astral bodies). Many children struggle to overcome substantial challenges, sometimes arising from deep-seated collective trauma, emotional or environmental trauma, or cumulative stress. These burdens make it hard for them to inhabit their bodies and unfold their destiny paths.

The sun’s light that shines with warmth is made inner within every human soul. Liane Collot d’Herbois, the painting therapist and painter who worked closely with Ita Wegman, often remarked that we are hardly able to do a thing here on earth if we are not well incarnated. She would also say, at every goodbye, “Keep your heart warm!”

Our work as healing educators or therapists is to help “Roses” by Karine Munk Finser children become receptive to all that streams towards them in terms of goodness and love. These unifying and healing forces can emanate from family, friends, a therapist, the community, a great teacher, or from one trusted individual.

This is the essential gesture of healing that we want to instill and teach our future practitioners of art therapies through the Kairos Institute. The parameters for diagnosis and the development of capacities in artistic therapies take their root from a dedication to relieve the suffering in our children, and to help them on their way.

A vocational training pathway for the artistic therapies

“Kairos” began many years ago as a whisper in my ear. While running the summertime program of Renewal Courses at Center for Anthroposophy (CfA) for 21 years, an interest in creating a “Kairos Institute,” a center for the healing artistic therapies, grew quietly yet steadily in conversations with close friends and colleagues, and eventually with my students in teacher training.

The actual catalyst for the formation of Kairos, however, was a visit to the Center for Emergency Pedagogy in the Bavarian city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Its founder Bernd Ruf traced with me the paths trodden by Kaspar Hauser so many centuries ago.

The suffering of Kaspar Hauser

We visited the palace where Kaspar Hauser was born, the house where he was secretly incarcerated, and stood inside the room in neighboring Ansbach where he died after being stabbed by those intent on thwarting his destiny. These sufferings of Kaspar Hauser two centuries ago, juxtaposed with the suffering of children today paralyzed by the consequences of trauma, struck me with a sense of intense urgency.

Karlsruhe is the birthplace of Kaspar Hauser. Bernd’s crisis intervention center trains teams of workers and sends them out across the world. They help children in places of war, the devastation of earthquakes and tsunamis, the ecological disasters of forest fires and floods. These skilled teams provide age-appropriate emergency pedagogical intervention to alleviate children’s suffering and help them regain inner mobility and renewed participation in life.

On the same campus in Karlsruhe is the Parzival School, co-founded by Bernd Ruf, with over 700 children aged infant to 12th grade. I saw many artistic therapies in daily use here: animal therapy, painting and drawing therapy, clay therapy, speech therapy.

Today the whisper of many years ago has become a clarion call. Kairos Institute, sponsored by CfA, will create pathways to train people wishing to become art therapists and work towards a Diploma certified by the Medical Section at the Goetheanum. In conversation with Laura Pifferetti, coordinator of artistic therapies in Dornach, and thanks to a collaboration between CfA and the program at Antioch University New England called “Transdisciplinary Studies in Healing Education” (TSHE), founded in collaboration with Camphill Academy, the core classes for all the therapies are mostly covered. All the therapies will share a common “hub,” but the various “spokes” of the different artistic and therapeutic trainings will be carried by their own coordinators. We hope to offer painting, clay, music, and animal therapy classes. In addition, Debra Spitulnik will carry the healing art of speech to enhance artistic pedagogical speech in classrooms.

Summer 2022

From Sunday to Friday July 3-8, 2022, Bernd Ruf will help us launch the Kairos Institute by offering the first module of his Emergency Pedagogy training. This and all the Kairos offerings this summer can be taken without commitment to the entire program. Some participants may elect both Antioch’s TSHE and CfA’s Kairos offerings. Others coming from different trainings may be able to join in midstream, since we will be able to translate appropriate courses into “life experience” credits towards completion of the Kairos training.

In any case, the Kairos program will be constructed as a part-time sequence, with online weekly classes during the fall of 2022, and in-person residencies during the spring and summer of 2023. Faculty for the fall sessions include Orland Bishop, Michaela Glöckler, Torin Finser, Gleice da Silva, Karine Munk Finser, Juliane Weeks, Debra Spitulnik, among others.

If you carry the Parzival question “What ails thee?” in your heart, if you are moved by the sorrow of Kaspar Hauser as he realized how in his imprisonment he had missed the arrival of so many springtimes, or if you wonder about lack of treatment of conditions that afflict so many traumatized children and adolescents, the programs offered by Kairos may be for you.

If you have questions on program content, contact kfinser@antioch.edu To register for Bernd Ruf’s first module on Emergency Pedagogy, go to:

centerforanthroposophy.org/programs/kairos-institute/

Karine Munk Finser, MEd

Karine Munk Finser, MEd, inaugurated the Transdisciplinary Studies in Healing Education (TSHE) program at Antioch University New England in 2014. This advanced track Certificate or MEd program serves experienced educators from early childhood through high school, as well as special educators, administrators, artists, Camphill workers, healing practitioners, and community builders who work out of anthroposophy. A new cohort will begin in July 2022. Karine, who directed CfA’s Renewal Courses for 21 years, is now Director for Kairos Institute at CfA, in collaboration with Antioch’s TSHE program, of which she is also Program Director.

Our next edition of being human will feature “Teaching in the Age of Coronavirus,” an essay by Douglas Gerwin, director for the past quarter-century of the Waldorf High School Teacher Education Program at the Center for Anthroposophy (CfA).