ROMBi and Learning Disability Awareness Week 2022
A learning disability, learning disorder, or learning difficulty is a condition that causes difficulties comprehending or processing information.
Learning disabilities, disorders, and difficulties are have different effects on different people. Many who have a learning disability are able to work, have relationships, live alone and get qualifications.
This year’s ‘Learning Disability Awareness Week’ theme is ‘Living Life with a Learning Disability’, which is all about showing how people with a learning disability are connecting with friends and their communities.
The theme also includes raising awareness of issues many people still face after the end of COVID restrictions, such as having to isolate or dealing with poor mental health and anxiety.
Mental health and anxiety issues are two areas that we have been exploring here at ROMBi. Psychoanalyst, Educational Specialist and ROMBi founder Penny Georgiou’s research explores how regular handheld puzzle work can open new horizons, especially for individuals with learning disabilities and how just 5 minutes with ROMBi each day can improve our information processing.
Penny explains: “Perceptual confusions are at the root of over-complication and over-working.
Overcomplication is an effect of mind. This can be because our ways of processing ideas are not yet nuanced enough to handle complexity and subtlety. We have to find our way to locate orient ourselves from a finite perspective, which requires awareness of many facets of perception. Eg, awareness of the infinite nature of our experience, and that horizons are helpful parameters in framing what we notice.
A daily meditative practice is beneficial in cultivating stillness. It allows us to experience greater clarity about when to act and when to rest. It also opens to sources of knowing and inspiration that can guide us gently from moment to moment.
Whatever we do in struggle indicates only the degree of distortion and confusion in our perception. This is present for many of us much of the time, and likely to be for each of us some of the time.
Stillness is not a passive approach. It is about the clarity found in our reverence for the way of things; how to win the day, be it within ourselves or with others, with combat set aside. Honouring the way of things yields something beyond expectation as we yield to it…with grace.
Further along these lines, my research has shown that a little daily structured handplay is a very simple starting point for reducing confusion, overcomplication and the stress of overwork.
It offers the mind consistent structures for organising and verifying the coherence of ideas; using the hands to access the benefits of geometry, without having to grapple with the abstractions of maths.”
ROMBi is opening new horizons for both children and adults alike. Our evidence indicates that ongoing, daily use of ROMBi can build new pathways and enable individuals to explore their inner creativity.
In this Learning Disability Awareness Week we’re encouraging everyone to get creative, whether it's through painting, music, dance, or any other art form.
Creativity allows individuals to discover new ways of expressing themselves, which other methods may not offer. Explore your creative side this Learning Disability Awareness Week with ROMBi and discover opportunities you never knew possible.
