What If the Most Important Thing We Can Teach Children Is How to Feel?
A ‘Roadschooler’s’ Guide to Sacred Sites, Shared Humanity, and the Curriculum No Classroom Can Contain
It was a scorching afternoon in Arizona, and my students were doing everything right: cooling cloths draped around their necks, sun hats pulled low, camelbacks full of water. We were on our way to Kartchner Caverns in Tucson—but first, a stop we’d been building toward in our ancient indigenous studies. Casa Grande Ruins. A massive, mysterious structure built by the Hohokam people over 650 years ago, now sheltered under a modern canopy in the middle of the Sonoran Desert.
We were practical. We were prepared. We were hot.
As we walked out of the visitor center toward the ruins, something changed.
I felt it first—a tingling sensation that started in my chest, the kind I’d learned over years of traveling to associate with places where something ancient and intentional had happened. But I didn’t say a word. I wanted to see what the kids would notice on their own.
A few steps later, I glanced over at a ten-year-old girl in our group. She had stopped walking. She was staring at her forearms with a look of pure bewilderment—and then she started laughing.
“What is going on?” she said.
The other kids looked at her arms and laughed too. And then they looked at their own.
The laughter stopped. They went quiet. Wide eyes turned toward me.
I said, “You feel it too?”
That moment became one of my favorite teaching experiences in eight years of road schooling. Not because I had a lesson plan for it. But because I didn’t.
The Curriculum Your Body Already Knows
When she asked why her arm hairs were standing up, I told her there were probably two things happening—and it was likely both at once.
The first is the theory of ley lines. Many ancient sacred sites around the world are built along invisible pathways of electromagnetic energy that run through the earth. Our bodies, which are themselves electromagnetic, can feel this. Ancient peoples felt it too—which is probably why they chose these spots, of all places on earth, to build their temples, their ceremonial centers, their places of prayer.
The second is something harder to measure but just as real: residue. When millions of people, over hundreds or thousands of years, focus their deepest intentions—their prayers, their grief, their gratitude, their hope—in one place, something accumulates there. Call it energy. Call it memory. Call it the felt presence of everyone who came before.
I’ve felt this in many places across my life. The Jeffers Petroglyphs and Pipestone National Monument in Southern Minnesota; Cahokia Mounds in Illinois; Effigy Mounds in Iowa, where I had the distinct sense of being watched; Stonehenge; The Khumbu Valley in Nepal, meditating and reflecting with my back against boulders of ancient granite; The House of the Virgin Mary in Ephesus; The North Rim of the Grand Canyon.
Different continents. Different cultures. Different centuries. Same feeling.
And the kids felt it too—when their bodies were ready, and when we let the experience lead rather than the lesson plan.
What ‘Roadschooling’ Taught Me About the Sacred
I want to be clear: I never introduced a “sacred energy curriculum.” I didn’t gather the kids in a circle and explain how the theory of ley lines developed in 1921 before we arrived at each site. I simply unknowingly created conditions for direct experience—and then followed their curiosity when it appeared.
At Effigy Mounds, I modeled something silently: before we walked the mounds, I paused. I took a breath. I asked inwardly for permission to be there, and offered gratitude for the experience. The kids noticed. Some of them did the same, in their own way. Some of them didn’t. Both responses were fine.
At Tulum, the Mayan ruins that rise dramatically above the Caribbean Sea, we stood inside the actual structures that made the abstractions of weeks learning about the ancient civilization in our classroom—the mathematics, the calendar, the cosmology- real. History stopped being something that happened to other people somewhere else and became something you could touch, smell, and stand inside.
On Indigenous People’s Day at Crazy Horse Monument in South Dakota, we were transfixed as traditional hoop and jingle dancers honored sacred dance forms preserved across generations. We shared buffalo stew with a community of local Lakota peoples, indigenous visitors from other nations, and non-indigenous visitors. In that cafeteria, we were simply humans sharing food. It was one of the most quietly profound moments of our travels together.
In caves across several states, we’ve descended into the earth and watched geology come alive. Stalactites and stalagmites we’d only seen in textbooks became things you could stand beneath, dripping slowly in the dark. The earth was teaching.
At Civil Rights sites—Martin Luther King Jr.’s childhood home in Atlanta, the Little Rock Nine’s Central High School in Arkansas, and other historical sites like the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City—we moved slowly and spoke softly. The energy there is not tingly. It is solemn. It asks something of you. And what it asks is that you feel it fully, sit with it, and let it change you.
I always let the kids know: you can leave at any point. There’s no requirement to absorb more than your nervous system can hold. I’ve learned to recognize when a normally quiet child gets a little too silly—that’s usually the signal that they’re tapped out, protecting themselves from feeling too much. We honor that. We step outside. We breathe.
Because learning to know your own limits is also part of the curriculum.
The Thread That Runs Through Everything
Here is what I kept noticing, trip after trip, site after site, across cultures that had no historical contact with each other:
The same symbols. The same stories. The same reverence for the earth, the sky, the ancestors, and the unseen.
Why are there feathered serpents in ancient Aztec cities that look so much like dragons from ancient China? Why does the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio echo similar forms found in cultures across the world? Why do the ancient peoples of the American Southwest, the British Isles, the Mediterranean, the Himalayas, and the Pacific Islands all seem to have understood something about energy, about the sacred nature of certain places, about the invisible forces that move through the earth and through us?
I don’t think this is coincidence. I think it’s memory.
I think humanity has always known more than our modern frameworks give us credit for. And I think children, who haven’t yet been fully trained out of their natural sensitivity, can feel this more easily than most adults.
The ‘roadschool’ trips weren’t really about history, or geography, or social studies—though they were all of those things. They were about helping children trust what their bodies already know. They were about showing them that the world is far more connected, far more mysterious, and far more sacred than any textbook suggests.
We share more than we disagree.
You Don’t Need a Passport for This
Here’s what I want every reader to know: you don’t have to travel to Machu Picchu or Stonehenge to give children—or yourself—this experience.
Sacred is not a geographic category. It’s a quality of attention.
Your local cemetery holds the concentrated grief, love, and memory of generations of families. An old-growth tree has been growing, feeling, and witnessing for longer than most human institutions have existed. A river has carved the landscape for thousands of years and been called sacred by the peoples who lived alongside it. A church, mosque, synagogue, or temple—even one from a tradition not your own—holds the accumulated intention of everyone who has ever prayed within its walls.
Even a museum display case can be a sacred encounter. When you stand in front of an object that was made by human hands thousands of years ago—a pottery shard, a carved figure, a ceremonial mask—and you let yourself really feel what it might have meant to the person who made it, something passes between you across time.
The practice is the same everywhere, whether you’re standing at Effigy Mounds or in the local history wing of your city’s museum:
Stop. Breathe. Feel into the space.
Ask yourself: What am I feeling right now?
And then—this is the important part—don’t dismiss the answer. Don’t explain it away. Don’t wait for someone else to validate it. Just notice it. Catalog it. File it away so that when you feel something similar in another place, at another time, you’ll recognize it. This is how intuition gets built. Not through instruction, but through accumulated, trusted experience.
For the Children of God in All of Us
I said this post was about roadschooling and children—and it is. But I’ve come to believe that “children” in the deepest sense includes all of us.
We are all children of the same source, learning to navigate the same extraordinary mystery of being alive in a body on this earth. And most of us, at some point, had the capacity to feel the things my students felt at Casa Grande—and were trained, slowly, to distrust it.
The tingling wasn’t real. The feeling was just your imagination. Don’t be so sensitive.
One of the greatest gifts you can give a child—and one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself—is permission to feel what you actually feel, and to treat that feeling as real information.
I’ve felt a dark, heavy energy exactly once in my travels: in a prison pit in Jerusalem. The contrast with every other sacred site I’ve visited was immediate and unmistakable. That contrast only made sense because I’d been paying attention—cataloging, noticing, building a felt library of reference points over years of intentional presence.
Your body is a finely calibrated instrument. It has been picking up information your whole life. The question is whether you’ve been taught to listen to it.
The ancient peoples who built Casa Grande, who carved the petroglyphs at Jeffers, who shaped the Effigy Mounds, who danced at Tulum—they listened. And across every culture, across every continent, they pointed to the same things: the sacredness of the earth, the reality of unseen forces, the importance of gratitude, and the truth that we are never as alone as we feel.
That’s not ancient history. That’s the living curriculum, available at every sacred site on earth—including the ones within walking distance of wherever you’re reading this right now.
Stop. Breathe. Feel into it.
What are you feeling?
An Invitation
If this post has stirred something in you—if you find yourself wanting to develop your own sensitivity more intentionally, or help the children in your life do the same—I’d be honored to walk alongside you.
At the School of Noetic Alchemy, a program of the Good Knight Network, we offer an online 54-month sequential exploration of Ancient Wisdom teachings that does exactly this: it helps you rebuild trust in your own perception, develop your intuitive capacities, and understand the deeper patterns that connect all of humanity’s spiritual traditions.
You don’t have to fly to Arizona to feel what my students felt at Casa Grande. But if you’re ready to start paying a different kind of attention—to the world, to sacred sites wherever you find them, and to the quiet knowing inside yourself—we’d love to be part of that journey.
Local to Stillwater, MN? Before each class, we offer an open gathering hour at Awakening Wisdom School. Walk our meditative medicine wheel labyrinth, canoe on the pond, forest bathe on our 15 acres of rolling woodlands, or receive a reiki exchange. Sacred experience, close to home.
Visit goodknight.org or reach out at thegoodknightnetwork@gmail.com to learn more.
About the Author
Amy Marotz, M.Ed., is Vice President of the Good Knight Network and Director of Awakening Wisdom School in Stillwater, Minnesota. She has been studying the Ancient Wisdom lessons under Sophia Key West since 2018 and now guides others on their spiritual journeys with the School of Noetic Alchemy. Amy is a Reiki Master, world traveler, homeschool and microschool advocate, and passionate believer in experiential learning that honors the whole person.
