The girls and I did a little experiment about the power of words, the rice and water experiment.

I wanted to prove to them how powerful words, both kind and hurtful are.

We found the idea from an experiment that I had been researching

We watched a video that I watched on YouTube called Words are Alive by Dr Masaru Emoto.

Dr. Masaru Emoto conducted a very simple experiment.

He used rice and water to reveal a connection between emotions and the effect that they may have on all living things

Whether that be people or in this case rice.

I wanted to prove to my impressionable young girls that words can hurt and never be taken back.

To do this I thought it would have an even bigger impact on them if I could show them

Showing them what happens when words are spoken to people or things, both kind and unkind.

We decided therefore to replicate his experiment here at home and the results astonished all of us.

Dr Emoto’s Experiment

In Dr. Emoto’s experiment he puts rice and water in to three glasses and speaks to the jars for 30 days straight.

To one jar he says “Thank You”

To the the second he says “You Idiot”

And to the third he says nothing, ignoring it completely.

At the end of the 30 days the rice and water that was thanked every day is fermenting but has no mould.

The second jar that he was mean to is now completely mouldy not very nice to look at.

In his third glass,which has been completely ignored for 30 days…..

Astonishingly this is even nastier and smellier than the jar to which he hurled abuse

In fact Dr Emoto tells us that at the end of his experiment this rice had actually rotted.

Our Experiment

So on to our own experiment………

We got three glass jars

The girls and I took a jar each and we added equal amounts of rice and water.

We decorated our jars with love, hate and ignore messages

And then we set about speaking to or ignoring the rice jars every single day for 30 days, just as Dr Emoto had.

It was hard to speak to the rice, either saying nice things or nasty things

But it was easier we found to say nothing at all to the ignore jar.

It was a bit weird saying I love you each day to the jar

Saying you idiot or I hate you to anything at all was very out of character for all of us but we persevered through and completed our 30 days.

It did become easier the more we did it proving that habits can be formed if you don’t give up

Another small lesson for the girls.

The Results

So the results were in after 30 days and this is what we found:

Our love jar was pretty much clear with the rice still nice and white and not too smelly.

The hate jar had fermented, it stunk and had a nasty skin on the top of the water with black mould appearing around the edges.

And then our ignore jar was by far the most fermented, it was turning black and mouldy through all of the rice and the smell was so rancid that I honestly wish you could smell it too.

I was fascinated by the results

But much more than that, the girls, who I think were just going along with it to please me initially, definitely got to see the power of words and actions.

The lesson that they learned through this was to speak kindly to everyone no matter what.

The love and hate jars had pretty much done what we thought they might

But even more importantly we saw that totally ignoring someone was damaging.

So very damaging that it can sometimes be even worse than being nasty.

A very powerful lesson indeed.