As babies, we are born with the natural ability to flow from state to state – from curiosity to wonder to amazement, to frustration to overwhelm to confusion, to surprise to fear to sadness to grief to joy, and back to curiosity. Babies simply flow from one state to another, fully, with their bodies.
Most of us adults have learnt to constrict natural movement. Dulled down and frozen from the extremes, we stop feelings when they get too joyful or curious or playful or scary or grief-filled.
So when we hold our little darlings in our arms, and they start feeling in their bodies states that we now resist, then we resist those feelings too. We do this in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and thus babies learn in each family what feelings are permitted and which ones aren’t. Those that aren’t become blocked in the body, frozen, unable to move. Thus, those non-permitted feelings, instead of drifting away in the movement and flow, stay in the body.
A while ago I was holding a four month old baby, the parents of whom I know well. The parents were practising Aware Parenting and were confident that the baby had recently been fed and was physically comfortable. As I held the baby, I witnessed her move through several different states. One moment she focussed on the leaves in the tree, then she cried tears with her whole body, then afterwards she smiled and grinned, then there were more tears, then she looked at the trees again, and then gradually she drifted off to sleep.
I was struck with wonder about the beauty of a being able to move freely between different states without resistance. Curiosity, wonder, overwhelm, sadness, frustration, joy, excitement, sleepiness, relaxation, sleep, and so on.
I love to support parents to become more and more present to the movement and flow in themselves, so that their babies and children experience the acceptance of all the different flows of energy in their body.
The paradigms that I most love, I interweave in this process. With babies, Aware Parenting is my love (www.awareparenting.com) With it, I have learnt the profound nature of connection, and the joy of lovingly holding my babies through their tears, and seeing the deep quality of presence and relaxation that exists when they are supported in their tears, when all their needs are met.
I am deeply grateful to Aletha Solter, who devised Aware Parenting, for her unparalled understanding of how to create emotional safety, and of the mechanics and nuts and bolts of what happens when feelings are not accepted – and instead become control patterns.
Control patterns are the specific, often external means, whereby we repress feelings. These may be things like movement, eating, distraction, and physically tensing up. These control patterns are what we unwittingly pass on to our babies and children when they express feelings that we are uncomfortable with.
These are the places that become cold and frozen and disconnected, and are also the places that we become disconnected from others. This is because control patterns at their heart always have beliefs about connection tied up with them. Aware Parenting looks at things like infant sleeping, and feeding, and children’s behaviour, through the lens of connection and feelings felt or unfelt. For me, this paradigm is profound.
I am also deeply grateful to Patty Wipfler and Hand in Hand parenting. (www.handinhandparenting.org). Although I have never done any training with the HiH organisation, I have learnt so much through their generous offering of knowledge and understanding of children and parents. Their free articles and the booklets that they offer for sale are clear, loving, and accessible. Very similar in many ways to Aware Parenting, but with a different flavour.
The gifts of both Aware Parenting and Hand in Hand Parenting are in their focus on connection. Aware Parenting is a type of attachment parenting, and HiH repeatedly reminds us of the simple power of connecting with our children.
Play naturally invites movement. Play enables children to learn and increasingly understand their world. When adults frequently play with their children, we can join in to help the flow of feelings keep moving.
Another main influence is Nonviolent Communication (www.nonviolentcommunication.com) NVC, as it is affectionately known, strips away the disguises of many of the words and beliefs in our Western culture.
With a deeper understanding of what feelings really are (since much of what follows the words; “I feel….” in our culture are actually not feelings but beliefs… like; “I feel misunderstood”….. yes, with a deeper distinction between what we are seeing or telling ourselves (Observations), what we really feel in our bodies (Feelings), what we actually need (Need) and the strategies we use to ask for our needs to be met (Requests), the muddy water becomes clearer.
Feelings, given empathy or self-empathy, begin to flow more freely again, and anything we are able to empathise and thus allow through our own bodies, we are also able to be present with in our babies and children.
Another invaluable learning for me from NVC has been understanding what life-denying feelings are, and what they come from. For example, depression comes from telling ourselves that we can’t have or do or be something; guilt comes from believing that we should have done something that we haven’t done; and anger comes from telling ourselves that someone else should have done something that they didn’t do.
Since all these are life-denying feelings, none of them have movement. Feeling them does not bring relief and movement into the next feeling; instead it has a quality of stuckness and of alienation from life and movement. Guilt, shame, depression and anger suck the life energy from us.
The beliefs that cause them are beliefs that are commonly passed down from parent to child. The more we are able to shift from life-denying feelings, to question and translate the underlying beliefs, the more movement comes back to our lives.
NVC is deeply about connection and compassion; connection with one’s heart and the heart of others. So many of our painful feelings are actually created by what we are telling ourselves about what is going on…. and blame, guilt and anger create victims and persecutors. The more we come home to our simple feelings and needs, the self-created pain of judgmental thoughts of ourselves and others drifts away.
My next major influence has been Field theory (www.fieldproject.net). A beautiful and paradoxical paradigm, it states that our experience is weaved from inside to outside rather than from outside to inside.
Philip Golabuk, the Founder and Director of The Field Project, is also a writer of fiction, and in his earlier writing talks about ‘first pain’ and ‘second pain’.
Briefly put, first pain is creature pain. It is wanted. Fully felt, it brings relief. It is movement. For example, someone we love goes away, and we feel sad. We cry, the tears come, the tears go, and other feelings come.
Second pain is more like the life-denying feelings discussed above in NVC. Second pain doesn’t have a sense of being wanted. Felt, it does not bring relief and movement. It has a sense of stuckness about it.
Field theory itself is very different to most other systems in its inside-to-outside paradigm, and in its focus on identity as the main determinant of our experience. Unwanted feelings are seen to stem from unwitting beliefs and identity choices – where what we want is set against what we believe about having that thing.
Unwanted feelings, then, are the gateways to become more. The unwanted feelings do not stem from what is happening to us, but are generated internally, from our unfriendly acquired beliefs about what will happen if we have what we have longed to have. It gives us ways of being the person who has what we love; and in essence, it becomes about being in love with being alive.
Feelings then, become gifts and signposts, amongst many signposts (including our external experiences, synchronicities, and bodily signs and symptoms), that lead us to the source of our experience, and fundamentally, to connection with something More than us.
And finally, the icing on the cake for me is physical movement and dance. Dance that comes from the inside, that moves us, that allows us to move, which keeps us vital and moving.
I am loving moving more and more… feeling the sense of movement and aliveness in my body more and more. All these paradigms, especially Aware Parenting, NVC and Field work, have given me tools and ways of assisting this process.
And this is what I love to offer to others.
I believe that the more free we are to move, to allow feelings to move through us, the more capacity we have for joy and wonder and gratitude, that kind of willing-to-have that inspires us to literally jump for joy or shed tears of simply being alive ~
I believe that the more capacity we have for wonder, for witnessing, for allowing, for curiosity and being willing-to-not know ~
I believe that the more capacity we have to cry and grieve and wail ~ the more human we become.
Increasingly freeing ourselves from the repressed feelings (AwP),
unmet needs and judgmental things we are telling ourselves (NVC),
and/or unfriendly beliefs set against our desires (Field theory),
the more we feel vital, alive, connected to ourselves, our loved ones, our wider community of humans, the earth, and More.
The more alive and vital we become, the more we can raise babies and children who are vital and present, compassionate and connected.
With this vitality comes our connection to who we are and what we offer to others and to the world. This vitality and presence brings joy and gratitude and our deep desire to love, contribute to, and connect with, others.
This is my vision for parents.