I had fun answering questions from Hilary Nichols at www.motherlandluxe.com
ON AWARE PARENTING
‘Aware Parenting is based on the idea that we all naturally love to connect, cooperate, and contribute, and that our natural state is aware, present and centred. From in utero onwards, we experience things that create uncomfortable feelings in us.
We have three ways of dealing with those feelings. The first is to release them, through laughing, crying, raging, sweating, shaking, or playing, with someone lovingly connecting with us. When we have connection and release those feelings, they leave our bodies and we return to our natural, calm and present, loving, selves.
The second way is to repress them. With babies, we can often unknowingly repress their feelings, thinking that they have an immediate need, when in reality they have some feeling that they want to share with us. Repression can happen through sucking, feeding, movement, and distraction. Our babies and children learn the ways that we repress our feelings – as adults we repress through eating, drinking, excessive activity, busy-ness, distraction such as Facebook and Instagram, muscle tension, and habits such as nail-biting. Children’s means of repression include things like thumb-sucking, nail-biting, clothes or soft-toy clutching, constant entertainment or movement, computer games, hair-twirling, and many more.
The third way is to act them out. This is when we don’t feel safe enough to express our feelings healthily. Acting out in adults looks like shouting, harshness, threats, punishment, and power-over. Acting out in children looks like hitting, biting, pushing, taking things, etc.
When babies are first born, their feelings simply move through them. Emotions are really e-motions – energy in motion. They feel curiosity, then that shifts to surprise, to interest, to overwhelm, to hunger, and so on. The feelings simply move. This is the kind of thing that we search for in meditation or therapy – to simply let our own natural feelings move through us.
However, from birth onwards, babies are amazingly sentient beings who are observing every minute detail of the expressions and movements of the people who care from them. If we repeatedly tense up, or look away, or distract them, whenever they feel joyful, or uncomfortable, or sad, then they soon learn to adjust that flow of feelings in response.
This happens to all babies. AND there is no such thing as a perfect parent! Yet, understanding that all babies have feelings, and that our responses to those feelings will affect their relationship to each of those feelings, helps us prioritise our own emotional development and our attuned responses to our babies and children.
ON MINDFUL PRESENCE:
Mindful presence certainly does not need to happen all day. In fact, sometimes it can be easier for us to be mindfully present with our babies and children if we haven’t been with them all day. Babies and small children are like gurus. They will invite us to deep presence, and will also show us every blind spot, every uncomfortableness that we have with being present. If you have been to see a guru or spiritual teacher and found yourself falling asleep, thinking about what to cook for dinner, or wondering how much longer it is going on for, you will not be surprised to find yourself doing similar things when you aim to be present with your baby or child. And unless we are enlightened, I don’t think any of us can be mindfully present 100% of the time. So, one thing we know is that being a parent teaches us, more than perhaps anything else, about self-compassion.
One technique is simply to sit facing your baby or child, and to really look at her. Gaze into her eyes and see their exact colour, the colour of her hair, the way her eyelashes curl, the exact texture of her face. When we really look at the particularity of her, this brings us in to the present moment where she lives. Touching her skin, being deeply interested in what she is interested in, seeing her as your ultimate spiritual teacher, all these can help too. Setting aside some time every day – and literally setting a timer – where you give her this kind of connection, and deeply follow her lead, also brings deep presence and deep intimacy between us and our little ones. This can be particularly useful when our children get a bit older and we do less of the eye-gazing that we did when they were babies. With tweens and teens, mindful presence might look more like sitting beside them whilst they are doing things that they love, just being present and quiet and waiting for them to talk to us about what is going on in their lives.
ON SELF CARE FOR MOTHERS: We are still coming out of a paradigm that has been around for about 3000 years(!) where, the culture as it was depended on mothers denying their needs, or at least, putting them last. Our culture no longer needs that, and yet we are the generation that is stepping beyond that – which means that sometimes we can fall back into old beliefs. I talk to so many mothers who have very deep core beliefs that if they get their needs met, their children’s needs will not be met. However, we are like receptacles as mothers. Giving to our children meets so many core needs for us. To contribute to someone we love is one of the most joyful things we can do. However, when we are giving more than we are receiving, over a period of time we literally become empty. Our giving has far exceeded our receiving. It is then that we are likely to become snappy, resentful, and frustrated; and it is our children who suffer. In other words, its vitally important, because not only do we lose our being-in-love with being-a-mother, but our children experience the results of that. We cannot be present with them if we are empty from unmet needs and full of uncomfortable feelings. We cannot listen to their feelings; we cannot truly and authentically play. And most of all, they learn to not value their own needs. So, instead of them getting what we want them to get – which is being full and having their needs met; what they get is the opposite, which is learning to accept being empty and not getting their needs met. And yet, again, we need lots of self-compassion here as mothers if we slip into old ways. 3000 years of conditioning doesn’t easily leave in a day.
ON CONTROL PATTERNS Control patterns are habitual ways we use to avoid being present, and to avoid being deeply connected with ourselves and what is really going on in our feelings and bodies. We can begin to recognise them by thinking about what we tend to do when we feel upset, or frustrated, or tired. Do we go on FaceBook, reach for the fridge, twirl our hair, tense our shoulders, talk a lot, clean the house, shop online, start thinking about the future or the past, etc. I think that we have most chance of shifting control patterns if we first value and accept them. Control patterns were put into place when we were younger and there wasn’t someone who was able to be fully present with us and a particular feeling we had. It helped us survive emotionally in our family; to dissociate when there wasn’t an adult who could be present with us and our full feelings in a way which made those feelings totally safe. Whatever the feeling, if a baby or child has an adult fully present with them, that feeling becomes safe and known. Feelings become feared and frightening when adults are not able to be with them with us. So, control patterns are helpful things, not our enemies. When we see them as our friends, things that protected us when we were younger, then we don’t need to fight them. You might say, “but I didn’t drink wine when I was a child”, but in reality, the form of control patterns changes as we age. For example, we might suck our thumb until we are five and other children start teasing us at school, so we change the form – it becomes nail-biting instead, or nose-picking. If our parents try to stop us doing those things but without listening to the feelings, then it might change form again – to muscle tension, for example. Once we have befriended control patterns, we can start to observe them; “Oh look, my husband just came in the door and went straight to the computer, and now I’m reaching for a chocolate biscuit.” Simply observing them means that we see that we are more than them. Then we might move on and say something to ourselves like, “Mmmm, I’m heading for the fridge again. I wonder what I’m feeling.” We might even just stop for a few seconds and simply enquire into that feeling. In essence, what we are doing is becoming our own parent consciousness – being able to be present with more and more of our feelings. As this develops, we gain more and more capacity to listen to our feelings rather than reach for a control pattern to repress them. Then our feelings start to move freely again, just as they did when we were younger, but this time with us being present with ourselves.
ON SLOWING DOWN At some level, all that requires is us to choose to slow down. When we feel ourselves feeling overwhelmed, when we aren’t experiencing connection with ourselves and our children, then these are symptoms that we need to slow down. But of course, slowing down means coming home to our self, and feeling our feelings and needs. We are likely to go through times of being more rushed, and then more peaceful. Sometimes it can be that we are awake in the night realising how stressed and rushed we have been, and how little deep connection we have had with our children lately. And then at some point, we simply make a choice to slow down the next day, the next week, the next month. Children grow up so quickly; remembering this can also help us slow down.
When we can be present with, and accept, our sadness, then we can hear our child’s sadness. We can be present with them as the feeling flows through them. That makes us a safe harbour. The more of a range of feelings we can bear in ourselves, from frustration to wonder to joy to grief, the more we are able to be a safe harbour for them.
THE GREATEST GIFT A PARENT CAN GIVE A CHILD…
Is to really see them. We generally see things through our own lens of beliefs, desires, hopes and fears. The more clearly we see them, not who we want them to be or fear them to be, the more deeply they are connected to their own true self.
ON THE CHALLENGE OF PARENTING CONSCIOUSLY
I often say to clients that sitting in a cave meditating is easier than parenting consciously. I believe it is so challenging because being with our children allows every single unhealed part of us, every single unfelt feeling, unhelpful belief, all of them to the surface. And we are exposed to this every day, generally, for about 18 years! People use partnership as a spiritual path, but for me, parenting has even more potential to help us change; precisely because we know that every belief of ours will become our child’s. When we see our child suffering from our old unfriendly beliefs and unhealed pain, that motivates us to shift unlike anything else. And of course it is so important because how we are with our baby and child is what they internalise and how they become with themselves. So we literally shape their internal worlds, and thus their lives.
ON FREEING OUR CHILDREN FROM OUR OWN ISSUES The love and care we have for our children means that we are always very close to what I call ‘the sweet spot’ – the exact place where the biggest feelings lie and where the biggest healing can occur. Knowing that our children can’t leave us (running away truly is pretty rare) actually creates safety for those big feelings to come up in us. In a way, the child part of us knows that we are with someone who can’t leave us, and so feels safe enough to feel things, and behave in ways, that we are unlikely to behave with anyone else. The things that we find most challenging in our children are often the result of our own beliefs being passed on to them, and them showing them to us. So, often, their behaviour and our reactions both have a cause in us. This is not always the case, as sometimes it can be things they do that we really would like to let ourselves do, that we find so painful. For example, perhaps our son asks for exactly what he wants. We get deeply frustrated because we would love to ask for what we want, but have painful beliefs and painful feelings stored up about that. The way I see it, our children are like magnets, who keep on calling us to evolve. I believe that we have these feelings and reactions so that we can evolve, so that they are freer from our own stuff and thus are freer to be themselves. So, our children help us on our next evolutionary step. Parenting is a fast-track psychospiritual practice! I trained as a psychotherapist in my twenties and as part of that had nearly a decade of weekly therapy, and that was nothing compared my 12 years of parenting so far!