Only you truly know what you need to do to nurture and love your children, your spouse, and most importantly, you.
Your search for true fulfillment, passionate and loving relationships, and healthy families and communities cannot be found from looking outside yourself.
In this era of quick fixes and pop-up gurus telling us how we should be and how we should parent, things can be confusing at best. To top it off, as moms, we question our abilities and choices, what our kids need, how to handle difficult situations, and how we can be more present without losing ourselves in the process.
Our ability to be the best moms that we can be, to give our children a solid foundation, to teach them to know and trust themselves, and to find joy and fulfillment, is really about our own inner well-being and self-care.
Conscious Parenting is leading by example and overcoming our unconscious patterns or societal conditioning. (I invite you to join the TOSA Conscious Community FB Group) It is up to us to be the change we wish to see in our world and in our children. Children need mature, conscious love to thrive (which is different from adult love). The frailties of our own consciousness come out in how we show up as a parent.
Helping our children experience inner fulfillment and confidence, knowing that they have the power to live a life of choice, to let go of stress, to not be influenced by others, and to overcome life’s inescapable obstacles, only comes down to one skill set — listening to our inner voice and authentic self, so we can be a model to our kids.
This is a journey of experience — not just knowing it in our heads. Children watch and listen to how you are in your life. They look at your ability to respond verses react, to get caught up in stress or to let it go, and whether you’re distracted by frustrations, or present in the moment. They look at you, not at “wise words” you or other people preach.
In the end, there’s no one else to listen to. No one else has all the answers, other than that deep, inner voice that we, as women, have — even if it seems distant currently. How we handle life’s obstacles beyond our unconscious responses and outside influences is about knowing ourselves better. Learning ancient, proven tools that help us stay closely connected to our authentic, inner voice and wisdom is critical.
And for so many women, we feel like we have lost ourselves — given ourselves up for our families, our loved ones. But wouldn’t they be better off if they got all of us — the real us?
The real us is patient. It doesn’t hold any resentments and has ways to set boundaries that are mutually beneficial in quality. The real us trusts our decisions and embraces all life’s moments with wonder and inquiry — even the challenging ones — because our perspective has been altered. This is Conscious Parenting.
So how do we find and cultivate that inner voice so that we can parent consciously?
Ultimately, there is really only one proven and ancient tool to connect and be the bridge between the human conditioned us and the real us — and that is accessing the silence within through practices like transcendent meditation.
As a certified Chopra instructor, I invite you to join an “Introduction to Transcendent Meditation for Families”.
However, through my experience of being a child of Transcendental Meditation®, with well over 2,000 hours in personal awareness studies, and having raised three kids with mindfulness skills and meditation, I have come to realize that the journey also involves a couple more components that I use in all of my healing workshops. These components are the key to moving back to our authentic, innate center, so that we can be the moms we truly want to be.
The reason I like to include these other key strategies along with meditation (ultimately the most important part), is because the majority of moms end up on autopilot, overwhelmed and feeling lost (and let’s not forget the joy and love that is always there, too). It is not until they reach some of the moments where they are experiencing exhaustion, frustration, and resentment that they realize they just can’t keep doing it this way.
Resentment starts to accumulate — not for being a mom, because we all know that is beautiful — but towards the overall picture. We feel resentment about losing ourselves in the process.
Pretty much EVERY mom is required to sacrifice: it is part of raising kids. In this day and age, we usually don’t have the healthy support systems that we need around us to nurture both ourselves and our children at the same time — especially if you have more than one child, work concurrently, and/or are a single parent. Gosh…just peeing on your own is a task!
So it begs the question, how do you genuinely make time for your needs? If you do presently take time for genuine self care, congratulations, you are among the rare ones!
For most, by the time we really take notice that we can’t keep going on like this, we are already too far down the road of servitude, because we have stopped the act of loving and nurturing ourselves! We are giving and not receiving, and are drained because of it.
It is really a vicious cycle, because we start feeling guilty for our lack of presence and patience (if we aren’t loving and nurturing ourselves), which then leads to sacrifice, with the succession continuing until we are exhausted. Even though we may not have deep issues, we all have some hidden resentments, fears, or beliefs that keep us from fully experiencing the joy and gratitude in each moment, and it affects our children as much as it affects us.
When we have the tools to release the old pain, anger, and blame, thereby letting go and letting God so that we can receive again, that is when the magic begins. You get to re-connect with your inner wisdom and authentic self — that’s who you and your family need, anyway. That’s where the fun and joys of life get expressed. Things just seem to fall into place, opportunities flow to you with ease and grace, and obstacles become doorways for growth. You get to “ride the horse in the direction it is going”.
Learning these essential tools, cultivating the skills and gaining this knowledge, all help give you options and choices where you may not have felt like you had any (or maybe you doubted that you had any) before. Knowledge and skills plus experience are what develop wisdom.
From here, we learn to guide our kids in a way that empowers them to make strong, confident decisions in life, and we steer them toward a life where they’re not caught up in the wrong crowd, or in what other people think. Their inner strength and connection creates the ability to know that they get to choose their life instead of building a catalog of victim stories, like the majority of the population does.
Conscious Parenting is about “being the change” that you wish to see so that you have the deepest, longest, and truest impact on those you love.
