Conscious Parenting
Recently the talk of conscious parenting, mindfulness, & awareness has been on the rise, but what do all of these actually mean? I, personally, believe that they all have the same underlying thread. When we are mindful, we are paying attention to the Now moment without any judgements. By practicing mindfulness, we are raising our awareness to what is actually happening Now before us & not reacting from a past feeling or situation. By making our Self aware to what is happening right now, we are raising the level of our consciousness, because we aren’t reacting from a place of victimhood.
By utilizing all of these techniques, we are processing through the emotions of the moment & connecting with our Self on a deeper level. We are being shown where our faults still lie, where our ego has a hold on us & where there is still growth needed.
To be a conscious parent isn’t just to parent consciously, but to live consciously in your life each & every day. We all forget, we all fall into the spiral of the lonely mind, but all these practices are here to help us to reconnect with the moment, come back to the present.
When I began practicing conscious parenting, that showed me that before I could even begin to parent consciously, I had to change my Self, the way I spoke to my Self, & the way I cared & carried my Self. Through this desire to create a more harmonious home, I knew i would have to do some work of my own, but that is exactly the basis of conscious parenting!
Our children come to us to show us where we are too rigid, where our views have become skewed. They come to help us, show us, guide us on our journey of growth.
By becoming more aware in our parenting a trickle happens within our lives. We become more aware of our workplace, we become more conscious in our relationships with friends & family & our partner. When we begin this path it can be scary at times, especially when you begin to see all the negativity you were allowing to live in your home & you’re mind.
For me, I started noticing friendships & relationships falling away that weren’t in my Highest Good. I saw people claiming, ‘You’ve changed’, but to them it wasn’t for the better. Soon I became worried about my relationship with my fiancé. That’s what happens when you begin to raise your consciousness—you either rise up & others rise with you, or they fall away.
It became so rewarding to share my thoughts & the new ways of thinking & living with him, some of the stuff he would pick up & some he would leave, because it didn’t resonate with him.
I think that’s what this journey is about too, sharing & giving those around you the choice. At some point, he saw the overwhelming growth that was happening & began implementing conscious parenting & mindfulness in his own ways.
Raising our consciousness isn’t always a straight, one way road. It has many paths, many twists & turns, many texts but regardless of the path you’re on, it’s definitely one of growth. For this & many others reasons, I believe our children come to us as our teachers. Each day we are teaching them how to be humans living on Earth, but each day they are also teaching us how to let go of that humanness & become more of a be-ing.
A child comes in with nothing but wonder & awe, play & curiosity, & what do we do as grown ups?
In most cases, we squash the young innocence from them in our haste for them to grow up. The children only want us to hurry up & slow down. They come to us to help show us how to live in the present Now moment.
Traditional parenting puts all the focus on the child, on molding them, controlling them, punishing them. Whereas conscious parenting moved this focus from the child & puts it back on you, focusing on connection with your child, raising self-awareness.
This had been the case since we started having children, but what is so beautiful about being a parent now is that we are aware of this!
We are aware of what triggers us, we are aware of the patterns we are walking in and we have the opportunity now to grow & choose something different.
This doesn’t mean we have finished our growth, because after one lesson completes, another one begins to push us to grow even more, to raise our operating level of conscious another tick higher.
When our child is born their consciousness is higher than yours. Just like the way our grandparents may not fully ‘get’ the online world & how our entire lives can be housed within our phones, we cannot connect with our children without first doing a little growing to come up to meet them on their level.
This is why some parents are so taken aback by some of the things their children may do or say. Children are constantly aware of what’s happening or being said (or not being said) around them. They pick up on every thing, even the slightest things because they are able to stay here in the Now moment. Their (egoic) mind isn’t pulling them to the last or the future. For this reason our children who’ll always be our biggest & best teachers.
They are sponges soaking up everything in their environment, modeling the behaviors & values they’ve seen in the world around them. If your child is modeling a behavior you don’t like them the time isn’t here to reprimand your child and give them a dissertation on what’s ‘right’ or appropriate, but the time is giving you a chance to go inward & see the place that you are modeling this same behavior yourself, & work to change it.
Our children are always giving us chances for growth, but are we taking those chances or are we ignoring them while we reprimand our children?