We live in a time when it is hard to know what's enough. Are we doing enough? Do we have enough? Have we watched/read/consumed enough? It seems that there’s always something more we can doing better for ourselves and our families. Especially now with the stress of pandemic learning, general anxiety and trying to do everything.
Jessie Asya Kanzer, author of Don't Just Sit There, DO NOTHING: Healing, Chilling, and Living with the Tao Te Ching, (Available March 1, 2022), offers these tips for parenting that can help ease the way through a troubled time.
“Your Children Are Not Your Children” – Ancient Tips for Modern Parenthood
In Don’t Just Sit There, DO NOTHING, I reflect on my own journey of becoming a mother and how it changed me in the best ways. That isn’t to say it was easy, but parenthood offers us a deep opportunity to evolve as human beings, as well as to evolve spiritually. Conscious Parenting they call it, though I would say parenting is a portal to becoming a more conscious human altogether. That is what I learned through the ancient philosophy of the Tao, which is anchored by the three pillars of simplicity, patience, and compassion – starting with compassion for yourself! I saw that the circumstances of being a new mother was an opportunity (sometimes a really hard one!) to practice all three of these Taoist pillars. And now as my kids are not babies anymore, I’ve understood that all of parenthood is a practice in patience and compassion, and in simplifying what we want from our kids and what we want from ourselves.
With that said, here are my 3 Guiding Principles for More Easeful Parenthood:
1. Tend to your relationship with yourself; it's the primary model for your relationship with your kids. If you're hard on yourself, you're probably hard on them. This is also their model for their relationship with themselves – they emulate us, so let’s model self-love, self-forgiveness, and self-acceptance.
It's as if we pass our issues to our babes through the umbilical cord. As parents, it is that much more important to heal ourselves and our wounds – a lifetime undertaking.
2. Let them be who they are. As Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poem On Children,
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
Our kids come into this world with their souls fully loaded. Wipe your specific dreams for them from your mind – keep them general instead: wish for them empowerment, resilience, health and wellbeing. The rest is for them to figure out and create – let them! (Even those general wishes I mention are impossible for anyone to sustain constantly; we all ebb and flow in this human life, kids included.)
3. Let go. Let them be bold out in the world. Keep your fears to yourself; take care of them, tend to them, but let your kids experience the world as fully as possible, within the boundaries of physical safety, which shifts constantly as they grow. And hold yourself back from always intervening in disagreements between siblings or with their friends. Let them navigate relationships and situations. That's how they learn. Hover less, trust more.
As I wrote in my book, “To have without possessing is the true definition of love – to open your arms when they need you and to release them when they do not – this is the blueprint, this is the lesson.” Here’s a video of me reading this sentiment, which I think any mother can relate to.
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