I am desperately excited to at last be able to announce the project I have been working on for the last couple of months: my new website, A Heart Led Life.

It has been apparent to me for some time that it is now time for me to bid farewell to The Awakened Parent. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned from writing this blog is that nearly everything I’ve talked about here can be applied not just to parenting but to every part of my life. It is this growing awareness that had drawn me to creating A Heart Led Life.

It is still in its infancy as yet, but if you go there you’ll find there’s a lot more than simply a blog. As it grows there will be all sorts of resources to support heart led living and much that is specifically related to parenting, including individualised support for parenting from me in the form of parent mentoring.

I hope you’ll follow me over to A Heart Led Life. Please consider signing up for the monthly newsletter so you can keep up to date with everything that’s going on over there:

A HEART LED LIFE NEWSLETTER

Posts from The Awakened Parent will begin to disappear over time as some of them will be reposted to A Heart Led Life and/or used as material for books or workshops.

You can also find A Heart Led Life on Facebook.

I have felt for many years now that it is unfair to judge any woman for choosing not to breastfeed, however clear-cut the situation appears to be to outsiders, and even if she herself would admit she just didn’t want to breastfeed.

My reason is that I firmly believe that we really don’t have as much choice as we think we have. I’ll rephrase that: most people don’t have as much choice as they think they have.

The fact is that very few of us have awoken to the deepest truth of personal responsibility. I know I only have within the last couple of years. And I feel that those of us who haven’t have much less choice than they realise when it comes to any decision-making.

This is because our capacity to choose a particular course of action is influenced by an infinitely complex mix of factors – how we were brought up, what our parents’ values were, how we are and were influenced by our peers, by the media, by corporate marketing, by our culture, what our experiences have been up until now with regards to work, friendships, relationships, how strong our self-esteem is (and by that, I mean our true self-esteem, not a false self-confidence created to mask a subconscious low self-worth), what our beliefs are about any number of issues – religion, spirituality, feminism, politics. I could go on for ever!

The mother who says she just didn’t want to breastfeed may be doing so because she has been told countless horror stories about saggy breasts and reduced libido and may believe that it is her physical appearance and sexual availability that is most important to her. This isn’t a true choice if she has created these beliefs by being brought up by a mother who encouraged her to always look nice to her husband, or had friends who felt that the number of sexual partners was one of the most important things in their lives.

The mother who says she didn’t want to breastfeed because her career was too important to her to take the time to get it started didn’t really have a choice if she holds beliefs about stay-at-home-mothers letting down the sisterhood thanks to conversations she’s had with feminists who hold those views herself; and if she feels that her place in society is only of value if it can be measured in financial terms thanks to having to fight for many years to compete in a male-dominated work environment.

The mother who breastfed until her son was four years old and believes she made a conscious choice to do so may not be aware that she was only able to make that ‘choice’ because she had friends who had done so, or because she happened to stumble upon a book that suggested that it was OK to do so.

I’m sticking with the breastfeeding issue here, but this could be extended to any number of issues – women who stay with violent partners (watch this amazing TED talk by Leslie Morgan Steiner for an in depth look into why women who do so are not really making a choice in the way we think.); the career we ‘choose’; even the supermarket we decide to buy our food from each week.

We are all the mercy of the things we are exposed to in our lives, and our opinions, beliefs and our understanding of the way the world works is shaped by the myriad experiences we live through in our lives and the information we are exposed to.

However, this lack of real ‘choice’ needs to be balanced against the vital need we all have to improve our understanding of personal responsibility. It is my belief that when we make ‘choices’ that do not fit with our hearts, we feel uncomfortable about them, and we often bury that discomfort with defensive justifications and bravado, so much so that we begin to believe them ourselves.

But when we learn to really listen to our hearts, and when we really take personal responsibility for the decisions we make, then we are more likely to make decisions that are wise and improving to ourselves and, therefore, to the world.

Again, however, we’re back to our being at the mercy of our experiences. I would not know the things I know now if I hadn’t followed the path laid out for me by the ‘right’ books and the ‘right’ people in my life, for example. I know that I didn’t consciously get where I am now, and that I was led here. But I also know that I have a responsibility to take decisions I make seriously, because I am responsible for my life, and I am the only person who is.

It is not helpful to go through life like the guests on daytime chat shows who say ‘it’s not my fault I hit her! I can’t control my temper’, because it is that person’s responsibility to learn how to control his or her temper. Yes, she may have been brought up believing that violence is the correct response to fear and anger, but she has also been brought up believing that it is OK to blame others/her parents/the world for her problems.

The issue is complicated because, yes, those things have brought her where she is now, but we will get no where until we accept that we are the only people who can change ourselves and change our lives. We are responsible only for ourselves and no one else is responsible for us.

Yes, Jim may have been brought up by homophobic parents, but once he reaches adulthood – maybe even his mid-teens – it becomes his responsibility to educate himself and form his own opinions and if he has the capacity to isolate his opinions from outside influence, then they’ll be much truer and will feel much more ‘right’ to him in his heart than otherwise. And I don’t really believe that any human being’s heart would lead him to hate anyone, gay, straight, female, male, Jewish, Muslim…I’m afraid I don’t believe in inherent ‘evil’.

I believe we are all born with pure hearts and we can all return to pure hearts if we accept that we are able to and work to get there.

How does this relate to parenting? Well, I believe that this is one of the most important things we can teach our children – that their lives are their responsibility, no matter how their minds and beliefs are shaped by their experiences. Of course we cannot help but pass on our values and beliefs to our children, but, with my children, I try always to temper what I do and say with a ‘but you must make your own mind up’ and I trust, I really do, that while their paths won’t necessarily be the same as mine, they will still walk a path of compassion, empathy and love because we are trying to teach them to listen to their own hearts, not those of other people.

Clearly, this is a jumbled, incomplete opinion of mine, and begs future examination so that I understand it further, so I welcome your thoughts on this matter. I know there are a lot of readers of this blog – stick your head above the parapet and leave me a comment, if you dare! ;)

Image courtesy of the US peace movement, Code Pink

Back when I was in my bleakest phase of depression, I used to say to people offering to help, ‘No, it’s fine. I chose to have them, I should be able to cope with them and should not be relying on other people to bail me out.’ Sound familiar to anyone?

And it’s not just mothers who feel it’s unfair having family and friends help them out with their children. I know of a few mothers who have told me that their own mums don’t help them out and why should they? They’ve done their child-rearing, and besides ‘I chose to have them’.

On top of that, let’s face it, children and families aren’t exactly welcomed in our culture. Children tend to be seen as an irritation to the general public. I remember have a student nurse placement in a nursery school where they were trying to keep the children quiet in playtime because some of the neighbours had complained about the sound of happy children playing!

Employers, despite being required by law in the UK to consider flexible working requests by parents, seem to frequently have an attitude of ‘well it’s not my problem. You chose to push out the sprogs, it’s up to you to find solutions when they’re ill/on holiday etc.’

The other evening my husband and I watched the tv documentary ‘Trevor McDonald Inside Death Row’. It was such a tragic programme to me, because of how young many of these violent criminals were when they had their lives cut short. You may think ‘hang on! It’s their victims who had their lives cut short!’ but really both the perpetrator and the person they killed are victims in most of these situations.

They are victims of a society that pigeonholes and judges children before they’ve even started out in life. They are victims of a society that tells some children they are worthless simply because of the colour of their skin or the trailer their parents live in. They are victims of a society that washes their hands of them; a society that doesn’t give a shit about them, so why should they give a shit about society?

And that’s really what it all boils down to. These middle aged men said it themselves: ‘I just didn’t care about anything’. But why? These men weren’t born evil, because if they were, then why don’t we have such levels of violence in every country in the world? These men were told as children, either explicitly or implicitly that at some point they will turn out bad and end up in prison. And then we are surprised to find we have such high levels of violence and anti-social behaviour in the West.

By not valuing children as a society, we create adults who don’t value society. When society decides not to care about children, we teach them not to care about society. In their minds their lives are already mapped out for them by their communities. They’re losers, and will never come to anything, so why bother caring about not killing for drug money? Why bother caring about the life of a police officer when you’re trying to escape? Why bother caring about who gets hurt as you find ways to vent your anger at the world?

This is why we awakened parents must be the change we wish to see in the world, and start modelling a pattern of behaviour where we do expect the rest of our community to support us as we raise our children and we need to teach our communities why it is important for them to support parents.

Ask for help from friends and family and tell them what help you need, and don’t apologise! Be polite, of course, but be honest: ‘I’m struggling to keep on top of the washing – could you take a load a week for me to try in your tumble drier?’: ‘I can’t work out why my son’s so miserable at the moment – could you talk to him? Offer him another non-parental ear?’

And pay it forward by doing the same when you’re able to (but not before!). Offer your neighbour-with-a-new-baby a cup of tea and take food round to her, and maybe she’ll do the same to another new mum in a year or two. Offer a kind word to that mother with the screaming baby and tantrumming toddler, or offer to mind her bags and buggy so she can concentrate on the important stuff.

Actually, I think we’ve come so far from an expectation of help from society, you may find you need to scrap the offering, and just go full whack with insisting. Buy a bottle of water for that breastfeeding mum on the bench and give it to her with a smile.

And spread the word. Speak out when you hear people moaning about children and remind them who these ‘annoying’ children will be one day, and what the world’s attitude to them will teach them. Tell new parents why it’s important to accept, or even expect, help from their family and friends. Tell them not to feel guilty, because, while it doesn’t take a village to raise a child, it definitely takes a village to raise a caring, compassionate, Generation Peace adult, and the more we have of them, the better the world will be! It’s not just parents who are responsible for raising a generation of peaceful, compassionate people, but the whole of society.

Only Connect

“You’re making a rod for your own back.”…

“She’s only using you as a dummy.”…

“Leave her to cry at night; she’s got to learn to sleep by herself.”…

“If you weren’t breastfeeding you wouldn’t have all these problems.”….

All these phrases cycled round my brain, on a continuous re-play, and my poor, exhausted mind had no idea of how to hit ‘stop’.

I had loved becoming a mother to my firstborn, my daughter, back in 2007 and found our breastfeeding relationship to be deeply satisfying. But as she got older, and as the sleepless nights continued, I found myself less and less supported in my mothering choices. My daughter woke at night frequently; I was tired and emotionally wrung out. Sadly, experience had taught me that it was best not to answer questions like “how is she sleeping?”. I felt isolated and low.

But surely there were others out there like me? Other mothers who were tired and struggling but who were determined to keep breastfeeding their babies? Other mothers who could understand my desire to keep my daughter close throughout the day and night and to feed on cue?

My intuitive voice whispered “yes”.

Thankfully I found those ‘other mothers’ at my first LLL meeting. I was welcomed into a place of warmth and understanding, where I heard none of the above tired, old phrases and I received only genuine concern from the mothers and Leaders who were able to empathise with me.

The monthly meetings were a highlight for me; I really looked forward to them and was saddened when illness, or otherwise, prevented me and my daughter from attending.

I continued to go to the local meetings and I grew in confidence. The hurtful phrases that seemed to have been permanently ‘on loop’ in my brain began to fade… Being empowered by the mother-to-mother support, and the wealth of accurate information about breastfeeding that LLL provided, I was able to finally hit the ‘stop’ button.

LLL’s support had been vital to me. I wanted to give something back to the charity that had helped me to grow as a mother and so I thought of ways to fundraise…

Last September I edited Musings on Mothering, an anthology of art, poetry and prose about pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, with all royalties going to LLLGB. The book has received some wonderful reviews, but one of the things I have appreciated the most is this: hearing from mothers that the literary, or artistic pieces in the anthology have mirrored their own experiences and that they’ve been able to draw comfort from them. It is lovely to know that my work in bringing together these contributions – some sad, some uplifting, some funny (and all beautiful in their own way) – has helped mothers to connect with each other. “Only connect!” E.M. Forster famously wrote. For genuine human connection – whether face-to-face or through the medium of the printed (or electronic) word – strengthens and gives inspiration to an individual enabling them to reach their full potential. And it makes me proud to know that I’ve played a part in building those connections.

I will forever be grateful to my daughter for helping me to begin to connect with my inner voice. By listening to that intuition and then reaching out to others who met me with compassion was a truly life-changing experience. This allowed me to then make more meaningful connections in my life and become the mother I always wanted to be. Thank you wonderful, darling girl.

If you’d like to share your story with The Awakened Parent’s readers, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. You can find out more on the Parents’ Stories page, or get in touch via Facebook or Twitter.

Ann writes: I would really welcome your input. I’d love to know what I can do to help my five year old daughter who cries about every little thing. She’s a really lovely caring little girl but I despair that the minutiae of daily life can bring her to tears. Her socks, the way I do her hair, even the odd numbers being left out when counting in two’s can leave her inconsolable. I really feel for her and try to rationalise that the little things are of  so little consequence  but my little girl doesn’t seem to want to be comforted. How can I help her “go with the flow” a bit more?

Hello Ann

Oh gosh, I can really sympathise with this! Sensitive children can be very frustrating to parent at times. Something I’ve learnt in my struggle to understand my sensitive child, is that what makes her so caring and loving is the same thing that makes her so easily upset by things that, to me, seem so little and unimportant. That fine-tuned perception of other people’s feelings often goes hand-in-hand with heightened emotions – ‘highly strung’ would be a common description of such children (and adults!).

A couple of thoughts spring to mind when it comes to your little girl. Firstly, by reminding yourself that the things that seem inconsequential to you, are clearly not so to her, you may find it easier to empathise with her. Her feelings about her out-of-place hair are as real and overwhelming as your feelings might be about going to an important meeting with your lipstick smeared across your face. Except that you have the maturity and experience to be able to put your feelings to one side for long enough to try to rectify the situation. Your little girl is too young to be able to do that, and needs you to hold her feelings for her. And that means accepting them, which I’m sure you are trying to do anyway. But if someone said to you: ‘Your lipstick really isn’t important, stop worrying about it!’ but all you could think about was what a twit you must look, and you had to spend the whole meeting suppressing the feeling of embarrassment, it wouldn’t make you feel any better, and might make you feel stupid, even

Trying to rationalise a child’s feelings when they’re in the midst of them is rarely helpful, because they’re so caught up in them that they can’t think logically. I would suggest that she might find it helpful when she gets so upset if you can just hold her, or be with her, and remind her you love her, until her emotions are calmed enough for her to work out how to fix it herself

Secondly, children can be very frightened by the power of their emotions. There is a brilliant children’s book we have called ’Angry Arthur’, by Hiawyn Oram. Arthur loses his temper because he’s not allowed to watch tv, and his anger breaks up his bedroom, his house, his street, and so on until eventually he’s floating in space on his bed having destroyed the universe and wondering what made him so angry in the first place. When we let children’s strong emotions dictate how we behave, I think it can frighten them and make their emotions even more overwhelming for them because they think their emotions have power over you: the adult who is meant to be their stable rock. I’m not suggesting that we never change our minds when children produce a good calm argument as to why we should, or that we shouldn’t offer help when it’s needed, but it may be that doing it in response to an emotional meltdown doesn’t help the child learn how to manage her emotions and may simply make her feel frightened of how powerful her emotions are. If she senses that she upsets you as well when she gets upset, then she has that to worry about as well

It may help your little girl if, when she gets disproportionately upset about something, you focus first on helping her to deal with her emotions, which have taken over, in her subconscious, as the primary problem; and then, when she’s calmer, help her to work out whatever it was that triggered those big feelings

You may find that if you can see yourself as her emotional mentor – being there whenever you can to absorb some of her pain while she’s too young to dissipate it on her own – that she gradually starts to find her own ways of managing her emotions without suppressing them, and without letting them hurt anyone – herself or others.

On my journey as a parent, I frequently have the same message handed to me over and over again, and still it takes me quite some time to hear it, let alone come to be in a place where I can put it into action. What is that message?

all you need is love

I am going to describe a situation to you, and I feel very confident that every parent will have worked their way through this sequence repeatedly.

1. The first thing that happens is something you’re not aware of initially – your child develops a ‘problem’ of some description. Maybe they get more short-tempered, or more clingy, or develop some physical issue such as ‘growing pains’, bedwetting or headaches.
2. The second thing that happens is that you notice it. You find yourself snapping ‘What is going on? You’re like this all the time at the moment?’ as you have, in the heat of the moment, twigged that this isn’t the first display of uncharacteristic nerves or bad dreams.
3. Thirdly, you start to worry about it, asking yourself what is at the root of the problem. Wondering irritably why they can’t just sort themselves out, and saying things like ‘it’s one thing after another’.
4. After that phase, maybe feeling a little lost, you realise this is something that needs some attention from you, and you start to research the issue. Maybe you turn to the internet, or a trusted book, or maybe you just talk it through with friends or journal about it.
5. As you start to find potential ‘answers’, you put them into action, perhaps feeling a little more confident and less lost. Maybe you even find the problem dissipates.
6. If the problem does dissipate, there may be plenty of times (or nearly all in my experience), when you find the situation isn’t fully resolved and has, in fact, just been buried just under the surface and has burst forth once again when you let your guard down.
7. The seventh stage is often a return to the third or fourth stage and many parents (myself included) find themselves stuck in this cycle for quite some time before the eighth stage is reached:
8. You realise that there really is nothing to be done but love and hold your child.

The eight stage is clearly the most important one. It represents a surrendering to the situation – an act that is aspired to by many wisdom traditions. Christians would call it ‘letting go and letting God’. Buddhists talk about surrender and acceptance.

Surrender in this situation is not the same thing as ‘giving up’. It is about faith and trust in a process that we cannot understand, and a return to the most vital things in life – love and compassion.

Why it works in parenting is this: I would venture to suggest that nearly all childhood ‘problems’ are based in some way on fear or anxiety. Mostly that fear or anxiety is unnameable for the child, and is subconscious and also insidious.

Indeed, our anxiety that leads us to our frantic passage through the cycle that starts at stage three above, may well be triggered by our child’s anxiety. In turn, our own anxiety feeds our child’s.

When a child is fearful for whatever reason, the last thing she needs to feel is that her parents are fearful themselves. A fearful child needs to know that her foundation is a solid rock, not crumbling unstable ground.

But there is one very well-known remedy for anxiety and fear, and that is love. Profound, caring, authentic love. As long as your child feels held and loved, he will more than likely be able to address his fears himself – fears that could have led to a spate of bad dreams, or that he may have buried only for them to manifest as digestive problems and stomach ache.

It is very natural for children to grow through cycles of trust and fear. This is part of their movement towards independence. Trusting in that process as parents is vital so that you can give your child what they need in order to emerge from the other side of anxiety – that stable, reliable rock of love that holds them securely.

How do you show them this when you hopefully spend much of your time cuddling your child and telling them you love them already? I think there’s not much more to it than a shift in your consciousness, in your awareness of the true root of the situation and a movement away from your own anxiety to a feeling of surrender and trust.

Obviously augmenting this change in your energy with some special time together can only help the process. I would suggest extra little pockets of time snuggled up with your child, maybe in silence (not enforced! Just quiet space into which your child may feel safe enough to place his or her fears), maybe even doing something together that has an element of meditation – a jigsaw puzzle, a craft, a walk in nature.

(What’s more, fixing your children’s ‘problems’ with love teaches them the same process themselves – what an opportunity we have to change the world in future generations! But that’s a topic for a whole other blog post ;))

Time and time again I have hurried through the cycle I describe above, often many times over one situation, before I have been ready to hear the message that love is probably the answer, and I have been able to slow myself and reach that calm space of surrender and trust.

I know I hear it sooner and sooner as the years pass, and sometimes I feel sad that it is my older children who are teaching me lessons that will mostly benefit my younger children, but that is the nature of parenting. If you choose to make it so, it really is a spiritual path, and by spiritual I mean a path of learning the truth, the true nature of our lives and how they weave together, and the nature of the loom on which they are woven.

And so I let go of the feelings of regret about getting it wrong, and move forward into trust in the process, and, again, into love, but this time for myself as someone who is doing her best to learn and improve with every day, every hour, every minute that passes. And I lovingly urge you to do the same.