Mindfulness helps us not to make our children’s drama our own.

In the “heat of the moment” with your child or children- remember you always have a refuge in your awareness and in your breath. Falling into repetitive patterns and reactionary cycles like “giving into our kids”, and “yelling or screaming” at our kids is the result of a conditioning process. The practice of mindfulness awakens our capacity to disconnect this circuitry. It is our mindful awareness that functions like a “circuit breaker”. It helps us to stay with the feelings of disappointing our children from time to time- and with the “empty space” in awareness to alter our course of action in response to them. Taking a brief moment during difficult times with our children to just breathe- noticing our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations can help us to relax into these difficult moments- and to stay with what is happening so that we may compassionately discern the most appropriate response for the situation.

There are always possibilities between “harshness” and “giving in”. How we act within this continuum of response depends upon the confidence we have in ourselves to trust the mindsight of our free attention and open awareness to simply observe with objectivity and care long enough for what needs to unfold to become revealed. Refined awareness or mindsight helps us to “see”- to recognize- and to illuminate what action needs to be taken. It is this action or response that is free of our own reactionary patterns for awareness has diffused the possibility of allowing our own thoughts and feelings to color our perspective and thereby fueling our impulse to react.

With the right intention and disposition, we can stay in the “heat of the moment” with our children. Mindfully, we don’t have to make our children’s drama our own. We all have vulnerabilities as parents so don’t take the process of parenting too personally. Practice with equanimity and loving kindness can do wonders for strengthening our confidence and capacity to be more flexible and responsive with our children. Difficulties with our children are inevitable. Loss, failure, success, and change are as much a reality for them as for the parents rearing them. Joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain are all apart of the emerging process of becoming as we are… interbeing as human beings.

Time for reflection as if our life depended upon it can make a significant difference in how we mind our children. Refining our capacity to attend and be aware of what our children are actually communicating (i.e. verbally and non-verbally) takes real discipline and intention to be present. Awareness helps us to bridge good observing and listening skills with appropriate action- it is also facilitates our capacity to “see” our level of distraction within the present moment. Attunement with ourselves and with our children is conditional upon our capacity to freely and openly attend with presence of mind-body.

Patience… patience… patience. Awareness helps us to tune into and “see” the feelings that underlie the impatience we foster with our own children. The more skillful we are in attending to our own thoughts, feelings, and actions, the more adept we will become in effectively relating and attending to those of our children. Patience in our practice endures to emerge as forbearance. Here and now, it is this kind of caring and purposeful self-control that allows us to be more and react less with the ones we so deeply love.

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