Heart's Rhythm (Step Four)

Place your hand on your heart, to make yourself aware of your heart and heart beat. This heartbeat is your oldest cellular memory. It is the echo of your mother’s heartbeat which you heard in utero. This heartbeat is not just circulating blood; it is pulsing and broadcasting your emotional state 10-20 feet outside your body. Do you know what you are broadcasting to your family? If you want to you can heighten this pulsing feeling by placing your right hand over your heart and hooking your right wrist with your left hand so that your left middle fingers are over the artery on your right wrist. This is the spot nurses use to take your pulse. Let yourself fully enter into this rhythm of your heartbeat, take your time and experience this consoling rhythm of your heart. Almost all emotional upsets throw us out of rhythm. Our children look to us to set the rhythm of the day; our children’s hearts entrain to ours. The secret to parenting is balance. Can you walk into a child’s messy room and stay in your heart and breathing in and out in rhythm with your heartbeats? Can you maintain your rhythm during a child’s temper tantrum, pouting, whining? Remember that talking about things when a child’s upset is a waste of time. However, children do respond to your rhythm. Maintaining your own rhythm amidst the daily challenges of parenting is the goal. Try going through your day and keep your rhythm, your self-confidence. As you get pulled off and frustrated by events, bring yourself gently back to your breath and put your breath in rhythm with your heartbeat. Find a rhythm that works for you, today, at this moment. Fully exhale for 4, 6, or 8 beats (or any number that feels right for you) and fully inhale for 6 beats (or whatever rhythm you’re using). Find a deep, full, satisfying rhythm. You can do this while you’re standing looking at the mess! And you can walk in rhythm as you push the grocery cart through the store. Of course, hopefully, you can find a few minutes here and there to actually sit still and focus deeply on rhythmic breath and return to balance.

You must work--we all must work to make this world worthy of its children.... Pablo Casals

Multiple Intelligences and Processing Styles

One of the most important things for parents to know about their child is their child’s processing style. Many experts believe that a child’s learning style is “hard wired in” by about second grade, and that we need to recognize and nurture these varied ways of learning to give children the best chance to become creative problem solvers. The failure to do this can lead to a host of so-called “learning problems”. These problems may get expressed informally as: lazy, spoiled, overly-sensitive, hyper and so on. Sometimes they are given more formal labels: learning disabled, attention deficit disorder, or emotionally handicapped. By understanding and accepting that children learn differently, we may choose to move away from judgments and towards a celebration of the many ways a child learns and grows. In 1984, Howard Gardner, a Harvard psychologist, wrote a book called Frames of Mind in which he proposed a new view of intelligence and learning. Gardner challenged the idea that we could give a paper and pencil test and determine how ‘smart’ or ‘dumb’ someone was. Instead, Gardner theorized that there are at least 8 different intelligences, which he called Multiple Intelligences. These 8 intelligences can be explained to children by using the following simple terms: word strong, math strong, picture strong, body strong, music strong, people strong, self strong, and nature strong. All children and adults have all of these intelligences, but we all have them in a different combination of relative strengths and weaknesses. It is vital that we discover these strengths and nurture them. Gardner suggests that direct observation of our children in multiple environments is the best way to get a sense of their processing style, and he cautions that paper and pencil instruments are never more important than watching our kids and catching them being smart. However, I have found that an informal MI inventory can start us focusing on our own and our children's strengths. It can help us start to see them through the lens of multiple intelligences. Here is the link to one site that takes only about 5 minutes, and then sends you a pie chart of your relative strengths. Have fun with this and see what insights arise.... http://www.bgfl.org/bgfl/custom/resources_ftp/client_ftp/ks3/ict/multiple_int/questions/questions.cfm

Waves of Harmony (Step Five)

As you finish balancing and energizing your heart, bring your attention to positive memories of your children. This in fact is one of our most important obligations as parents, to treasure and keep in our hearts powerful, positive images of our children; to tuck these away for a rainy day. To hold onto these images and keep them on our child’s behalf through all the turmoil that they will most certainly experience as they grow. To hold these positive images even when they aren’t able to see themselves that way. And then, one day, we can give these beautiful and loving images back to them when they most need it, the essence of who they are, which we have kept safe in our hearts all these years. As you stay with this rhythmic breath, send out waves of peace and harmony from your heart to your family. Fill your home with this balanced, radiating energy of your heart. Let it fill every nook and cranny with light. This balanced energy IS the environment that you want your family to live in. It is the ultimate home re-modeling! Feel and experience your optimistic, energized heart, which is more powerful than any stressor.

Energizing Our Heart (Step Three)

With the upright posture we’ve begun to stabilize our body. As we become more grounded & solid, we are both more open & more emotionally resilient. Awareness of our inhale & exhale can move our attention away from the worry brain, and center our identity on the breath. We are the one who breathes. So far, we haven’t intervened much in the natural process of our day to day life; mostly just observing our posture and becoming aware of our breath. Now we want to start to use our breath, not just observe it. We can start by recognizing that breath is energy. When we feel fatigued, overwhelmed, discouraged, or pessimistic—it’s a signal that our heart’s energy is depleted and needs to be re-energized. Breath is life; and half-breath is half-life. Our hearts need the energy of a full diaphragmatic breath. Our history is reflected in the way we breathe. As young children we may have learned to tighten our stomach and hold our breath when our parents told us to quit crying. And we may still do so when we feel afraid, angry, sad, powerless, embarrassed…etc. However, feelings are energy, and when they flow the most, they hurt the least. Full breath allows feelings to be processed as they arise, and not stored in the unconscious only to be triggered at some later time. An energized heart is a resilient, radiant heart (we can literally see it in people’s smiles). An energized heart is the source of optimism…we literally think differently and feel more confident when our hearts are re-charged with our full breath. We can’t think ourselves here; but we can breathe ourselves here. We and our family deserve the fullness of life that a full breath creates.

Conscious Breath (Step Two)

First, we worked with our posture, and practiced sitting still, upright, opening and leading with our hearts as we met the challenges of the day. Perhaps we found that we could lean into and depend on this noble posture to remind us of our inherent worth as human beings, which is especially important as parents, as we are models for our children. Keeping our shoulders back and our heads held high. This posture then connects us to our basic goodness...that we don't have to earn or deserve but is our (and our child's) birthright. So much is here in just this slight pulling back of the shoulders, taking the risk of vulnerability and emotional availability to those we love. As I was preparing this post I got interested in how and why babies take that first breath after "breathing" fluid in utero. I assumed that how babies start breathing was well known and had a simple explanation. In fact, MEDICAL EXPERTS DO NOT KNOW HOW BABIES ADAPT SO QUICKLY TO FRESH AIR. There are many theories including "transitory asphyxia" which signals the brain to activate breathing, to hormones in the placenta becoming inactive at birth, to environmental elements like gravity, light, temperature, sound and touch changing the baby's physiology. So quite a few mechanisms play a part in that first breath and no one has clearly figured it out. As I said to one parent, “If the first breath is a miracle, then each breath is a miracle.” Without conscious breath, there is no conscious/intentional parenting. Instead, we merely act out old, over-learned habits and beliefs (inherited largely from our parents, and from the society around us). However, as we become aware that we’re breathing, we become more present, and we increase the bandwidth of our awareness. With conscious breath, that part of our unconscious, controlled by the survival brain, is freed up and information stored in our body (the the body IS the subconscious mind), starts to percolate upwards, and become available to us. Every conscious breath creates new neural pathways, new possibilities and connections we previously didn’t see. Through joining the noble posture with conscious breath, we can begin to restore trust in ourselves—and start finding our own, unique way to parent: open-heartedly, consciously, and intuitively, beyond merely getting through the day and surviving. Aware of each breath, we can begin to practice intentional parenting. On each inhale, we can receive the situation, our child’s behaviors, as they are (without judgment), just as we receive each breath. On the breath we can begin to practice what Byron Katie calls, “Loving what is.” Then on the exhale we can practice giving ourselves fully to the situation, meeting it with self-compassion and balanced energy. Our responses now flowing from our deeper connection to ourselves and insight as to what is actually needed in the moment. Ever new, ever changing, breath by breath we learn to parent from our hearts...Here's a short, guided breath meditation....

Guided Practice for Parenting from the Heart (Step One)

Over the next few posts I want to share the 5 steps in Heart-Rhythm Practice for parents. Each guided meditation is between 5 and 10 minutes. Mindfulness meditation on our hearts and breath is a core practice for beginning to truly parent from our hearts. The first step is a sitting and grounding practice I call 'The Great Lap'. This upright, openhearted posture reminds us of our inherent value and worth as parents...especially at those times that we feel overwhelmed and even inadequate to the demands placed upon us. As we open our hearts and bring them forward in awareness, we may discover a capacity to work with the challenge in front of us more creatively, less reactively, and with more confidence. We create an "unconditional lap of love," that provides a place of physical and emotional safety for our children (and ourselves). A place of refuge in an uncertain world. A child need not physically sit in our lap, but by taking a few moments to sit and be still and feel our inner strength and solidness, we can carry that sense of ourselves forward into our interactions. Beginning and ending our day with 5 minutes of this noble posture begins to initiate deep, positive changes in our parenting....moving away from just being pulled around by the demands and chaos of the day...we learn that we can sit still and 'be with' whatever is happening...not get pulled off balance...we learn to trust the posture and ourselves....