4.6.1 Explore the video

Watch the video: https://youtu.be/c4HBqR0aov4

Explore the information given in this YouTube video relating to the conscious parent and all the information discussed by Dr. Shefali Tsabary.

Transcription

0:06
So thank you for having me welcome. I’m always amazed when parents and a group gather such as you when there’s no incentive to become either rich or thin. And the only real goal here.

0:24
And this is our commonality today, to discover ways in which we can enrich the lives of our children. So thank you for coming, and, and welcome. So each one of us is a story, a story that’s packed with words, action, and a whole lot of drama. These emerge into rhythms, these rhythms, create themes. And these themes emboss themselves into patterns. And despite what we would all like to believe about our adult selves and our great freewill, most of us without realising are unconsciously dictated by two or three emotional patterns. Most of what we do how we think, process, handle failure, cope with grief handled traumas in our life. All of this is unconsciously being hijacked, just by two or three basic emotional patterns. Where do these patterns come from? Well, they originate, mutate transform, from the shortest, yet the most profound period of our life, our childhoods, everything, everything emerges from here, how we learn how we learn to not learn, learn to envy, anger, please. seek approval run toward or away, believe in God or not, the self, the other, trust, abandon betray, all of this first emerges in childhood. Mommy, Daddy, what’s a racist person? Mommy, Daddy, who is gay? Daddy, is God a woman? Mommy, Daddy, what is this thing they call hell? and suicide? What is that? And why do people divorce?

2:22
Life’s essential questions first get asked and answered in childhood. And our children pay attention, not so much to what we can verbally tell them. So we can package the perfect answer, but they’re barely paying attention to that. Instead, they’re absorbing on a deep level, how it is that we embody and live these answers. So I invite you, the parent, to not only appreciate with great humility, the indomitable power, you have to lay that first layer of cement in your child’s minds, but also to ask yourself, are you yourself living in a manner that’s mindful and conscious transforming paradigms? Or are you stagnant, regurgitating patterns of the past? Simply because that’s the way it’s done. Each one of us here is a story, despite our surface differences, taller, thinner, more successful, more achieving, more pretty thinner. Did I say 10? Obviously, an issue. We all hold at our core, the irrefutable influence the thunderous power of mommy and daddy. So this parent calls me this the other day, for the first time, this mother, and she says to me, my child, seven months old, he isn’t connecting to me, there must be something desperately wrong, can you fix him? As I often do, and this is quite non traditional, I visit the homes of my clients. Because what I can see, within moments, I will take years to see unfold in an office. And in fact, if I see that the client is committed enough, and in desperate need enough, I will make that visit to the home. So I happen to chance upon feeding time. It could be that a seven month old doesn’t connect to its mother, I thought to it to myself, unless of course there was something drastically wrong with it. I began to observe and what she said was true. This baby here was the mother and here was the baby. The baby refused to look at its mother disengaged, disinterested, disconnected. This was truly happening. I was about to judge, label and diagnose the child as obviously having some spectrum disorder. But then the funniest thing began to happen. I began to engage with it. I began to laugh with it make funny faces, play with it. And then the baby began to respond to me. How could that be? Its eyes followed every movement, it began giggling back at me the perfect mirror. So now what I began to delve into the mother’s history. Within moments, the patterns became clear. The mother, herself a victim of a neglectful childhood, has been an alcoholic, for the past seven years, in and out of intermittent stupors. Now the baby couldn’t have known that couldn’t have intellectualised that this is the way to handle a mother who’s in and out of stupors, could it but yet, barely a year old just at seven months already so sophisticated had morphed itself to react to a less than good enough environment, already wizened to the use of avoidance as a means of coping with anxiety. But parents will indignantly because no one is more righteous than us parents will tell me, but my child is naturally avoidant, or my child is painfully shy, or it’s been aggressive since day two, I surely didn’t create that. I don’t create my pouting teenager or the sulking adolescent who’s forever rebellious, I couldn’t have created that. Because they’re longing to be released from judgement. Because this is a hard job indeed. But what I say to parents is, of course, you didn’t create that. But there is no such thing as a pure Sally or a pure john, or a pure Mary, there is no such thing. So if you’re looking to label your child as such, you’re falling under an illusion, for the moment of conception begins a dance, a dance of CO creation, where both parent and child are inextricably linked, influencing each other moment after moment.

7:11
So yes, you did not create your child’s temperament if we even know what that is on a pure level. But where your power comes in, is in how you react to that temperament. It is in here in your reaction in your energetic vibe. In the way you enter the dance, that you hold the power and where you need to take the responsibility. So akin to a gaggle of girls on a girls night out, enjoying themselves, and they chanced upon a cathedral, and they enter the cathedral, chirpy and noisy two seconds ago. Suddenly, they’re enveloped in the quietude of a magnificent God’s space. What happens to them you think? What happens? They get quiet. And they stand in or did the cathedral have to tell them be quiet? No, simply by its energetic presence by its grand year of stillness. The gaggle of girls knew that they were invited to enter a different space. So it is with us. As parents, we hold the power of the cathedral. We just have to create the space and we already are. But if we do it with intent and mindfulness, then there is no need for force, coercion, cajoling, pleading, yelling, and even discipline. In my practice, as a clinical psychologist, I hear stories of the story. of valour, great valour, love, great love, and pain. Well, mostly a lot of pain, pain of feeling too much pain of not feeling enough pain of wanting to feel but not knowing how pain of never having been felt by another. And I believe that it is our inability to tolerate, regulate and transform pain. That is the misery of the human condition. I have a story for you. This mother sat before me one day in therapy, having been coming for a long time complaining about her son. But on this day, she was particularly in Roth, her entire body was quivering, racked with emotion. I have had a Dr. shefali. She said, you always tell me to be mindful and patient and compassionate and I’ve been and nothing is working. It’s a torment to be with my son. Her 16 year old son, we will call him Justin. Nothing I do. connects with him, no matter what I do. He will not listen. Every day is a fight. This is tormenting to me. His words are like a dagger You don’t understand. They are purposefully suited, aimed at my heart. She was juxtaposed desperate, walking the tightrope between hope and resignation between perseverance she wanted to persevere, but utter desperation between great love and contempt. Her eyes begged me, Do not judge me. I am trying my best, I am failing, I am sinking. I don’t know any other way. And little did she realise that the last thing that emerges from my consciousness when I see a desperate parent, is judgement. Because all of us are doing only what we know how to do within the realm of possibilities that we ourselves were exposed to. We don’t know any different, and that’s why we’re in pain.

11:00
No one chooses this consciously. The other day, he came home reeking of pot, alcohol, she continued, and then he stolen $200 from me, I just discovered, the only thing I can do now is send him away to boarding school, things have become so desperate, it’s a disaster. Mother child, yearning for connection, but unable to deliver. Her story is just one rendition of a tragedy I see being played out home after home. All sides, wanting to meet in the middle, but simply unable to deliver the cornerstone of psychological growth connection. I asked her to bring her son in the next day. So there he comes. Of course, I’m expecting public enemy number one. At least six tattoos. A few piercings give me something to corroborate his story. Instead, of course, I get a shadow of a spirit. lanky, awkward, he shrinks into the couch, hoping it would eat him alive. His eyes wanting to trust me, but so tired of an adult agenda? What was I going to tell him that he hadn’t already heard? So he said to me before I could even speak. I know why she sent me. I know why. And here it is. And he threw on the on the table $200 notes. I didn’t touch it. I know she thought I was going to buy drugs with it. That’s what she always thinks. She always thinks the worst of me, like I’m some monster. At least have delivered on that expectation. He said the silence in the room was claustrophobic. I wasn’t looking at a monster or a devil, my life would have been much easier if he had been a shade of one. Instead, I was looking at a boy so last consumed by waves of parental disapproval and shame. He continued. I didn’t use any of this money for myself. I used it because I have a chemistry exam coming up. And I know I’ve been doing badly. So I’ve hired a tutor. My first session was tonight here see the text? Here was a child lost in the abyss of an agenda imposed on him and one he couldn’t cope with. How many times have I met adjusted? How many times have I seen a child desperately desiring of an approval and taking on roles that are simply not theirs to own, only to fit into a system that simply cannot expand enough to invite it in? Justin is not alone. I asked him to continue telling me the truth. And as children do when they’re given the proper conditions and the space free of controls shame, guilt, he began spilling the beans. He began talking about his childhood with his father, a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, giving him every imaginable luxury, luxury possible. Except, of course, his presence. He remembers. Justin remembers having to kneel down for hours on end because he wasn’t achieving well enough wanting to cry, but being told that that’s not manly enough. Just Justin, just one more collateral damage of parental unconsciousness. I invited the mother back into intercession and I pleaded with her, you know your son is good, is worthy, is deserving of your attention and your continued patience. But she disagreed with me. She said you just don’t know he’s manipulated you hasn’t he? I began to delve into her history and I discovered that she too grew up With the father, just like Justin did, and in fact, married the same men. She too grew up just like Justin did, unheard invalidated, feeling undeserving so of course, she passed on the legacy of unworthiness straight on to her son. And just like she had felt in her childhood, she shut him out. So the patterns you see, they repeat themselves insidiously, without our knowing. And they grip the psyche and take us on a path hurtling down the slope, even though we try our best not to follow the path of our parents.

15:37
Tell me what will become of that little girl that 11 year old girl who goes to the bathroom over 14 times a day, because pleasing her parents is simply too much to stomach. And what about that eight year old boy who Knightley has sweats because he plays baseball and he knows that his father Junior League Baseball stars, watching his every move, waiting for his son to rise to stardom like he did. And what will happen if that with that grown man who comes to my therapy couch and cries in his 40s still cries when you remember his how his parents called him an idiot, and that he would amount to nothing. And the woman in her 50s a successful lawyer still with body image issues because she remembers her mother slapping her when she put on her Prom Dress because she was too seductive. Tell me what will become of these children severed from their sense of self they have no choice, they will turn to food or clothing or status or wealth or zip code or peer pressure, they will become the addict the criminal, the thief, the bully, or some shade of perpetrator or prey. What other choice do they have searching for a sense of self that was never given within the parent child dynamic. They will forage the earth marauding looking scavenging, snatching from the other a sense of self. Or they will turn inward, they rage turning crippling themselves on an inner level. These are the only choices left when that essential connection is missing. Is this how we want to raise the next generation of free thinkers of Mavericks, when all we feed them is a daily diet of conformity, shame and compliance. It is time to change the parenting paradigm. The moment is now we are at the brink of a great consciousness at the same time, we might endure an epic collapse. It’s up to us to choose a new way to parent our children. We have the power to create a different kind of resilience, of resilience that doesn’t need to feed off another but can look within the self to flourish. It all begins with our level of consciousness. You know we each enter the parenting journey with such great fantasies and such pure intentions. Right? We expect this symbiotic bonding with the child where there will be the seamless entry from AI to re and back to AI. The child has surely look like us and want to be like us. Or if they’re not already like us their greatest aspiration will be to be like us. And we imagine walks down the riverbank with your child following your lead so interested in everything you are. And later as they grow up, they will come with you to the loof at astound you astound you with the incredible aesthetic aesthetic ability. They will know more about every painting there than you ever did. And you will just wonder at the off your genes. And of course, they must aspire to greatness in every activity they do. Tennis can’t simply be tennis, they must make it worth it by winning every tournament. They must swim the best on the team. They must, of course apply to one of the Ivy League schools or at least Stanford. And if they do if they don’t get into one of these, then at least make it up to you by you know studying pre med or volunteering for the Peace Corps or travelling to Rwanda teaching English in India something worthwhile to make you feel good at the next dinner party.

19:42
This is what we all imagine. This is how we fantasise the journey to be I was no different. Now you would think that I should get the mother of the Year award. You know, I’ve written two books on parenting. I have a PhD in clinical psychology for heaven’s sake. I have been a meditator since my early 20s stable Relationship Check, check check. I was a candidate for that award. So I thought for the first 15 minutes or so, I have to say I was pretty conscious. I was the conscious mother. Oh, but yeah, I was so heavily medicated that but it is because my mind had turned itself off with the aid of sedatives. I was actually in a funny paradoxical way very present. But when those medicines began kicking off, I kicked in and they begin began the barrage of duality, to bottle feed or breastfeed. and for how long should we breastfeed? Darn it, my sister in law breastfed for over a year, she had to be the model. I have to beat her to cloth diaper, or regular diaper to Montessori or public to cello or violin. The choices became endless. My daughter was barely two, and I had already crafted her life. And of course, she had the audacity, the audacity to violate every one of my fantasies, starting from how she looked, first violation, how dare she looked like nothing. No one from my family. And then, when she didn’t take up even one hobby that I thought she would never once painted with me, with the sunlight streaming through the window. And as bonding in that pool of light.

21:41
But I didn’t fight I didn’t stop without fighting. I didn’t just give up. I wasn’t going to just roll over and let her just ruin my body and drain me financially for nothing. I was going to fight I was going on I put up a vet Valerie’s fight at two, when she wouldn’t eat the banana. And if no one was watching, oh, I bared my fangs and I said you eat that banana. And then at four when I bought the ticket for the donkey ride, and she did to turn it down and I’ve wasted $3 Oh, how I threatened her. And I kept threatening her as she toddled away in her diapers. And then at six, and then at seven, and then at eight, when she refused to think like me, act like me want to be like me. I fretted and I filmed and I tend trimmed. And now after a decade, it is slowly dawning on me that she wasn’t put on this earth to meet any need of mine. She wasn’t here to fulfil any fantasy, or to make me feel whole in any way I would have had, I would have to do that on my own.

22:48
Sharks should have just stuck with a pet. So we enter this journey with with pure, good intentions. But really, when you examine those intentions, you begin to see very quickly, if you dare to that the intention really is to fill your own need. I asked groups of parents over and over. So why did you have a child? So why did you have a child and they because I had a great mother. Because I have so much love to give, because I think I’ll be a great mother. Because I want to play baseball with my son. Because I have so many talents I want to pass on. Because I because I because I because I and the I have the ego roars loudly. So why do you have children again? So if we just understood and all agreed that this is why we had children, just to fulfil our narcissistic egos are hungry, thirsty sense of selves, we would be all the more better. If we just did this one thing today, for the rest of our children’s lives, understood, it’s all about us. And our greedy, needy, desperate, searching self. This admission would release all conflict would free your child to finally live the way they truly came here to live as this one admission, this conditioning you see this conditioning, to hide from pain to pretend to project the need onto the other to control the other to fill the need is all part of our emotional legacy that we inherited from our ancestors pass. It’s not our fault really. This was just given down to us. We weren’t told another way in schools who told us that being a parent was more about parenting the South. Where did we learn about mindfulness in Science in Biology in Math. So it’s not our fault. We are excused, we are exempt. But still, our children are suffering. And we need to change and turn it around and discover a new way of being with our children from today. Because love is simply not enough. You know, parents always tell me but I love my child. I don’t you see how much I love my child. And I tell them, you know, you love a little less. It’s okay, you don’t need to love that much. In fact, the more you love, the more the child suffers in direct proportion. Don’t make the child the object of of your desperate love. Hold it back a little bit. Because what is more powerful than love, and what’s really hijacking your relationship is not your sincerity, but your conditioning, your unconsciousness conditioning, in fact, the conditioning from our childhood, right rides roughshod over love, completely abducts it and mutates it. And what it leaves behind is desperate roadkill of emotional bankruptcy. So love your child less, and instead, awaken yourself to your own healing, healing your own baggage, discover your own wounds, resolve your own unmet needs, and turn the spotlight within that is the entry point for raising a resilient child. That is the way to begin creating connection. It is time now to end the denial to stop pretending like it’s about our children. And we’re sending them for tennis and cello and violin and swimming for them. No, we’re not. We’re sending them for us. Go to tennis courts and watch the parents there. Instead of like leaving the kids and getting free babysitting. What are these parents doing back and forth as the ball moves court to court and then they’re taking notes about backhand and forehand and giving their children great analysis at the end of the day. Go to any ice rink and you will see mothers with with their fingers in their mouth, biting their nails, watching every every little period, enslaved by their child’s achievements, filling their inner sense of lack, anxious that their children will fail just like they did. The more empty we feel, the more we fill our children’s lives with garbage. And we think that they’re going to feel fooled by this. Because if we teach them to have an identity of a swimmer or a tennis player or an Ivy League, or an A plus greater than they will feel full, perhaps. But instead, all our children learn is to affix an identity to all the wrong things.

27:47
And instead they absorb our emptiness. So I invite you From today, to do your parenting differently. Do not look at your child to parent, look at yourself, do not look at let you try to raise but raise your own level of consciousness and evolve to a new height. Our children are here to usher us to this growth, we are simply clueless as to how to take the invitation. Our children are here to show us the path to our own greatest evolution in that conflict when we’re fighting with the child. And when we’re trying to impose our agenda. Paradoxically, it’s here precisely here that we asked to release our agenda. And in doing so, we free ourselves from the past, you know, with no one else will be presumed ownership as much as we do with our children. There is no one we will presume the right to call ours quite like we do with our children. And because they are ours, we assume possession and because we assume possession, we unleash unmitigated control, but they are not ours. So how do we enter our children’s lives with presence with attunement with mindfulness? How do we take the invitation by these gurus of living in the present moment? No one does it better than the child. moment after moment after moment after moment, they defy definition. they defy description. They transcend judgement. How can we enter that space and dance with them? So as we launch back into our Parenthood, and you enter reactivity, and more reactivity and righteous indignation, and you make action statements and you do doo doo doo doo, and you control life and micromanager to death. Stop, pause. Ask yourself, what is the as is my child is having a tantrum my child has feelings. My child says no. Can I enter the acids and meet it without the imposition of my agenda? I can. If I’m grounded, I can, if I can see the beauty of the rain and not feel anxiety, I can, if I hold an abundance perspective, but if I only know from my own childhood, lack, anxiety, control, lack anxiety control, then this is what I will send on to my child is my legacy. Every conflict with your child, every conflict in life has three stages. It starts with lack, it enters anxiety you seek to control. And all of us whether we like to believe it or not, are always having some shade of an adult temper tantrum. Because life simply doesn’t. It doesn’t follow our lead does it? Well, life is just as it is, and our children are the same. It’s up to us to contort to expand to meet them. They inviting you it’s a call to your consciousness. The question is, are you willing to take that call? If you do your children will assure you to your wholeness and to your strength and your abundance. And if you don’t, well, you’re living that already. So take that invitation and move forward and your children will lead the way. Thank you very much.