- Sovereignty. Sir Gawain and the Loathely Lady.
- Empathy. When we cultivate empathy, we try to see things from our child's point of view. The real test for us comes when it feels as if their needs are in conflict with ours.
- In the face of an unresponsive environment, many babies close off emotionally, withdraw, and tune out. Shutting down emotionally what we want in our kids?
- As parents, it is our job to continually rebuild and restore our relationships with our children. This takes time, attention, and commitment.
- Acceptance: next moment called for something new, something to further healing, completion, and respect. How we see things will completely affect what we choose to do. It can help us to remember, right in those most horrible moments, to accept our children as they are, and attempt to act out of awareness, with compassion.
- This cycle of "bad behavior," followed by some kind of discipline imposed by us, frequently does not include any attempt to empathize with what the child is experiencing. Rather than a difficult moment leading to greater understanding and a deeper connection between parent and child, distance and alienation are created instead.
- The times they need our acceptance and our love the most are, inevitably, those times when it is hardest for us to give.
- Too many children live with the feeling that they are not accepted for who they are, that, somehow, they are "disappointing" their parents or not meeting their expectations. Ultimately, each child has to find his or her own way. When they feel our acceptance, feel our love, not just for her easy-to-live-with, lovable, attractive self, but also for the difficult, repulsive, exasperating self, it feeds her and frees her to become more balanced and whole.
- Zen trainers - that's our kids. It's all about mindfulness and non-attachment, knowing who we are at the deepest of levels. Our babies as live-in Zen Masters ... giving us endless challenges, and they have much to teach us.
- Parenting as 18-year retreat. Inner calling of parenting and the years of constant and ultimately selfless attention, caring, and wisdom that it asks of us.
- The practice is always the same: To be fully present, looking deeply, as best we can, and without judging or condemning events or our experience of them. Just presence, and appropriate action, moment by moment.
- Practice. With awareness. Being fully there.
- Free within our thoughts. 1. Breathing. 2. "I am not my thoughts." So when practicing mindfulness, it's important to see your thoughts, as thoughts, and not simply as "the truth."
- Discernment vs Judging. Mindfulness is defined as moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. May look back years later, with deep regret, that our opinions were just that, opinions.
- What is called for in the cultivation of mindfulness, and in mindful parenting, rather than judging, is discernment, the ability to look deeply into something and perceive distinctions keenly and with clarity. Discernment is the ability to see this and that, as opposed to this or that, see whole picture and its fine details, to see gradations.
- Only through being non-judgmental that it's possible to see and feel what is actually happening, past surface appearances and the filters of our won limited opinions, our likes and dislikes, beliefs, fears, our unexamined and sometimes unconscious prejudices, and our deep longing for things to be a certain way.
- Discernment includes seeing that even as we attempt to see our children for who they are, we also cannot fully know who they are or where their lives will take them. We can only love them, and accept them, and honor the mystery of their being.
- Formal practice. Put your mind in your belly for a few moments and feel it moving with the breath or put our attention at the nostrils and feel the flow of the air there. Pay attention to the breath ... means attending to the feelings in your body. Activity of your mind ... you simply observe it, let it be, and let it go, returning to the breath.
- Letter to young girl about Zen. Important to be sensitive to what is coming from our children, and what we may be forcing on them from our desire to have them value what we value.
- Zen and Buddhism are really about KNOWING WHO YOU ARE. About knowing yourself, understanding yourself, and knowing what that means. Some kinds of knowing and understanding are beyond words, and beyond thinking, and beyond anybody being able to tell you about it. Your true self.
- Don't mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon. Pointing is not the something. Zen mind - when walking, just walk. Meditation is simply working at being aware of each moment. I love listening to silence.
- Keep sight of who our children really are and what they need from us in that moment.
- Stopping and stillness need to be valued, and brought into the home to restore balance.
- To see things from each child's point of view. What does my child really need from me in this moment? What choices do I have here? Catch ourselves. Do over. Say to the child, "Let's begin again," "Let's try again." and do it differently.
- Major responsibility of parents: to actually behave as adults, and respond to and meet the needs of their children. Good idea from time to time to ask ourselves whether our children are here to meet our needs, or whether it is the other way round.
- Family values. Sovereignty, empathy, acceptance, and awareness.
- Consumers. Products become barriers and substitutes for human interaction and presence. Relationships are built on shared moments.
- Greater risk of losing our children to the enticing values and images of peer culture, the mall culture, and the various media. Children experiencing a lack of connection. Lot easier to start our parenting without a TV than it is to regulate its use once you have one.
- Balance. Awed and amazed when we see parents who have been able to transcend the limits of their own childhood and the era in which they were raised, and create a different model of parenting. Managed to create more balance in their own parenting.
- Ronia the Robber's Daugther book. Same author who wrote Pippi.
- Tatterhood - I will go as I am. Strong women. Sovereignty and authenticity.
- Learning to touch silence and stillness.
- Expectations. Attend to whether we are seeing our children clearly in each moment and modifying our expectations to the circumstances. Decades of therapy to undo damage that is caused when children embark on journeys driven by expectations that they unquestioningly adopt but that are not truly theirs.
- Surrender. They put me to the test. Can I let her show frustration and misery without judgment, without criticism? Mindful parenting is to continually re-examine whether we are doing and thinking is in this child's best interest, and to ask ourselves if there might be a better way that we are not seeing.
- My move. Generous choices to attend a child ... we are not acting like her servant (though it may feel like it).
- Grief. Making space for deep and unpleasant emotions is a much as part of mindfulness as following the breath. Maybe able to see and accept them in ways that will occasion less lopping off parts of themselves in their heartbreaking attempts to be accepted for who they actually are, rather than for what we -- in our own ignorance of how things are, and out of our won fears -- might want them to be.
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost to you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
- Intention 4: see my children as they are, accept them and not be blinded by my own expectations and fears.
- Intention 5: I will make every effort to see things from each point of view and understand what my children's needs are, and to meet them as best I can.
- Exercise 3: Practice seeing your children as perfect just the way they are.
- Exercise 4: Be mindful of your expectations of your children and consider whether they are truly in your child's best interest.
- Exercise 7: Try embodying silent presence. Listen carefully.
- Exercise 8: Learn to live with tension without losing your own balance. Practice moving into any moment, however difficult, without trying to change anything and without having to have a particular outcome occur.
- Exercise 10: Every child is special and every child has special needs. Each sees in an entirely unique way. Drink in their being, wishing them well.
