The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

by Dr Shefali Tsabary

Children quite naturally feel all their emotions without blocking them.

Were we to encourage our children to be real about what they feel in the way children naturally are until we shut them

Many of us assume that when we are angry or sad, we are feeling our feelings. On the contrary, we are often merely reacting.

Truly feeling an emotion means being able to sit with the incoherence we experience at such a time,

venting it nor denying it, but simply containing it and bei...

Feeling our emotions without reacting to them can be terrifying. To sit with our emotions means we have to be in solitude, which is unbearable for many of us. We are too used to having a thought and being trig...

For instance, if we feel anxious, we eat or self-medicate in some way. If we feel angry, we experience an urge to vent or even explode at someone. Sitting and watching our thoughts and feelings in stillness may seem pointless to us, but it’s by doing precisely this that the core lessons of consciousness are learned. By silently witnessing our thoughts and feelings, we learn to accept t...

As you learn to be with your emotions, they will no...

you. In the full acceptance of surrender, which is of a quite different character from mere resignation, you come to see that pain is simply pain, nothing more and nothing less. Yes, pain is painful—it’s meant to be. However, when you don’t fuel your pain by either re...

Your wisdom will increase in line with your capacity for embracing all of your feelings, whatever their nature. Along with increased wisdom c...

This mother’s inability to handle her child’s pain, let alone to help her child handle her own pain, denied this little girl the opportunity to feel her emotions. Instead of being allowed to feel hurt and disenfranchised, she was made to believe that if she changed her outer appearance enough, her peers would accept her. In this way, she was learning that painful emotions are too painful to deal with and need to be swept under the rug, or better still camouflaged by various forms of “doing,” such as blaming others or fixing her outer appearance. Because all effort was directed to squelching her pain and disguising it, with no effort made to sit with it, the daughter was incorrectly coming to believe that her external persona was more valid than her inner world of feelings. Of course, she most desperately needed the tools to handle rejection.

When our children are permitted to feel their feelings, they are able to release them amazingly quickly.

They come out of the pain understanding that pain is just...

When our children experience their pain in its pure form, without fueling it with resistance or coloring it with a reaction, the pain transfo...

Part of our problem is that we are unused to handling pain alone. We would much rather project our pain onto others, roping them into our emotional drama through guilt, blame, or anger.

we resort to an unhealthy habit, perhaps overindulging in food, alcohol, working out, drugs, or medication. In

The antidote is to sit with ourselves and become a witness to our pain, knowing well that the pain originates from our attachment to our ego.

Once our children learn to accept pain as a natural and inevitable part of life, they don’t fear it so much, but simply acknowledge, “I’m in pain right now.” Instead of intellectualizing about it, judging it, or resisting it, they sit with it. We teach them this by sitting with them when they are young. If they need to talk, they will talk, and all that’s required from us is the acknowledgment of a nod, or a statement such as, “I see.” There’s no need for logic, cheerleading, or hurrying through the experience.

Just allow it a space in ...

Also, if pain stays a while, we make it a matter-of-fact experience, keeping all drama out of it. Perhaps we might talk about it in terms of “a thing,” with colors, different appetites, and moods. Above all, we don’t aspire that our child become “ha...

we are able to calm ourselves after an hour or so, drop our reactivity, and sit in our anxiety simply watching it.

When a parent tells me they are upset that they lost control of their emotions in front of their child, they expect me to judge or guilt-trip them. Instead, I congratulate them. I say, “Now we know how your unconscious looks, which is an important step forward.” It is indeed an important step forward, because most people in the world have no clue that their reactivity is a manifestation of unconsciousness.

Peter allowed himself to become so deeply triggered that he lost all control of himself. When we react out of our own need for power and control like this, we fail to ask, “What does my child need from me that I have been unable to give so far?” This father had long stopped listening for what his son truly needed from him.

“my son doesn’t care about my feelings,” “my son is disrespectful of me,” or, “my son is purposely being defiant.” None

“my son is in pain and needs help,” “my son is crying out for help and doesn’t know how to behave right now,” or “my son has need of my patience as he passes through this difficult phase of identity-confusion.”

As long as life mirrors our ego attachments, we are fine. The moment it dares to contradict our deeply held assumptions of how things are supposed to be, we lose our centeredness.

All dysfunction involves our deeply personalized interpretations of the events around us.

The sad byproduct of this is that our children are left feeling they are ...

which results in guilt and can lead to a sense o...

From this place, they then react...

It’s crucial to recognize that the seeds of this equation lie in the initial judgment we make in...

“I deserve more respect.” If we interpret our children’s behavior as lacking respect, it’s an indication we have a grandiose sense of entitlement. For someone to show us insufficient respect automatically triggers our narcissistic

We tell ourselves, “I’m better than this. How dare this person behave like this toward me?”

With our children, our immediate interpretation when they fail to follow “the plan” is that it’s they who are wrong, and that they are doing what they are doing because they disregard our authority. We can’t see that it’s our interpretation that sets the stage for dysfunction. Neither can we see that the real issue is that we feel threatened in some way.

Without imposing any sort of judgment or interpretation on his son’s behavior, and—most critical of all, leaving himself out of the equation—he would diminish his rigidity, thereby freeing up much internal space and allowing him the flexibility to be creative in his response to his son. When we open up internal space, we discover new ways of encountering our children, which is refreshingly different from repeatedly engaging in the same battles. Coming from a need to “do” something divorces us from our flow of creativity. Life is then parent pitted against child, a battle for the supremacy of egos.

When the individuals in our life are allowed to possess their own emotions without everyone tripping over everyone else’s emotional drama, we begin to fully accept all our emotions, knowing that they are simply emotions.

Anxiety is our way of reacting to our mental judgments. Recognizing when we are anxious is one of the most important things we can do for ourselves in terms of the preservation of our relationships.

When we experience anxiety, something from deep within us has been triggered. If we are aware from moment to moment, we ask ourselves, “Why am I being triggered right now?” After asking this question, we remain in a state of openness, being careful not to project our anxiety onto others.

The anxiety is coming from something unresolved within us and would continue to exist regardless of whether the triggering person or event was present. If one set of circums...

Anxiety is a natural emotion there’s no escaping. Rather than seeing it as something we need to control, we are asked to accept that it’s natural and quietly witness it. Sitting in our anxiety, simply al...

If we don’t learn to just witness it, we are likely to become overwhelmed by our internal sta...

We are then primed to engage others in a reactive, perhaps volatile manner—or, convers...

Either way, we inevitably leave a trail of unnecessary consequences. Only through awareness do we neither split off from ...

When we swim in the ocean, we allow the water to move our body. We don’t protest, “How dare this wave be so high? It should be low.” We accept that we have no dominion over the ocean. Indeed, we find the unpredictability of the waves exhilarating. Why, then, when it comes to relationships or events in our life are we unable to simply go with them?

It’s when we react that we turn it into a tsunami.

No one wins when we come from our unconscious reactive state.

Emotional drama can only lead to suffering.

So much of our pain is se...

Unless we learn to break free from our negative interpretations, we will forever be mired in one destructive ...

The good news is that life is a wonderfully willing partner in our journey into a more conscious way of being. It assists us on every level, and all we h...