Category: Parenting
Special Announcement: Upcoming Courses for Parents at Sacred Stream
Sacred Stream is committed to supporting parents in bringing greater consciousness into their relationships with their children, their partners, and themselves. All of our Empowered Living courses are designed to help you get the most from your everyday experience. Several upcoming courses are especially helpful for parents.
Conscious Parenting will help you connect more deeply with your intentions and values as a parent and respond to whatever arises with greater self-understanding and grace. Tracking Spirit in the Birth Environment provides an opportunity to connect to powerful resources for giving birth or integrate the birth experience you already had. The Path of Service strongly connects you with your own needs and how to address them so that you can maintain your energy level while caring for others. And if you find, as you parent your children, that how you were parented is coming up as something you would like to understand better, Relationship and Karma will help you do that.
Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 6: Learning from Our Triggers
By Joanna Adler, Psy.D.
Editor’s note: Joanna Adler, Psy.D. is a certified Depth Hypnosis Practitioner and licensed clinical psychologist. Her two-day workshop on Conscious Parenting will be at The Bodhi Center in Bainbridge Island, WA on the weekend of April 28-29.
Life throws so many difficult things at us as parents. It’s important to find enough time to support ourselves so that we can be resilient and offer that same support to our children. We know this, but sometimes it can feel like yet another thing to do. The good news is that there are practices we can cultivate for when we encounter difficulty in our relationships with our children, practices that allow us to get out of the way and offer the child what is truly needed in that moment.
Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 5: Interview with Joanna Adler, Psy.D.
Editors’ Note: We’re delighted to publish this interview with Joanna Adler instructor of the Conscious Parenting workshop that will be offered at The Bodhi Center, Bainbridge Island, WA on April 28 and 29. Joanna Adler is a licensed clinical psychologist and certified Depth Hypnosis Practitioner. She has studied extensively in the fields of Depth Hypnosis, Buddhist Psychology, Shamanism, and Energy Medicine at the Foundation of the Sacred Stream. We asked Joanna about how she helps people with the dizzying array of choices parents face on a regular basis, what the word “discipline” means to her, and what interests her most in her work with families.
Q. How do you work with parents that may be struggling with knowing how to best support their children when there are so many choices, so many potential ways to respond in a given situation?
Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 4: Cultural Context
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
In the first post in this series on conscious parenting, I touched upon how important it is for us, as parents, to know what we value, because our values become the structures within which our children learn to express themselves. Then I discussed how we can foster the authentic expression of our children’s highest potential and how to get out of the way of this expression. Because the cultural context can have a significant influence on our children’s expression, it is also important for parents to determine how well this context is contributing to our children’s highest potential. The cultural context, for the purposes of this post, consists of the values and priorities of the society in which you live.
If you have values that are different from the surrounding society, it will be even more important for you to be clear about what your own values and priorities are, and communicate them clearly to your children. If you don’t, your children may absorb the values of those around them by default, and that may put you at odds with your children.
Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 3: Getting out of the Way
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
The last post in this series on Conscious Parenting addressed how to recognize our children’s highest potential and why it is important to move out of the way of its expression. The question we were left with was, “How do I get out of the way?” One of the best ways to get out of the way is to look at your attachments to having your child be a particular way. Those attachments are probably a function of something that did not work in your own childhood.
Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 2: Children’s Highest Potential
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
If I had to define one goal that we, as parents, must do our best to attain, it would be to protect and cultivate our children’s highest potential in the world. Naturally, every child’s highest potential has its own expression. Every child has a set of gifts that she brings into the world that resonate with the child’s deepest calling. You will find that I use the phrase “highest potential” interchangeably here with “a child’s deepest calling,” “the child’s most authentic expression,” and “the child’s gifts,” because each of these offers a different view and definition that points to the complexity of the deepest aspects of our children.
But how do we support our children’s authentic expression in the world?
Blog: Conscious Parenting Part 1: Six Essential Questions for Parents
By Isa Gucciardi, Ph.D.
I am a parent of two children, and I have been counseling and teaching families and individuals for more than twenty years. Over the course of the last ten years, I have seen many of the central issues around parenting shift drastically, mainly due to the more central role that technology now plays in the family.
The challenges that parents face today in raising children are very different from the challenges their parents faced. Not only do parents have to figure out how to function on less sleep, they also have to determine the role they want technology to play in their children’s lives. As parents find themselves with less time than they would like to be able to devote to parenting, they have to come up with clear strategies for enrichment, discipline, and many other important issues. This is difficult when people find themselves trying to navigate the issues around work-life balance, and face down issues such as self-doubt and guilt about the choices they must make.