Mental presence is a state of being wide awake and receptive to what is happening, as it is happening in the moment, within us and between the world and us. Presence cultivates happiness.
When your child is disrespectful and talks back to you, when you are asked to come in for a meeting with the principal, when you find crayon scribbles all over your wall: these are survive moments, no question about it. But at the same time, they are opportunities – even gifts – because a survive moment is also a thrive moment, where the important, meaningful work of parenting takes place.
You can use all of the interactions you share – the stressful, angry ones as well as the miraculous, adorable ones – as opportunities to help them become the responsible, caring, capable people you want them to be.
You can be grateful for what you enjoy, not longing for what you are missing.
That’s a direct lesson every parent should consider quite deeply: do we want to teach our kids that the way to resolve a conflict is to inflict physical pain, particularly on someone who is defenseless and cannot fight back?
But when we integrate those embedded experiences into our present consciousness and recognize them as implicit memories – not valid intuitions or reasoned decisions – then we begin to offer ourselves the means to become awakened and active authors of our own life story.
Serenity, courage, and wisdom are at the heart of temporal integration.
Simply put, reactivity cuts off seeing clearly.
A colleague and friend, Jack Kornfield, has a great way of thinking about this important process: Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past. In this way, we forgive not to condone, not to say it was fine, but to let go of false illusions that we can change the past.
If the leaders of a culture are themselves devoid of mindsight, then the young, emerging minds of that culture will be living in a world in which the blind are leading the blind.
As I’ve mentioned, research has revealed that people with dismissing narratives show physiological signs that their subcortical limbic and brainstem areas still register the importance of relationships. It’s simply that the higher cortical areas, where consciousness is created, shut out this awareness in order to survive barren times. The key would be to align myself with these deeper subterranean circuits and bolster Denise’s ability to integrate them into her life.
Having an awakened mind means using the mental processes of attention, awareness, and intention to activate new states of mind that, with repeated practice, can become intentionally sculpted traits in a person’s life.
Coupling the relaxation and sense of safety associated with that imagery with the sensations of the body can ground a person in the visceral reality of tranquility and clarity. It is this grounded place that can serve as a vital resource of safety and strength during the explorations ahead.
Trying to change how we actually feel by ordering ourselves to do so is a strategy that goes nowhere, fast.
When such resonance is enacted with positive regard, a deep feeling of coherence emerges with the subjective sensation of harmony. When.
Beginning with a genuine sense of care and interest by the focus of the other’s careful attention, resonance extends this positive interaction into a fuller dimension of the other being changed because of who we are. This is how we feel “felt,” and this is how two individuals become a “we.
How we treat our children changes who they are and how they will develop. Their brains need our parental involvement. Nature needs nurture.
The immature brain of the child is so sensitive to social experience that adoptive parents should in fact also be called the biological parents because the family experiences they create shape the biological structure of their child’s brain.
Creating stories through play, and presumably through our dreams, may be ways in which the mind attempts to “make sense” of our experiences and consolidate this understanding into a picture of our selves in the world.
It is, ironically, “safer” to believe that the reason your needs are not being met is because there is something wrong with you, rather than that your parents – whom you depend on for your very survival – are actually not dependable.
Your job as a parent is not to prevent them from experiencing setbacks and failures, but to give them the tools and emotional resilience they need to weather life’s storms, and then to walk beside them through those storms.