Parenting, Self-Mastery, a foundation for healthier and happier parenting.
Excerpt
Foreword
To write a complete book on parenting is inconceivable; one book, alone, cannot even begin to list and incorporate the multiple facets responsible for producing a fully successful parent. Parenting research often focuses on the importance of early child developments, whether parents stayed together or divorced; whether the parent, as a child, lived in a healthy environment and ate nourishing food, obtained enough sleep, received a decent education, enjoyed economic advantages, lived drug-free, etc. But, the above-mentioned factors characterize the components of more complex dynamics operating within a person, both before and after becoming a parent.
Success, or the lack of success, in parenting involves cultural programming, parental beliefs, religious orientations, education, individual preferences, levels of commitment, and motivation. These components all play major roles. Most importantly, our beliefs shape our reality. Parenting is not simply one subject to be learned within a specific time frame. As part of an evolutionary process, parenting requires that we first learn to know ourselves, by investigating our own belief system. It entails analyzing the blueprint we adopted for mastering our lives and scrutinizing our internal dialogues and beliefs we learned to perceive as right or wrong. To improve human skills, a person must be open to learning different approaches leading to a happier, healthier, and more meaningful life.
Albert Einstein noticed, long ago, that we can’t solve a problem from the same level it originates. Living happier and healthier both necessitate investigating how we work psychologically, thus learning how we process our own perceived images and words filtering through our brain. Successful parenting entails living an exemplary life, recognizing the important part we play daily constructing our path called life. In time, we recognize that our internal state of mind reflects a mirror image of our current state of affairs.
My goal with this book is to focus on a scarcely known, yet most-important, aspect involving the fundamental building block of all existence, often labeled consciousness, and its strategic correlation to parenting. Consciousness, in general, poses a daunting subject based on an invisible energy that acts and reacts to very specific, but unseen, Universal laws. An interpretation of consciousness, alone, could fill several books, and explanations vary, reflecting a particular writer’s level of awareness. One interpreter may perceive consciousness as simple biological functions of the brain (finite aspect), while another recognizes that consciousness works through the brain but is not a strictly localized aspect of the brain (transcendent aspect). Arguing over this difference in understanding continues to fill library shelves, with each side believing their definition right. They are, of course, correct. Their “rightness” particularly reflects how they understand, or don’t understand, these invisible psychological dynamics.
Living with greater awareness regarding these invisible psychological dynamics involves self-reflective understanding of all the beliefs, habits, and behaviors we adopted during our lifetime. Many of these beliefs have been unconsciously accepted; yet, sadly, most people seldom analyze whether these beliefs serve their current life.
Most young parents repeat what they learned from their parents or teachers. Many of those skills may no longer sufficiently or beneficially assist their meeting the multiple demands of this twenty-first century. But, unless a person is ready to test new possibilities, his, or her, habitual beliefs become habits and continue to dominate. Testing new outcomes entails taking risks because no prior frame of reference exists to validate new ideas leading to new behavior or understanding.
Where does this new knowledge, or skill, hide before we become aware of it? Some find the answer to that question perplexing at first, since this knowledge is not learned from someone else or absorbed from a particular literature. Indeed, this conscious awakening takes place within a person and consequently alters his, or her, current level of understanding. Our research finds it a pre-existing wisdom or energy, also known as Universal Consciousness.
An invisible matrix, at all times, permeates and affects our state of being and reflects Universal Laws that mirror our current level of understanding. This infinite, invisible wisdom, not found in printed instruction booklets, serves each individual according to his, or her, level of awareness.
This sounds mysterious and can be puzzling until a shift in understanding takes place within an individual. I used to wonder where in my brain, or body, this wisdom resided, since it was already considered a presence inside me. While searching for a specific place, I finally realized this wisdom was not firmly localized in my body. We have access to this wisdom via our brain, but not as a hidden, or designated, compartment of our physical brain or body. As both energy and intelligence, this invisible wisdom instructs our brain while simultaneously transcending both our body and our brain.
In this book I share with you the drastic changes that improved my life and so enhanced my parenting skills that sanity soon found its way back into my and my daughter’s lives. I had found myself at wit’s end with a rebellious teenage daughter that did not respond to my pleas, or to psychiatric interventions, psychological counseling, hospitalization, pastoral help, and various other interventions. As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, this devastated me even more—I felt like a complete failure not only as a mother but also as a licensed therapist.
I was successful with my clients but unable to “fix” my own daughter. As her behavior became increasingly alarming, I worried more and more and then began experiencing insomnia. I had witnessed the dangerous handwriting on the wall many times before, with previous clients. Not sleeping certainly made me feel even worse, and the more I worried the angrier and more deeply guilty I felt.
The angrier I became, the worse the situation grew. I desperately wanted to help my daughter, but was unable to do so despite all my academic skills. None of my co-workers offered satisfactory solutions for us. At my absolute breaking point, I met Dr. Pottenger. After hearing my woes, he explained to me that my state of mind affected my daughter’s state of mind, and consequently her behavior. At the time of our meeting, he had researched for forty years the interactions between mind and body.
Dr. Pottenger’s verbal statement hit me like a ton of bricks and shook me to my innermost core. I now had reason to feel even more guilty. This burden became unbearable until I found myself motivated to fully test his approach by implementing his proposed changes.
In all my academic training I had never heard of the stated correlation in the way he presented it to me. Needless to say, his presentation and my realization of it soon changed my life completely. It also changed my daughter’s life. In the beginning, while enormously skeptical, I made up my mind to test his theory and see for myself, since no other method had worked successfully.
To my utter surprise, changes began happening within a short time! I soon found a way to release my anger and to sleep again. And I started witnessing subtle changes in my daughter without having shared one single word with her about my testing this new theory.
Dr. Pottenger’s research group identified the core concepts of this theory and named them Holographic Psychology TM (HP) principles. In the pages of this book, I share these HP principles with you. Although still primarily unknown, these principles prove strategically important to successful living, including parenting.
I can’t go back and physically change that difficult time with my daughter; but what I can do is share this most important life-changing aspect with parents also struggling to cope with their children. The marvel of these principles: they apply for every person, regardless, whether or not we parent children. Understanding and implementing these principles during daily living bring much-needed relief and beneficial changes to any type of problems (relationship, or other heartaches). This realization makes it possible to live happier and healthier, enjoying new-found understanding and freedoms derived from a healthier self-image and other inherent benefits of these principles.
Clearly, many facets of parenting reign significantly important; but, without a doubt, our state of mind most significantly affects the quality of our lives. This correlation may not make sense until you have a chance to test the proposed principles. When we live with greater levels of conscious awareness, we react differently to current situations. We are the meaning-makers of our lives.
I sincerely desire to foster this awareness in my readers: within each of us resides a storehouse of information and answers to life’s most perplexing questions. Knowledge of the invisible connection to this inner wisdom affects every human being and every other aspect of the entire world. Strategic to our happiness: realizing how our own thoughts and feelings are helping or hindering any current or future state of our life. As our awareness grows, so do our health and happiness.
We have the possibility of living with greater self-esteem—an empowerment that creates excitement and freedom seldom experienced, thus far, in daily living. We have the capability to live healthier, and without anger, frustration, or jealousy. Reading this book will help you realize that perceived negativity and/or the practice of negative experiences both create more unhappiness in your life.
We all have a transcendent aspect to our nature. When consciously recognized, this aspect presents and offers you a giant leap to living happier and healthier. Worth testing, it yields magnificent surprises. May you use these principles to your benefit, and may your life be blessed with wonder, health, abundance, peace, and happiness.
Read more about What I Wish I Had Known Before Becoming a Parent and Margrit Spear HERE.
Copyright 2008 Margrit Spear. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Post a Comment