A New Writing Venture For Me
October 13, 2011 at 3:42 pm | Posted in parenting, peace, society, Uncategorized | Leave a commentI’ve been very busy lately writing articles on Hub Pages, a site that brings my writing to a wider audience. As with this blog my hope is what I write may help make life a little easier for someone somewhere. Many of my “Hubs” are on aspects of parenting, some practical and several describing life in the early days after Lolo was born – these I hope will be of help to anyone coming to terms with having a premature baby.
You can read about the first time I held Lolo in this post: A Mother’s Experience
You might also like my latest post: The Meaning of Peace (be warned you may been in for a few suprises!!)
I will be back here soon with more posts on allowing family life to thrive with the Work and The Sedona Method.
I’m making a donation to Peace Direct: to stop conflict before it starts. Will you join me?
December 18, 2010 at 10:46 am | Posted in peace, society | Leave a commentI’m making a donation to Peace Direct: to stop conflict before it starts. Will you join me?.
Peace is what the the holiday season is all about. Giving love, giving understanding, acceptance, respect.
I believe in supporting organisations that are FOR, rather than against – for peace, for a clean healthy world, for kindness, for supporting others to support themselves. Peace Direct provides the means for local people to build bridges between communities in conflict. If you are interesting in learning more about what they do follow the link above! To learn more about Peace Direct, click this link below:
Gratitude and Guilt
October 23, 2010 at 5:58 am | Posted in emotions, society | 4 CommentsTags: beliefs, gratitude
If you’re reading this (which of course you are) there’s a good chance you also read personal development blogs and books. If so, you will probably have read that feeling gratitude is essential to finding happiness. It makes sense: there is nothing quite so joyful as feeling waves of gratitude pass through you, and there is little more painful than feeling consumed by resentment.
One way it is often suggested we cultivate gratitude is to “count your blessings”. There are many ways to do this, and one way is to keep a ‘gratitude diary’ each day, writing down all you feel grateful for. I have no argument with this, and have done it myself. If it works for you, that’s wonderful, and you may not be interested in the rest of this article. But if you want to read on, thank you in advance! I’m grateful!
Sometimes we all have off-days. (Okay, sometimes I have off-days and if you don’t you probably don’t bother with blogs like this, so I’ll assume you do.) Sometimes gratitude seems like the last thing you can ever feel, and if that’s you right now, perhaps this article can offer some peace in that.
You can’t feel grateful right now if you don’t, and no amount of forcing will make you. I think this is so, so important that I’m going to say it again. You can’t feel grateful right now if you don’t, and no amount of forcing will make you.
Let’s go back to that gratitude journal. If you write it because you feel inspired by all the wonderful things in your life, it probably will make you feel even more grateful. If on the other hand, you’re trying to make yourself feel grateful because you’ve read this is how to get what you want in life, there’s a strong possibility it won’t work either at making yourself grateful or bringing you what you want. Gratitude is a joyful spontaneous feeling that comes naturally when we allow it to. But saying thank you, whether it is spoken or written, is not the same as feeling it.
It’s interesting to notice that most of the ways we try to make ourselves grateful induce guilt. Were you, as a child, as baffled as I was by urges to think of starving Biafrans or Ethopians when you didn’t like your dinner? It never even occurred to me then that it was supposed to make me feel grateful to be eating food I hated, and I couldn’t see how what I ate would help them. The trouble with trying to count our blessing by comparing ourselves to others is that instead of leading to gratitude it can lead to guilt when we notice the lack in someone else’s life.
When we have this sense of lack it can taint our natural ability to feel grateful. Let’s imagine you are feeling fed up, and try to cheer yourself up by thinking about the new shoes you bought yesterday or the kiss your child gave you at the school gates, or that your boss said you’d done an exceptionally good job today. Instead, you feel guilty for buying shoes you didn’t really need when you could have sent a cheque to charity, you remember the argument with your child as you walked to school, and you wonder if she only kissed you because she’s hoping you’ll relent and buy that iphone she wants, and then you wonder what your boss thinks of your usual standard of work if today was exceptional. And if this counting blessings lark works for everybody else, you must be the most ungrateful, churlish person on the planet.
Maybe there’s a different explanation. Remember the old grumpy great-aunt you used to have? You know – the one who gave you the hideous sweater she’d knitted herself in a style that went out of fashion twenty years before and still hasn’t come back into fashion thirty years later. As you tried it on and noticed the sleeves were far too short and the body far too wide, she snapped, “Well, aren’t you going to say ‘Thank you’?” If you didn’t have that great-aunt, I’m pretty confident you can remember some other adult hiss, “Say thank you,” as they shoved something into your sticky little hands. You may have loved whatever you’d been given, but how did you feel saying the words that were demanded of you? Were shame and guilt now mixed in?
What confused messages do we pass on about gratitude when we say this sort of thing to children? I’ve heard a parent tell a child to say thank you so that her grandparents will keep sending presents. Another justified asking her child to say, “Please,” when she didn’t say it herself, by explaining that adults show it in how we say things and in our gestures. Is this true? Or do they show it more? Which would you rather have: a child’s eyes light up with excitement as they eagerly grab a present – or a head cast down and a mumbled thank you?
Why should a child say “thank you” or “please”? Does learning these words teach them to be polite or to be inauthentic to get approval? And is our motivation to teach manners or because we fear disapproval from others if our children don’t say these supposedly magic words? And what do we teach them by calling “please” a magic word?
Is it possible that all this guilt is exactly what stops us from feeling gratitude? If you’re having a day where you find it hard to be grateful, I invite you to let yourself off the hook. Instead of insisting you count those blessings, or hissing, “Say thank you,” to yourself, take a few moments to notice and question the thoughts that make it hard to feel your gratitude. Like love, it’s there always, but sometimes it gets buried so far beneath ‘shoulds’ and ‘shouldn’ts’ that it is impossible to find. Don’t force yourself to feel something you’re not feeling. Allow yourself to feel your resentment and lack of gratitude. You may be surprised to discover you can feel grateful for that!
So You Want to be a good parent? It that true?
December 3, 2008 at 10:45 am | Posted in beliefs, family, parenting, society | 3 CommentsI’m guessing that about two out of every three readers of this blog are parents. (Okay, two out of THE three readers, and the other one is Pam – Hi Pam!)
If you’re not a parent you might think this post doesn’t apply to you, and I’d say that it might. As you read it, perhaps you can think of other situations where you think you want to be ‘good’ – a good spouse, employee, teacher.
There’s nothing obviously stressful about wanting to be good at something, so it might not seem worth questioning that belief. Yet I’ve found that often it’s the beliefs that seem so very reasonable that generate most stress. I’ve read that stress is caused either by trying to push away or to hold on. This makes a lot of sense to me. We push away what we think will do us harm, and try to hold on to what we think will bring us peace. Holding on creates tension. (If you find this hard to imagine stop reading for a moment and pick up something on your desk. Hold it tightly and notice what happens to your hand!) So the very act of trying to cling on makes it harder to do or be what we think we should.
Then there’s the word ‘want’. I want to be a good parent. Want can mean lack. If you want something you don’t have it (or at least you don’t believe you have it), so if I want to be a good parent, that implies that I’m not. For me, one of the most important sub-questions I’ve heard Katie ask is, “What images come into your mind when you think this thought?” What I’ve noticed, many times is that when I think I have to be or do something its opposite also comes into my mind. I think I want to be kind and patient, and images appear of me nagging and criticising my children. I think I should be a good parent, and my mind fills with pictures of people telling me I’m not. The day that I first noticed this was long before I’d discovered “The Work”.
The girls were still little – three and four. I had pain that a doctor told me was fybromyalgia. It could take years to get better, so I’d read. (It didn’t.) Some days I couldn’t lift the girls, couldn’t open the garage door. Yoga helped, so I had started doing yoga in the mornings. That particular morning I hadn’t done my yoga when the girls woke up. After breakfast they wanted to go swimming. I explained I needed to do yoga first, and they wanted to join in. Sounds idyllic doesn’t it? And wasn’t I such a wonderful mother, introducing my children to wholesome activities like yoga at such an young age? That was what I wanted to believe. How virtuous I felt saying, yes, I would show them what to do.
It didn’t work out like that. I can’t remember exactly what happened instead. Either they thought they’d do their own version of the exercises, or they climbed all over me when I lay down. It could have been cute and fun, we could have invented some new exercises, had I not had a head full of people telling me how a good parent should be. “You should take control, not let them run riot,” ran the commentary in my head. So I snapped at the girls to stop messing about and do what I showed them. The internal rant switched from taking my side to theirs, and carried on, “Look at you, you idiot. Yoga is supposed to be relaxing. How are they ever going to find it relaxing if you snap at them? They’re only little kids! Lighten up for goodness sake. If you’d been more organised and got up earlier you could have finished yoga ages ago.”
Strangely enough, this didn’t help me relax! Strangely enough, this snarling voice didn’t bring serenity to that yoga session! But that voice in my head didn’t shut up. I told the girls I knew they hadn’t done anything wrong, that I was trying not to be angry, and we got ready for the pool. Meanwhile old nagging-voice told me I was useless at getting organised. As we set off for the pool, it said, “You can’t go swimming now. It’s far too late. By the time you get back lunch will be late, and the girls will be hungry. Any decent mother would be better organised at feeding them.” We took a detour via a corner shop and bought muffins, but that only momentarily quieted my self-criticism. It wasn’t proper food, not the sort of thing a decent mother fed her kids. And lunch would still be far too late.
I kept listening to the voices in my head, trying to please them, not realising then that I didn’t have to believe a word they said. I had to be a good parent, and I was failing. Miserably. I’d say sorry to the girls, say I knew it wasn’t their fault, but the next minute I’d start snapping again. About the only time I stopped snapping that morning was when we were in the pool. My four-year-old pointed this out (who says wisdom comes with age?) Now, I can see that the reasons were simple – in the pool we were all doing something we loved, the self-criticism let up and I was able to focus on them and what we were doing instead of trying to please some imaginary audience.
That day was the first time I realised that trying to live up to what I imagined other people believed a good parent should be was preventing me from being able to be the best parent I could. I didn’t know about The Work then, but it’s interesting to look back and see how I would have been different without the thought. It’s not hard to see, because for part of the day, I was that person. For part of even that day filled with self-doubt and frustration, I was a woman in a pool, playing with her children, enjoying their company. I can also see that what prevented me from staying that way when we left the pool was fear. Fear of other people’s disapproval, and also fear that without this constant nagging voice pointing out my errors I wouldn’t know how to do the right thing. A few years before this, as LB changed from baby into toddler I scoured bookshops looking for a parenting book that explained what was acceptable behaviour in a toddler, and what I should correct. It took me a while to realise that nobody could tell me this, that for each parent the answer is different. Later I came to realise that my confusion came from never having learned to trust my own inner voice, and that is why I find The Work so valuable. It’s not about adding any new rules, but about letting go. Even the turnarounds aren’t new rules to be followed, but options to explore.
What turnarounds might you find for ‘I want to be good parent”?
I don’t want to be a good parent. Not if it means following someone else’s ‘rules’, and trying to live based on what I imagine will get me approval.
I want to be a good child. Yes, is that a child is open to learn.
The thought “I want to be a good parent,” loosened its hold on me that day, but it came visiting many times since, and still occasionally does. When I write for this blog it whispers, “You can’t say that, people will think you’re a bad parent.” Now, after years of doing The Work, I know I don’t have to believe it, and that what people think is their business and doesn’t threaten me in any way.
Are We Ill At Ease With Illness?
October 15, 2008 at 11:43 am | Posted in family, society | 2 CommentsTags: illness
The girls have both been ill lately, and one or the other has been off school for weeks, which is largely the reason it’s taken me so long to post.
I find it fascinating to notice the mass of contradictory beliefs in society, and in me, connected to illness. Western cultures seem to believe that we have to fight illnesses, be they life-threatening like cancer or heart disease, or more ordinary like the common cold. (Though the common cold that Lolo had as a baby meant nine days in intensive care on a ventilator.) I’ve heard of companies that reprimand employees for being off sick, and in the UK we have TV ads for cold cures that suggest you can swallow the potion and get straight back to work. The alternative, it seems, is to huddle in bed with a hot water bottle, nose dripping, feeling totally miserable and sorry for yourself.
So when I start to feel ill, or my children are, thoughts come popping into my head, thoughts I once would have believed or fought, and now instead I question. Here’s a selection:
It’s weak to be ill.
I should find a way to prevent my children getting ill.
Teachers/other parents/people will think I’m doing something wrong if my children are off school.
People won’t believe me that the Buteyko Method works if my children are ill.
I shouldn’t be ill.
I’ve too much to do to be ill.
I won’t be able to cope.
One morning recently, noticing my sore throat, runny nose, headache, I also noticed these last three thoughts, and that I was seeing only the options of fight or give in and collapse – and that led to feelings of anxiety and tiredness.
What if there was a different way? What if instead of letting my mind run off into the future it stayed right where I was? What if instead of imaging the day ahead with all the struggles I’d go through because I was ill, I took each moment as it came? In other words, who would I be without the thought that I couldn’t cope?
Interesting this – I’d be living in the now, right here, with no stories of struggle.
What if illnesses aren’t the enemy? If we were to treat illnesses instead as teachers, how would we see them differently? How would we feel differently about them? I’ve read many articles about people who have developed disabilities or debilitating illnesses such as cancer, and who have come to see them as a gift. (I’m reading Michael J. Fox’s book Lucky Man right now, and that’s how he describes his Parkinson’s disease, and says that the ten years since he was diagnosed have been the best of this life – though he also writes he has been criticised by others for saying this and that it is a gift that keeps taking.) I’ve not experienced serious illness myself, so I have no idea how I would react, and if you or anyone you know are in that situation, I certainly am not suggesting that you should look on your illness as a gift – if you don’t. I simply notice that for some people it is possible to see things that way, and this inspires me when I think about my own minor ailments. I guess the fear is that if we stop regarding illness as the enemy we will be overwhelmed by it. Yet, what if illness is perhaps a signal that somewhere, somehow we are out of balance? Would we stop looking for cures then, or would we approach the search for a cure with less – or maybe even no – fear?
For years my fear of the breathing difficulties Lolo experienced with colds led me on a panicky search for a cure. It’s probably six years since the day that she got furious at me about something, (I’ve conveniently forgotten my crime!) and as she raged at me she began struggling to breathe and needed her inhaler. Yet, though I noticed the link between her outburst and her breathing, I missed the opportunity in this. It didn’t occur to me then, for instance, to notice what happened to my own breathing when I felt upset. And a few years later when someone gave me an article about the Buteyko breathing method, it took me months, maybe even a year, to ring a teacher. Why? I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. Probably because of beliefs I had such as: ‘Doctors wouldn’t like it.’ I have yet to meet a doctor who complains about it, and when I discussed it with the asthma nurse at our clinic, she said it was very effective. But fear rarely lets evidence stand in the way.
I am aware that I still hold many crazy beliefs about health, and accepting that is oddly peaceful. I don’t have to try to force myself to drop unhealthy beliefs about health! That seems similar to trying to force my body to be well. I read more and more about research that indicates placebos are as effective as drugs, and when we read this it’s easy to start thinking if a dummy pill can do it we should be able to simply heal ourselves. Some people seem to find this comes relatively easily, and others don’t. I tend to think we all have lessons that help us become more aware of the inherent wholeness of our being, and that certain situations recur in our lives because that’s how we learn. So if you or I experience recurring illness, for instance, it’s not because we’re inherently weak, stupid or careless, but because these illnesses bring to the surface beliefs that tell us we are, and we then get the chance to question these beliefs and more toward love.
Parent’s Intuition
June 23, 2008 at 11:53 am | Posted in family, parenting, society | Leave a commentTags: sleep problems
A different style of post today.
Yesterday in a newsagent I picked up a parenting magazine and flicked through it. I read a short article about research that claims to have shown that children whose parents are with them as they fall asleep or who are taken into the parental bed if they wake in the night will more likely continue to have sleep problems as older children.
Hmm, I wonder, could this be a bit like the research that showed babies who had a night light grew up to be short sighted? That research came out when LB was a year or so old, and I fretted about it long enough to switch her light off one night. She screamed, the light went back on, and some time later the researchers realised that they had overlooked one fairly vital piece of information – babies with night-lights tend to have parents who are short sighted! (And no, I’m not but my husband is.)
So am I now going to beat myself up over all those nights I picked LB up and took her through to our bed in the middle of the night? Am I going to assume that’s why she still occasionally has bad dreams? (The article suggested these children more often had bad dreams.) Or am I going to take a wild guess that these researchers may just have overlooked important information – for instance that children with high levels of anxiety or who get scared at night may well have parents who sit with them as they go to sleep and who soothe them when they wake in the night? It gets even more interesting – I looked up the magazine’s web-site and found a mass of information about children and sleep, including evidence that controlled crying creates stress chemicals in a child, whereas co-sleeping reduces them. So who do you believe?
This post is not a argument about whether you should take your baby to be with you or not – I think that what works for any family depends on so many factors unique to them that it is impossible to generalise. I can’t help feeling that instead of doing endless studies to prove one way of parenting is better then another, it would be more useful to encourage parents to trust their own intuition.
Going back to LB – not long after Lolo was born (and while she was still in hospital so our lives were somewhat disrupted) a “sleep expert” asked me what I did when LB woke in the night. I told her it depended how LB was – if I hugged her and laid her down and she settled quickly I tucked her up in her own bed. If she was clearly distressed and unable to settle I took her into my bed. “You’re confusing her,” the expert said. “You must always be consistent, always leave her, or always take her into your bed.” Being consistent was apparently more important than trusting my instincts or responding to the needs of my child at any given moment. Probably that sleep expert did my a huge favour – her advice seemed so utterly crazy to me that it may have been when I began to listen to that small voice of wisdom inside of me, the voice that told me I knew my daughter better than any expert.
We all have this wisdom, we all know instinctively how to look after our children and ourselves, and I sincerely hope that in some small way this blog can help others learn to trust that wisdom – others including well-meaning sleep experts!
Is It Okay To Have a Feeling Mum?
April 24, 2008 at 3:33 pm | Posted in emotions, parenting, society | Leave a comment
In the first article on this blog I wrote about how children unconsciously mirror parents. This article looks at the impact of the wider environment. Everything we come into contact with as children has some bearing on how we think and feel, be it family, friends or the society we grow up in. The effect can be blindingly obvious, or so subtle it’s hard to notice. It’s easy to see that children who grow up in alcoholic families or in a war zone are going to be affected by that environment, but subtle effects on our development can go unnoticed.
My daughters both love to swim. LB, the elder, joined a club a couple of years ago and has entered a few competitions. She has come second or third in several races, and has a small stash of medals. She has a dream that one day she may be a ‘really good’ swimmer and make it to the national team. Will she, won’t she? Who knows? I have Albert at UrbanMonk.net to thank for helping me see that doesn’t much matter right now. In an article about finding our purpose in life, he writes about years spent boxing, dreaming of glory, till one day he lost interest and stopped, to later realise the purpose of it hadn’t been to make him a brilliant boxer, but to give him confidence. (See link at the end of this post.)
So, LB has dreams and can swim well – she is also prone to minor, niggling illnesses. A few weeks ago she had a heavy cold and a big competition coming up. She was determined she was well enough to compete, and determined to enjoy her birthday a few days before. All week she had gone off to school coughing and sneezing and brimming with excitement. (Not her usual behaviour – more often she huddles in bed at the first sneeze.) On the morning of the event she was still coughing and her nose dripped a wonderful stream of green snot. But she was going!!!!
She didn’t win any medals, or even come close. People – including me - still told her she’d done well: pointing out she’d been the youngest in her races, had swum strokes she’s not confident in, hugely improved her time in one of them, and swam half a second faster than before in another stroke – and she had a cold. She smiled as people pointed this out to her, she smiled as people told her it’s not coming first or second that matters, but getting personal bests, or even just taking part. Not everyone can come first, people said, and she had done well just to enter a big long race. People asked if she was pleased with how she’d done – she smiled and said yes.
By evening she was in tears. All day she had tried to be upbeat, tried to keep thinking it was okay, that everything was fine, that she was pleased with the improvements she had made, that coming last in that long race didn’t bother her. She thought she was supposed to be happy, that was how people behaved. She was having huge doubts about whether she was any use at swimming at all, as she’d watched some of her friends knock three or four seconds off their personal bests in every race, and as she compared her times to the winning times.
I knew so well what she was feeling, and I told her it was okay to feel disappointed, frustrated, okay to feel sad. And I sent a little memo to my own mind to remember that too.
Thinking about it the next day I realised what had happened was something I often notice – that when we adults find it hard to deal with children’s feelings we try to stop them instead. It’s a mite confusing to tell children that what really matters in these competitions is personal bests, because if that was true the medals would go to the kids who knocked the most off their times, not to the ones who swim the fastest. This lie, because that’s what it is, is told with the intention of being kind and encouraging the children who will probably never win medals. So we throw children into competitions telling them it’s not winning that matters and yet get excited when they win, and expect them to go on smiling and not be jealous when they don’t. Likewise, we divide them in classrooms into reading groups and call them Owls and Pigeons and don’t let on to them that the myth of owls being intelligent isn’t true, till one day the Owls realise that the Pigeons are reading Dostoyevsky, while they are still on Spot the Dog. (Okay I’m exaggerating, but you get the picture.)
My gut feeling is that when we aren’t honest with children, even when our intentions are kind, deep down they know. Our lies don’t stop the feelings, they just stop the expression of those feelings and lead to children feeling something’s wrong with them. In the short term it might serve adults to dodge dealing with children’s more difficult emotions, but in the long term it comes back to us – if we’re lucky it’s later the same day when our children cry at bedtime. If we’re less lucky they stifle those feelings and go on stifling them and carry with them a simmering resentment. When I realised how disappointed my daughter was I couldn’t tell her she’ll win next time – she might , or she might not. Instead I guided her through The Work on some of her beliefs around that disappointment. Doing this she remembered the joy she gets from swimming, from feeling the water around her, the feel of moving quickly through it, the pleasure she gets at pushing herself to see how fast she can go – and her sense of purpose returned.
The next day LB came to me with some drawings she was doing and told me she couldn’t get them right, saying that her friend is better at drawing than she is. Having worked as an art teacher years ago I noticed that children often approach drawing with their minds, not their eyes, drawing what they think they should see, not what they do see, in an attempt to get it right. I showed LB how to look more closely and to draw what she sees and not what she knows. Five minutes later she was back with another drawing, pleased as punch that she had discovered she could draw well after all. Was this coincidence or did it have something to do with working through her disappointment the night before? Hmm, I wonder…
(Read the full article at:
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