The Conscious Parent

This is why we keep on making mistake after mistake. Most of us don’t even know who our children are right now, let alone allow their moment-by-moment newness to emerge.

For this reason, the parenting experience isn’t one of parent versus child but of parent with child.

Without our realizing it, we bind our children to us by tying them to our approval, making them slaves to our judgments of them. Either we constantly starve them of our approval, or we cause them to become dependent on it.

How can we guide, protect, and provide for our children in the physical world, yet rigorously relinquish all sense of domination of their spirit, unless we have nurtured a free spirit within ourselves? If your spirit was squelched by parents who were divorced from their own emotional freedom, there is a risk you will squelch your own children.

Parenting is a journey that tends to begin with a high level of egoic narcissism, an energy we take into our relationship with our child. The consequence is that we can easily, though in many cases inadvertently, fall into the trap of using our children to fill some need in ourselves, all the while under the illusion that we are loving, giving of o

For this reason, the ability to see—really see—our children separate from who we are is our greatest gift to them. Conversely, our greatest weakness as parents is our inability to honor a child’s path as it emerges.

A certain child enters our life with its individual troubles, difficulties, stubbornness, and temperamental challenges in order to help us become aware of how much we have yet to grow. The reason this works is that our children are able to take us into the remnants of our emotional past and evoke deeply unconscious feelings. Consequently, to unders

“Ego” as I’m using the term is an artificial sense of ourselves. It’s an idea we have about ourselves based mostly on other people’s opinions. It’s the person we have come to believe we are and think of ourselves as. This self-image is layered over who we truly are in our essence. Once our self-image has formed in childhood, we tend to hold onto it

Even when we are called upon to discipline, consciousness shows us how to do so in a manner that bolsters our child’s spirit rather than diminishing it.