“Every step we take toward increased consciousness brings us exponentially closer to our child’s heart and spirit.”
— Shefali Tsabary, Ph.D.
coaching for parents and caregivers
Dream it.
When asked what their hopes and dreams are for their children, all parents I’ve ever met say some version of this: I want my child to be happy. I want them to be confident. Creative. Compassionate. Passionately curious. Most people assume that obedience and spelling are required prerequisites to all that - the tedious stuff we focus on when our children are young so they can do the good stuff later. But it really doesn’t work that way. What we sacrifice when we are young, we sacrifice - until we find our way back again.
Create it.
In order to support our children to sustain their dreams, we need to re-ignite our own. As we find our way towards our own true passions and interests, our children will absorb our model - because that’s what they do to survive - and we’ll be better equipped to help them navigate their own path towards happiness, and to strengthen their sense of agency, self-efficacy, and belonging along the way. We take care of our children by showing them how to care for themselves — by nurturing our own dreams, our own creativity, our own curiosity.
The joy and love we feel for our children is directly proportional to our fear that terrible things could happen. When we combine these fears with the ways we learned to cope with our own childhood realities, we often end up in cycles that keep us from enacting our dreams of something better. When we find our way to our own true nature, we ensure that our children have a chance to stay grounded in theirs. We recognize we all have the right to access our true nature. We learn to trust our children’s as we learn to trust our own. We learn to accept our fear, and embrace our capacity for joy.
“Once I have seen my dividedness, do I continue to live a contradiction - or do I try to bring my outer and inner worlds back into harmony?”
Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholenss