0:00:06.9 Juan Alvarez: Won’t you like to be a better parent or a partner? Are you ready to break free from unwanted habits and get over the burden of the past? Maybe you would like to develop a healthier relationship with money or with food or be able to lead with compassion. In all those matters, mindfulness can be a catalyst of change and a resource that you can always tap into. My name is Juan Alvarez, and I’m an executive coach and a mindfulness teacher, a teacher and a guide or a companion for people looking for attainable ways of being more present, peaceful and conscious in their lives. I’ve dedicated my life to exploring how mindfulness and meditation improve our relationship with the world and with the people around us. So tune in if you want to build a solid meditation routine and learn different techniques that will also enhance the only practice that truly matters when it comes to being purposeful, life itself.
0:01:15.0 JA: Welcome back, my friends, to Life Is The Practice. The main purpose of this podcast is to show how mindfulness can be integrated into our worlds in a practical level, enable us to thrive in every facet of our daily lives. Today, we are looking at how the practice helps us become conscious parents. We will talk about how to be present with our children, how dissolving our egoic patterns, soften our relationships with them, and how the practice helps us to respond consciously instead of reacting to negative emotions. We will also explore the best ways to teach the practice to our children, sharing with them tools and education that will help them to grow in harmony with others. Here to help share their experiences are my clients, Heather Walling, a brilliant CEO and mom to nine-year-old Evan, and Christopher Celeste, a close friend, talented writer and father in a family of six adult children. You may remember him from episode one. Let’s go. One of the most immediate benefits of the practice is the increase in our ability to be present. As we talked about in episode three, cultivating presence, the development of this ability has innumerable advantages, some of them very profound. If you want to learn more about cultivating presence, I invite you to listen to episode three. For now, we’re moving on to visit the intersection of presence with parenting.
0:02:44.1 Christopher Celeste: I remember when my son was in little league, all the parents are on the side of the little league baseball field yelling, no, put, hold your hand this way. Run this way. Johnny, go faster. And I remember a coach said to us, your children can’t hear a thing you’re saying. All they want to do is when they look at you, they want to see you looking at them. That’s it. They just wanna see that you’re watching them. Don’t say a word. The little teaching about being present with them, the power of just being present, not being responsible for the outcome of what happens, but just to be a witness to their activity, that was a very powerful lesson.
0:03:26.4 Heather Walling: Being present with him is something really important to me ’cause he’s, he’s at my house half the week and then at his dad’s house half the week. And so I think the mindfulness practice has really helped me kind of hone that as a skill and recognize that being present with him and listening to him and sharing what we’re experiencing together, like is the most important thing I can be doing when I’m with him.
0:03:50.6 JA: Being present with our kids is a way of giving ourselves to them, of investing ourselves completely in them. I think is the greatest gift we can give them. Very simply, because being present with our children is loving them. When we make ourselves present, we give ourselves completely to the other without thinking about our problems or the shopping list or the last email we sent. And without projecting onto them our mental and emotional patterns or our expectations of how they should or should not be. By being present, we become the space that supports their experience, accompanying them in their development. When we allow them to be fully themselves, we grant our children the freedom to show themselves exactly as they are without interference or censorship. And when we are conscious in our own lives, we are also modeling, for our children, what it is to live in union with ourselves fully embodied. Let’s pause here to look at some common examples of how the ego can creep into and derail our relationships, including those with our children and how the practice can help us stay present and gently push back against this very human tendency. Mental defaults to scarcity, insecurity and fear are classic expressions of the ego. If we are not aware of them, these patterns condition our thoughts and emotions, our decision making and how we relate to life and others.
0:05:20.6 HW: I think it’s also helpful in helping me recognize eyes when my ego is trying to tell me, you’re not doing enough, you’re not being a good enough mom. This is your fault. And recognize like, that’s ego. And I don’t really have to listen to that and like, can I get focused and centered first and then how do I, you know, make a decision or figure out what the next best step is based from there. But recognizing that sort of the mind chatter isn’t reality.
0:05:47.2 JA: Recognizing these patterns as what they are, the egoic mind, and learning to let them go is one of the fundamental benefits of the practice. It frees us from the conditioning factors of the ego and infuses our relationships with authenticity. Perhaps the concept of ego is confusing for you or you don’t fully understand what it means. If that’s your case, I invite you to listen to episode five, The Ego: Taming Our Inner Critic, which explains it in detail. Another way in which the ego can sometimes sneak into our relationships with our children is when we come to identify through them, defining ourselves through their behavior, achievements, or attributes.
0:06:29.7 CC: The sense that somehow they’re an extension of you. Oh, if my child misbehaves, that reflects on me, if my child isn’t the best basketball player, well, that reflects on me. They’re not a badge I wear in public. Look how polite my child is. Look at my child succeed. We project ourselves into and through other people. It’s really my ego pushed through my child and burdening my child with not only having to try to figure out their own sense of self, but somehow have to be a representative of me and the world.
0:07:00.6 JA: Through the practice, we develop foundational presence and insight that help us become aware of and dissolve these egoic patterns before they seep into our relationships with our children. When we do this, we free our children from this pressure and give them the space they need in order to explore themselves without conditioning, which is so important. We want our little ones to discover themselves and become who they authentically are, not conform to or be molded by the expectations and identities we project onto them. In short, conscious parents contribute to the growth of more conscious and free human beings. But we must acknowledge that this task is very difficult, and in my experience, it is not possible to avoid projection 100% of the time. Still, through mindfulness, we can certainly reduce the amount of projected ego and consciously avoid those patterns that are most harmful. Just as we bring intentionality to our personal egoic patterns in order to free ourselves and others from their influence, it is also necessary to illuminate our collective ego, a whole set of thought patterns, beliefs, and conditioning that apply to our collective identity and consciousness. It is tremendously important that we bring awareness to and let go of what does not serve us well. For example, received wisdom about what it means to be a so-called good parent in our society.
0:08:30.4 HW: I think there’s a lot of pressure, especially on moms. You know, you see everybody’s Instagram photos of like the really beautiful birthday pictures and everybody’s matching Christmas pajamas and, you know, it looks like sort of this perfect version of parenting and childhood. And I think mindfulness, and this practice of conscious parenting has helped me sort of separate from that, of I don’t have to compare my own parenting to everyone else’s parenting, and I don’t have to feel bad about us not having matching pajamas, but like what I’m doing with Evan is good enough, and I’m trying the best I can, and we’re on our own journey, and we can’t compare our journey to other people’s journeys.
0:09:15.7 JA: One of the most beneficial aspects of doing this inner work of observing and dissolving harmful egoic patterns is that it makes us intimately familiar with the universal mechanics of the ego, which is integral to being human. Interestingly, paying attention to the damaging mindsets that can impact us all can in fact brings us closer together. However unique we are as individuals, we are all subject to similar traps of the mind. This is especially helpful in building empathy into our family relationships and preventing unnecessary conflicts.
0:09:52.5 HW: It’s helped me recognize also and have some empathy for him of, you know, when he is speaking out of anger or if he’s frustrated about something, recognizing that that’s a moment in time and that I can’t take that personally, that it has nothing to do with me. That it’s an experience or an emotion that he is navigating, and I can create the space for him to experience that emotion. But I don’t know that I would’ve felt as equipped if I didn’t have my own mindfulness practice and my own understanding of that journey.
0:10:21.2 CC: I can look at one of my children and I can see how something has triggered them or how their ego is labeling them or fueling their behavior in a way that they may not yet be able to see. The gift of that ability to see that for me is the ability to be compassionate and not reactive. It gives you the gift of compassion so that you can allow them just to do what they need to do and not take it personal. Old me would get triggered, and you’d play a game of tennis back and forth as you’re just doing this emotional volley that escalates. And at some point, you think, I’m an adult, why am I in this argument with my child? And now I can sort of… We sort of just let the ball go past.
0:11:10.8 JA: Intimately linked to all of this is the need to be present to see and improve our inner experience. Only then do we have the possibility of responding consciously instead of reacting reflexively with learned egoic patterns.
0:11:27.7 CC: The practice of mindfulness provides a moment, an extra beat between the thought and the action, which creates more opportunity to choose, consciously, your best self. So in the context of any relationship, but especially my relationship with my children who I… Are the loves of my life, this practice gives me that pause and that that awareness leads to the opportunity to be your authentic self instead of your reactive self.
0:12:05.8 JA: So far we’ve talked about how developing our ability to be present enhances our experience as parents, allowing our children the space to be fully themselves, dissolving egoic behaviors and improving our conscious response. The practice additionally helps us to find peace within ourselves and to bring this peace to our relationships with others, most of all our children, through conscious emotional management. Our children often press our buttons, activating very intense negative emotional reactions in us. These are moments that put our emotional management skills and conscious response to the test. Training ourselves to recognize and process our emotions helps us absorb these moments without adding more negativity or harming the other.
0:12:54.4 HW: It also gives me almost like the permission to say like, I need a minute to process this. And so if we’re having a conversation or if we’re disagreeing about something, I can feel the tension in my own body starting to bubble up and then now know enough to say like, I need a minute to like just walk away from this conversation. I need to go like take a few deep breaths, and then I can come back to the conversation in a more like common centered space and have a better interaction with Evan than if we just kept sort of running into each other’s egos.
0:13:27.7 JA: Let’s take a moment now to review some meditations and practices that we can adopt on our journey to becoming more conscious parents. Meditation techniques that helps us focus our attention, develop presence through observation and acceptance of our inner experience are the most useful. They help us bring consciousness to our thoughts, emotions, and body, but it is not enough to meditate. We also have to bring all these skills to daily life and practice presence, observation of thought and emotions. We must always be cultivating inner peace, even in mundane situations in the present moment. After all, life is the practice.
0:14:08.8 HW: I think that it’s not just about like sitting on the cushion and breathing for 10 minutes. I think it’s more so how I’ve been able to take some of those lessons and learnings and then apply them across the board in every aspect of my life. And parenting certainly is a big piece of that.
0:14:32.3 JA: In my online course, The Practice, I explain in detail how to achieve this by using some simple daily tools. I will leave the link in the show notes For those of you interested in learning more. Please check it out.
0:14:45.8 CC: There are simple methods. This isn’t some complicated. You don’t have to go read some big textbook to understand the basics of this, the idea of taking a breath, the idea of, of creating some stillness and asking yourself, what am I feeling? Go to your body and say, what am I feeling? And then just accept that that’s true and that’s okay, if you’re angry or angry, if you’re scared, you’re scared.
0:15:13.1 JA: Over the last decade, I have coached hundreds of entrepreneurs and the question I’m frequently asked is, how do I teach this stuff to my children? My answer is always the same. The best way to teach mindfulness is to be mindful.
0:15:29.3 CC: One of the things that parents say often, but sometimes forget, despite saying it often, is your kids aren’t listening to what you’re saying, but they’re watching what you’re doing. If you embody something, your children are noticing. And so, it’s certainly my children who are young adults have noticed over the last decade the impact of the practice on me and the way I show up in almost every circumstance. How I interact with my own parents and my own siblings, how I interact with them, how I interact with their mother. And they’ve come to me and ask me things and I see them trying things in their own life.
0:16:13.2 JA: Dear friends, as you know, I always say that practice helps us to be present, peaceful and purposeful. Today, we have seen examples of how the practice helps us to be present and peaceful with our children. To close our episode, let’s review how the practice also helps us feel our experiences and relationships with purpose.
0:16:34.3 HW: Mindfulness has helped me have this great appreciation or at least put words to maybe something I always sort of believed, but that there’s this kind of shared humanity, and we’re all part of this like bigger journey together. And I think that that helps me also think about how I’m parenting Evan. I want him to understand that we’re part of this shared humanity and how we interact not only with each other in our house, but how we also interact with people at school or in the community or other pieces, that there’s this sort of bigger fabric that we’re part of and that we have a responsibility to be part of and to contribute to.
0:17:11.6 JA: At the end of the day, the practice leads us home. It helps us to rediscover our essential identity, our purest and most intimate inner workings. And when we bring this deeply authentic self to our relationships, we find ourselves naturally, organically relating to others with love, compassion, and trust. And then my friends, we begin to experience what it is to be part of a very large, very loving family at home in our communities, and as part of this vast human existence. All right, my friends. In our next episode, we will talk about how the practice helps us cure our anxiety. I hope to meet you there. Thank you for listening to this episode of Life Is The Practice Podcast. If you found it valuable, please subscribe. Leave us a review. You might help others live better. And if you want to learn more about the practice, please explore the online course that is available to you at lifeisthepracticepodcast.com. Thank you and be well friends.
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