Tuesday

Mindful Parenting: How Parenting and Mindfulness Practice Can Support Each Other

By Sean McCann

An Excerpt from the Shambhala Online Community Blog

Mindful parenting is a rich and multifaceted topic. How can mindfulness inform our parenting? And how does parenting affect our mindfulness and meditation practice? In this article, we’ll look at three related questions:

1. How mindfulness and meditation can support us as parents.
2. Mindfulness practices we can offer both ourselves and our children to support healthy and positive parenting.
3. How parenthood is likely to affect our own meditation and spiritual practice.

In addition to sharing resources on mindful parenting, I spoke to a number of parents about their own experience. I asked them a few initial questions, including: How does mindfulness affect your parenting? and How or why does being a parent motivate you to meditate? You’ll hear what those parents shared about the many facets of mindful parenting throughout this article.

Mindful Parenting: How Mindfulness and Meditation Can Support Us as Parents

Quite often, what our children need most is for us, as parents, to be positive, open, and present. There is a saying in the world of Chinese medicine, “To benefit the child, nourish the mother.” This is a poetic explanation of a specific approach to treating illness, but it is based on a simple truth: a child’s health and development are largely dependent upon the health and stability of their parent(s).

The important question here is, How do we accomplish this? Numerous practices can help us, from deep breathing, physical exercise, and meditation, to seeking counseling, scheduling regular acupuncture or massage sessions, and more. All these can support us in enjoying the benefits of mindfulness parenting below.

Mindful Parenting Benefit: Clarity in Decision-Making

Many decisions we make as parents are not easy. Economics, social pressure, ubiquitous technology, environmental factors, and more often require us to make difficult decisions. 

Meditation and mindfulness practice can help us to be clear about how and why we are making a decision. That way, even if the situation is not ideal, we know we made our choice from a good place, and we can release the anxiety or blame we may otherwise feel around it.

Sometimes, this means making difficult decisions that require us to be particularly clear in order to bring our family through a tough time. Meditation and mindfulness practices can help us recognize unsafe situations and have the clarity to act decisively and appropriately. 

This may be something as simple as seeing a child playing in a place that is unsafe and helping them move to a safer location; it may also mean recognizing that a relationship or long term living situation is unhealthy for the family and making the choices to get into a healthier or safer situation as soon as possible. Sometimes, it is just recognizing that we need to ask for help.  

If you are experiencing a crisis or are in an unsafe situation and need help, there are a number of websites and hotlines that can help. A list of these resources are available here.

Mindful Parenting Benefit: Staying Sane in Difficult Situations

One parent I spoke to shared their experience parenting through divorce. This parent said that divorce can make it much more difficult to model the positive behaviors we want our children to learn, because of both emotional turmoil and physical distance.

In difficult situations like this, mindfulness practices serve to help keep us sane, which is an important distinction from utilizing mindfulness practices to achieve higher consciousness.

The parent shared how difficult it was for them to continue meditating and practicing qigong—which they had done for many years—during the process of their divorce. It was too painful to have all of the negative thoughts arise in the midst of the silence provided by those practices.

The parent mentioned the saying, “The mind is a self-purifying mountain stream,” meaning that if allowed to run its course, the mind will become calm and thoughts will cease—and noted that this saying assumes that the sources of pollution at the stream’s source are curtailed. That wasn’t the case for this parent during the divorce’s painful aftermath.

Finding Different Ways to Incorporate Mindfulness

If we are embroiled in conflict, court cases, custody battles, etc., then finding ways to relieve the deluge of negative thoughts is key–and sitting still might not be the best way for every person to achieve that…

To continue reading this article please visit the Shambhala Online Community Blog.