The Conscious Parent Transforming Ourselves, Empowering Our Children

by Tsabary, Shefali

• ISBN13: 9781897238455
• ISBN10: 1897238452
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-11-01
• Publisher: Namaste Pub Inc

Summary

It’s a tremendous privilege to raise children, though for a quite different reason than most of us who are parents imagine. While we think it’s our responsibility to mold and shape our children’s future, the essential premise of Dr. Shefali Tsabary’sA Call to Conscious Parentingis that our children are born to us to create deep internal transformation within us. Our children have the power to unleash our egoic behavior unlike anyone else, triggering all of our emotional reactivity. As, through our intimate relationship with them, we are exposed to our immaturity, they become our most accurate mirror of our own lack of emotional development. In other words, by inviting us to confront who we are in our relationship with them, our children raise us to be the parents they long for us to become. Despite our best intentions to raise our children well, in our unconsciousness we pass on emotional legacies to our children that have deep and lasting repercussions. Bequeathing to them our unresolved needs, unmet expectations, and frustrated dreams, we shackle them in unconscious patterns that shut them down to their own unique being. To do justice to parenthood, a parent needs to become conscious. Only to the degree we are willing to transform our own emotional present do we succeed in positively influencing our children’s future. Dr. Tsabary asks us to set aside traditional parenting strategies that major in controlling our children and instead find true kinship with their spirits by tuning into who each child is in its own unique essence. Surrendering to the oneness of the parent-child relationship in this way lifts parenting out of the physical and into the realm of the sacred. Peppered with practical, hands-on examples from Dr. Tsabary’s real-life experiences with the countless families she has helped journey consciously together,A Call to Conscious Parentingis a manual for giving our children the opportunity to shine and dazzle with their natural state of being.

Author Biography

Shefali Tsabary, PhD, received her doctorate in Clinical Psychology from Columbia University, New York. Dr. Tsabary was exposed to Eastern mindfulness at an early age and integrates its teachings with Western psychology. This blend of East and West allows her to reach a global audience. Her ability to appeal to both a psychologically astute and consciousness-driven audience establishes her as one of a kind in the parenting field. Dr. Tsabary has worked with a varied demographic: survivors of the Asian Tsunami, women from economically disadvantaged countries, inner city youth, suburban families, the elderly and infirm, and corporate leaders. She lectures extensively on mindful living and conscious parenting around the world and is in private practice. She resides with her husband and daughter in New York.

Table of Contents

A Real Person Like Myself	p. 1
You Are Raising a Spirit Throbbing with Its Own Signature	p. 2
Parenting Unconsciously Is Where We All Begin	p. 4
To Connect with Your Children, First Connect with Yourself	p. 6
You Can Build a Feeling of Kinship in Your Family	p. 9
How Consciousness Changes How We Parent	p. 10
The Spiritual Reason We Birth Our Children	p. 13
How Can a Child Awaken an Adult?	p. 15
How Conscious Parenting Is Learned	p. 19
A Conscious Parent Doesn't Emerge Overnight	p. 21
Release Your Children From the Need for Your Approval	p. 25
Acceptance Is Key	p. 28
There's Nothing Passive About Acceptance	p. 30
Don't Parent with a Cookie-Cutter Approach	p. 31
You Will Only Accept Your Child to the Degree You Accept Yourself	p. 35
A Blow to Our Ego	p. 39
How Does Ego Function?	p. 40
The Ego of Image	p. 43
The Ego of Perfection	p. 44
The Ego of Status	p. 47
The Ego of Conformity	p. 48
The Ego of Being "In Control"	p. 50
You Can Transition Out of Ego	p. 53
Is Your Child Growing You Up?	p. 56
Face Up to Your Reactivity	p. 58
Discover Your Emotional Inheritance	p. 61
How Can You Integrate Your Pain?	p. 64
How to Handle Your Child's Pain	p. 65
Take One Step at a Time	p. 68
What It Takes to Tame Your Anxiety	p. 74
Life Is Wise	p. 77
Life Itself Teaches Us	p. 78
Is It Possible to Trust Life?	p. 80
Your Child Doesn't Need to Earn Your Trust	p. 81
How You Draw Many of Your Circumstances to You	p. 83
You Can Break Free of Your Unconsciousness	p. 86
It's All in the Interpretation We Give it	p. 89
The Challenge of a Lifetime	p. 95
Infancy and the "Terrible Two's"
The Lessons of Infancy for the Parent	p. 96
A Journey of Self-discovery	p. 98
A Chance to Recover Your Rhythm	p. 100
Toddlerhood: A Planet All Its Own	p. 102
Toddlerhood Is the Time to Sow the Seeds of Containment	p. 105
From Center Stage to Supportiang Cast	p. 109
A Parent's Opportunity for Spiritual
Growth in the School Years
Middle School: the Challenge of "Being There" for Our Children	p. 110
High School: the Need for Unequivocal Acceptance	p. 113
Why It's Important to Resist the Temptation to Control	p. 115
The Insanity of Parenthood	p. 117
The Particular Role of the Mother	p. 118
Raising a Child Is an Invitation to Surrender to a Different Pace	p. 122
Parent From Wholeness Instead of Your Wounds	p. 125
If You Grew Up Feeling You Weren't Good Enough	p. 127
If You Learned to Please Others to Earn Their Approval	p. 130
Were You Unable to Be Yourself?	p. 134
"Bad" Behavior Is Really a Search for Our Inherent Goodness	p. 137
Your Brokenness Doesn't Reflect Your True Being	p. 139
A Household Built on Being	p. 141
Are You Aware that Anxiety Is a Form of "Doing?"	p. 144
What's the Source of Our Fear of the Present?	p. 147
Beyond Living by "Doing"	p. 149
The Moment Is Now	p. 151
The Wonder of the Ordinary	p. 155
Do You Revel In Your Child's Ordinariness?	p. 156
The Fallacy of the Overproduction of Life	p. 158
Surrender the Urgency to "Do"	p. 161
Back to Basics	p. 162
A Life that Mirrors Who Your Child Is	p. 165
Shelve Those Great Expectations	p. 167
Honor Who Your Child Is	p. 168
How to Set the Bar for Your Child	p. 169
What Can You Realistically Expect of Your Child?	p. 172
Focus on the Process, Not the Outcome	p. 174
Use the Right Kind of Praise	p. 178
Realize that Your Children Imitate You	p. 179
Create a Conscious Space In Your Child's Life	p. 183
Allow Room for Stillness in Your Child's Schedule	p. 184
Create a Meaningful Narrative for Your Child	p. 186
Why Expressing Gratitude to Your Child Is a Powerful Parenting Tool	p. 188
Connect to Your Child with Engaged Presence	p. 193
How We Undermine Our Attempts to Connect with Our Children	p. 195
Do You Validate Your Children's Behavior, or Their Being?	p. 197
Just Be There	p. 200
How to Handle Your Child's Mistakes	p. 205
Do You Really Know Why They Did What They Did?	p. 206
How You Can Transform Mistakes into Spiritual Gold	p. 208
Celebrate Your Child's Mistakes	p. 210
The Two Wings of the Eagle	p. 213
A Child Can't Soar Without Containment	p. 214
The Spiritual Approach to Discipline	p. 218
Don't Avoid Conflict-Value It	p. 221
How to Discipline in a Manner that Works	p. 223
The Rule about Rules	p. 226
Why Teaching Is More Effective Than Punishment	p. 229
Acting Out Reflects Unmet Emotional Needs	p. 232
Do You Own Your Part in Your Children's Behavior?	p. 234
Why Delightful Children Turn into Defiant Teens	p. 238
Heavy-handed Tactics Backfire	p. 241
How to Execute the "No"	p. 245
Timing Is Crucial	p. 249
Afterword
Understanding Our Shared Unconsciousness	p. 253
We're All in This Together	p. 254
Becoming a Parent Who Is Present	p. 256
Appendix
The Consciousness Compass	p. 259
Questions to Ask Ourselves
Some Highlights From the Conscious Parent	p. 263
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