Our children can anchor us back into our original versions of us if we can allow that and embrace their wholeness.
What does this mean practically?
When we become parents or are expectant we don’t automatically look at how our inner life both the material worldly and spirit heavenly might impact our parenting style and technique. We may not even be aware that there will be a style a certain flavour of you with which you nurture and care for your infant.
Imagine you are just a cell inside a warm fluid structure which keeps you nourished and you evolve into a little body with tiny limbs inside of this place. You hear sounds under the water and are wrapped in this liquid which for you is all that there is and literally your whole life as you have known so far with the little brain that might help in making sense of what your sensory organs can perceive. By the time you can make some sense it’s time to be taken out of that place and before you know it you let out a big cry finding yourself detached from this warmth and in very very dry airy surroundings maybe even very unfamiliar faces that you can’t quite make out.
You will have within your certain codes let’s say for now genes DNA your reptilian brain a bit of the limbic and neocortex too. Okay let’s leave the science out for now and you can just look it up if you may.
With all of that assuming you have the most loving parents and are cocooned in your mamas bosom you then start to pick up what sound you make gets what attention. You learn that when you cry because you are hungry, your mama will be quick to feed you. You even learn that your needs are met without you making a sound because your mama just knows – she is in tune with you. And you know it’s your mama because you recognise her voice smell touch and much more.
As you go from conception to birth to then the various milestones you pick up information of how to navigate this new place that’s now home to you. The maps will be provided by the models set by your primary caregivers. Sometimes the caregiving may meet all of your needs and at other times maybe not. You will learn to make sounds maybe scream cry in different ways till you learn how to speak to communicate. Again this may or may not be fully understood. There may be gaps in the communication that might frustrate you the infant and then the mamas papas and other caregivers.
As you move into your toddlerhood when you are actively exploring trying to learn the secret of everything you can hold so you can master it, you also pick up on not so tangible stuff like emotions. Your excitement joy and playfulness may be welcomed initially but when this turns into daily breakage of items and then the parents might have other pressing stuff to attend to and you just won’t stop clinging onto their legs or scream so loud they cannot hear what the bank has to say or their boss, this spontaneous enthusiasm of you, might be met with a “erghhhh”.
What starts to happen now is we behind to adapt our behaviours into what’s acceptable and what’s not, and what we can or can’t change, including what we simply won’t change because we want to test the waters or because we have been shunned one too many times and have developed a hard skin.
It is important if not vital that we have age appropriate boundaries in place for our children. For example to have a ceramic plant pot on the floor and your toddler knocking it off you cannot expect anything else and he is not behaving badly he is exploring, but when your seven year old does it that might not be exploring and can be addressed as behavioural. I put out some glassware and explained to my toddler that glass can break and we can get hurt. He broke a glass but not on purpose. That breakage made him laugh a lot and then he wanted to break some more and then some. Then I put all the glassware back and explained that we will leave it behind doors for now until he has understood or is capable of, that we don’t break glass unless we are at a Greek wedding!
Apart from setting a structure boundaries and what is acceptable to you in your unique family setting, we will have a way of communication too which will impact on how the infant develops.
Ideally when the infant has become mobile, an environment that is safe to explore would be more appropriate than one that is not and the infant hears the word “no” more than anything else and the parent gets worked up and might even verbally lash out at the infant for doing what infants do – explore. This can eventually become detrimental to the infants natural curiosity to explore and he might simply shut down and not be willing to leave your side to explore or become very anxious. You have just stepped on their original wholeness and torn it down.
This tearing off the original and fragmenting the self starts at babyhood and even before although the first few months can remedy any lose of original self with the type of care that is given.
That playfulness and joy is not the only original sense of self that there is. There is also that fearlessness, that freedom and without hesitation ready willingness to know to do to move. Each day is new. Everything is seen with wonder and awe. What seems ordinary becomes magical. The infant literally so spreads fairy dust on everything and makes it otherworldly. And some things can take other form with their vivid ever developing imaginations. They are inventors in the making and can find solutions to their daily experiences that might frustrate in open one way so they try another.
Except all this stays in our childhood doesn’t it? Childhood is cut short for some and even shorter for others. Why? Diary from the rush there is something else. And that is our own self imposed limitations that might be borne in our infancy babyhood toddlerhood adolescence even adulthood.
As we grew up physically, the essence of our childhood has always remained with us. We have good or bad or no memories of our days gone but our brain will have encoded it all and what our lives are now will be a product of that “made up” version of self as opposed to the original self.
Our make up is inter alia:
1, parents’ blueprint at conception
2, mama’s health nurture care at pregnancy
3, babyhood
4, toddlerhood
5, childhood
6, adolescence
7, high school
8, university
9, work place
10, society
11, environment and more.
The experiences above will have embedded themselves inside our psyche some of which will enrich us and maintain our original sense of self and some might dampen that so that we live a life not quite so original.
And then our world falls apart. For some than might be that turning point, and that looking back into the mirror of us taking us on a long walk inside the making of us, how we came to be as we are. The process itself can be jarring and it might even mean breaking away from very known territory places people relationships foods versions of Gods and more.
World falls apart when we compete; we compare; we gauge; we lie; we judge; we manipulate; we make up stories and try to keep up a facade of a picture perfect life.
We are almost always geared to explore away from the womb and the return to the womb for a feeling of creative wholeness again which is your realised creative self, so the self that was masked, the unmasking, and then the being without the mask. Mask gone, original experienced self returns home! Hooray.
Well, it’s really not as simple as that though is it?
BUT, the good news while we wade through our make up, is that we hold the power as caregivers and parents to retain as much of that original sense of self in our children. And that comes from being a parent by nurturing your own original sense of wonder joy and child self.
Make a play date with your child as a child and not as a parent sometimes. Play a little. Paint the walls with your child, break your own rules, have some fun, do something outrageous for the sake of it obviously something safe! And maybe change your hair colour to pink blue yellow anything. Obviously you know I am not suggesting that this is the only way but eking it out of you to find your own sense of joy. Take that rigidity out of how things should be.
Take the “should” out to the rubbish bin. And no, please don’t go out there in your pyjamas to get it when all are asleep after a fun filled day because erghhh the cleanup was just too big a price to pay!
And on that note I need to get the sand out today so bubba and I can sit in it and make what we want with it.
Sending you so much fairy dust.