As a mother, what I say every day—and how it reflects on my son as he listens— keeps me reflecting on awareness.
This is what I’ve learned:
How I say no, he learns to say no. How I say yes, he learns to say yes. How I say I love you, he learns to say I love you. How I say please, he learns to say please. And how I say thank you, he learns to say thank you.
So I teach him to pay attention to his breath, and observe his sensations without attaching his "I" to them.
Allow me to elaborate. When I say “how,” I mean “how I feel when I say every word.” This means, if when I say “I love you,” I feel joy, joy is the vibration he tunes into. If when I say “no” I am upset, he learns to feel upset when he hears the word no, instead of understanding why I am saying no. When I say “yes,” because I feel overwhelmed, he learns to connect that emotion of exhaustion with the possibility of me saying yes—so perhaps if he exhausts me, I will say yes, when what I want to say is “not now", calmly and be heard.
Confusing? Not if you have children. One of the first things that parents pay attention to and learn is that children pay attention not to what we say, but to who we are.
A meditation arises from this truth.
It begs the question: How can we freely express every emotion with awareness? Why is that the awareness part is so important? Are children that aware of us? How can we freely express every emotion?
When we feel mad, when we feel sad, when we feel afraid or confused—which are all human emotions—and children are around, we have been taught to “pretend” carefully as to not affect our children negatively with adult drama. This makes sense; children, after all, have pure minds. But what happens with our vibrations? We now know that the heart beat syncs with other hearts that are in a close range. We also know that cellular activity functions with light, and that DNA communicates through electromagnetism. Science in the new millennium continues to explain what masters from different traditions and cultures recorded through their studies, that we are subatomic particles behaving like such, and vibrating as waves of sound. Appearing and disappearing, charged with positive and negative energy.
So what happens when we feel mad, and our energy is overly charged with negative energy, and suddenly our son asks us: are you okay? Think about it. Do you take a deep breath as you respond: "I am okay, darling." Or do you burst into anger, as you say: "I am okay, darling!" You see? The emotion is still —you are mad. The words are the same, but they are saying the opposite of what you feel. If we feel mad, we are not OK. And then there is the fact of how we say it.
Awareness is to understand what your child is learning from these mixed elements. Will your child learn that being mad is being okay? Will he learn that being okay is when you are angry? Will he learn that you don’t really tell him how you feel?
Every parent has a personal intuition that develops through the journey of parenting. Nobody can teach us how to parent best. But we can teach each other to listen to the teacher within, to cultivate awareness and exercise equanimity, as we pay attention to our breath, and observe our sensations in the body, without attaching our sense of "I" to the experience, moment by moment.
As this is the yogi path, we can safely say that eventually all emotions arise, and they also pass away, as a natural law.
This meditation benefits us perhaps in understanding how to honor how we feel and be honest about it, without reaction, in equanimity and awareness of doing no harm, as we go about the world feeling our feelings. Would you agree that a technique that can bring peace and real happiness—and liberate us from our suffering—is, indeed, what all parents wish for their children to learn?
There is a teaching. It is called Vipassana.
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