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’s A Call to Conscious Parenting is 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 Parenting is a manual for giving our children the opportunity to shine and dazzle with their natural state of being.
When you parent, it’s crucial you realize you aren’t raising a “mini me,” but a spirit throbbing with its own signature. For this reason, it’s important to separate who you are from who each of your children is. Children aren’t ours to possess or own in any way. When we know this in the depths of our soul, we tailor our raising of them to their needs, rather than molding them to fit our needs.
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