A Less Conscious Life

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Everything with no exception is a choice. The choice can be either conscious or unconscious depending on the level of self-awareness. The more self-aware we become, the faster we can make our unconscious choices known to us.” – Raphael Zernoff

I’ve been living less and less consciously as the days go by and I am quite frustrated with myself. Not only because I truly want to live a more conscious life, but because I feel like a fraud. How can I write about living consciously, when I spend so much time in my own head, when I haven’t committed to a regular meditation routine, when I continually react, rather than respond; when I hear myself, over and over, parenting on auto-pilot, doing things I said I do not want to do again. I’ve been running on empty, spending my days taking care of everyone else, running from home to school, from school to home, feeling pulled in three different directions at once and never able to satisfy anyone.

I’m sure at lot of this sounds familiar to parents out there or others with over-committed lives. I’m exhausted, frustrated and disappointed in myself. I need a new plan. I hear my mother laughing in my head because all my life has been a serious of plans: plans dreamed up, plans written down, plans followed, plans dropped, plans made anew. But here I am again, needing a new plan. Because I really want this to work. I really want to live a more conscious life. I want to be more present, more joyful, more alive.

But it isn’t easy.

Sleepwalking through life is easy. Reacting is easy. Lashing out when you are tired, overwhelmed and angry is easy. Living consciously is not easy.

But I need to do it for my children, for my partner, for my family, for myself.

So here is my plan:

1. Start journalling again to bring more consciousness and reflection to my days.

2. Make a list of reminders of how to live more consciously and put it in a prominent place.

3. Put my to-do list in a place I can check it regularly to keep from feeling overwhelmed.

4. Come up with a thoughtful way to handle the afternoons at home with the kids so everyone’s needs are met.

5. Make a schedule to get regular exercise and stick to it.

6. Put my Conscious Parenting Notebook somewhere I will refer to it daily.

And now to forgive myself for my transgressions, pick myself up off the floor and allow myself a new beginning. Because after all, that is what living a more conscious life is all about. Every moment is a new beginning. Every moment is another choice.

Every moment is another opportunity to be present,

to be grateful,

to be forgiving,

to be joyful,

to be loving,

to be alive.

Thanks for reading! (And listening!)

What about you? Have you had less than conscious periods in your life? What did you do to get back on track? I’d love to hear what has worked for you!

Sharon, Author, The Conscious Parenting Notebook

Conscious Parenting PEACE WEEK – Reasons, Rules and Reflections

 

 

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” ― Albert Einstein

The word retreat may bring to mind visions of peaceful solitude in a mountaintop meditation center or yogis practicing by the sea and sipping tea in a perfectly manicured garden. However, as Jon Kabat Zen writes in Everyday Blessings, The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, “from the perspective of mindfulness, parenting can be viewed as a kind of extended and, at times, arduous meditation retreat spanning a large part of our lives. And our children, from infancy to adulthood and beyond, can be seen as perpetually challenging live-in teachers, who provide us with ceaseless opportunities to do the inner work of understanding who we are and who they are, so that we can best stay in touch with what is truly important and give them what they most need in order to grow and flourish.” While seeing all of our parenting years as a “retreat” may be a bit difficult, taking one week to work at being more conscious is more manageable and can be a great way to really focus your efforts in the area of conscious parenting. 

REASONS

Unlike people with unwavering self-control, I tend to need external motivation or accountability to follow through with most things I set out to accomplish – hence the need for this blog 🙂 My PEACE WEEK retreat idea is in that same vein. I try to be more conscious in my parenting on a regular basis, but so easily, it seems, I fall back into unhelpful patterns of behavior that lead to more struggle and less joy in my parenting and my relationship with my daughter. Sometimes a break or a mental check-in helps to get me back on track, but when I’ve fallen back into a long stretch of unconscious parenting, I need more than a gentle reminder to dig myself out. And typically it is when I find myself exasperated at my daughter’s rapidly de-escalating behaviors that I realize that it might be time for some recalibration. I usually make a note of the challenges we are facing and try to come up with alternative ways of addressing them. PEACE WEEK allows me to set a personal commitment, for one week, to really focus on my parenting in those moments and make changes where things aren’t working. Whatever structure, time period and guidelines motivate you to stick to a plan, should be those that you use in your individual PEACE WEEK (or ZEN WEEK, HAPPY WEEK, MINDFUL WEEK, etc.), should you chose to try one.

RULES or GUIDELINES

Once I have committed to another PEACE WEEK, I create a set of guidelines, that aren’t meant to be a cause for upset if they are “broken,” but rather to act as reminders of the things you want to do to help yourself be a more conscious parent.  

My PEACE WEEK rules this time around are similar to those from my previous PEACE WEEK:

1. No Screen Time When Children are Present.
2. Practice Pausing and Noticing My State of Mind Throughout the Day
3. Limited Speech (Three Breaths before “Reacting”)
4. Morning and Evening Self-Care (Morning Yoga / Evening Tea and Meditation)
5. Quality Time with Each Child Each Day

This time, I also wanted to work to model our HUGS (not Hurts) approach to rising frustration, which I’ve been talking about and using with my daughter for a few weeks now, but haven’t been modelling it myself. Whenever my daughter starts to get frustrated or angry with her brother, I ask her “HUGS or Hurts?” and give her our four options for dealing with frustration (HUGS – H: ask for Help, U: Use your words, G: Go take a break, or S: Stop and breathe). 

Additionally, I wanted to try to more consistently use other conscious parenting techniques, such as using mantras, acknowledging positive behaviors, giving options, etc.) It is so easy to fall back to less conscious parenting methods unless we’re, well, conscious, and I’ve been conscious lately of my tendency to use a lot of threats or two unappealing choices to “motivate” her to do what I ask her to do. 

And finally, I wanted to try to use the same words when addressing similar behaviors to help ingrain them into her memory. When you repeat the same message over and over, in the same way, it has more of a chance of sticking with them, than if you alter your words every time.

Ultimately, like a fast or genuine retreat, I just wanted a set timeline and self imposed structure in which to hold myself accountable to the conscious parenting practices I seem to have lost somewhere in the Atlantic on the way to South East Asia.

REFLECTIONS

Probably the most important part of PEACE WEEK is your reflections, whether you jot them down throughout the day, or take time in the evenings to think through your interactions with your children, both positive and not-so-positive and allow yourself the time and space for creative problem solving, “aha!” moments, or mental pats on the back when something you tried worked well. 

I was going to share my personal reflections on my current peace week here, but ultimately, I want this blog to be helpful to others and my detailed reflections only represent the current situation in my unique family and are most likely not very interesting or helpful to anyone else, so I decided to spare my readers. However, if you have any questions or comments to share, I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks for reading!

What about you? Do you think you might benefit from a personal parenting retreat? If you try one, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Sharon, Author, The Conscious Parenting Notebook