Journey to a New Life

I was asked a question in relation to my previous blog, specifically in relation to this part:

“Children are not supposed to be possessions, they are gifts. They are gifts with an immense amount of responsibility attached to them.”

The question was: How does a child ‘being a gift’ and ‘being a parents’ creation’ fit together?

These two points are seemingly at odds with each other; because if a child is a given then the role as parent is limited, but if the child is a creation then the role of the parent is grand.

Yet, these two points need not be at odds with each other, when they refer to different dimensions/aspects of what is involved in caring and raising a child.

So let’s expand on each dimension in isolation first, and then bring them together:

A Child is a Gift

In my previous blog I wrote:

“The child is a person on his own. He or she is a life-form, which came through you, but is not owned by you. Every child has his or her own unique expression, and that expression will differ from your own and other members of the family. Your child as a life-form happened to have come through within your family-setting, but could have sprouted up anywhere else just the same.”

Within having a child, you are the receiver of life, the receiver of life in the form of a child / another human being. The life that is here as your child is not something you created, this life/life-force was already here – but is now taking on a different form. So when you are pregnant and have a child, yes your body creates another body and bring together and creates from itself all the substances/material to make another individual body possible, as the form in which this life will manifest itself. But even here, ‘you’ as that part of yourself that you are aware of; is not involved in its creation – your body did all the work and ‘you’ as that of yourself which you are aware of was simply a bystander in the whole process and did not contribute anything (for more on this, see Day 26: How are Babies Created?).

So within that, your child as life is a ‘gift’ given to you, a piece of life being shared with you for a moment (in the scope of the enternity of life) , for you to have the opportunity be a custodian of another form of life other than yourself. But your child as life is part of the totality of life that is here, it was not 'created' by you.

A Child is a Creation

A child is not only life, it is also a person. Part of being a person, is having been born with a clean slate (if we leave out the unconscious and DNA programming) that is ready to be written on, ready to be instructed. Through the inputs parents provide to their children, an equal and one output is created as the character of the child. This input consists of in-form-ation; which forms and shapes the child. From that perspective, the child is a creation – because its personhood is dependent on what instruction it receives from its environment. And this personhood, is an intrinsic part of being a human being, and will determine the child's relationship with and towards life, and thus towards him/herself.


So when we bring the two points together, we see that a child is a gift in the child being life – and the child is a creation in being a form – and so your child is a = life-form.

The two points do not need to exclude one another as they refer to two different dimensions/aspects of a singular manifestation.

In my previous blog I explained how a parent’s responsibility starts with self first.

This seems paradoxical, how can my responsibility towards my child start with a responsibility towards myself?

I came across a piece of Osho writing which I find pertinent to this point:

“Nobody has been exploited so much as children -- neither the proletariat nor women, nobody has been exploited so much and so deeply and so destructively as the innocent children. Because they are helpless and dependent they have to learn whatsoever you teach them. They have to imbibe all the falsehoods that you go on forcing upon them. It is a question of survival for them -- they cannot survive without you. It is a question of life and death! They have to be Christians, Hindus, they have to be Mohammedans, they have to be Jainas, they have to be Buddhists, they have to be communists. Whatsoever you are interested in putting into their minds, you go on putting it in. Instead of making them more alert, more aware, more alive, more reflective, instead of making them more mirrorlike, pure, you make them full of ideas...layers and layers of dust. And then it becomes impossible for them to see that which is. They start seeing that which is not and they stop seeing that which is.“

We cannot know, see or assess what is best for a child, if we are coming from a box of ideas. These ideas come from memories of our life, based on experiences we’ve collected. When we want to direct or guide a child, we can only do so from within the limited bounds of the box – as if the ideas in the box are the only options available, and whether they are actually best or not for the child becomes irrelevant – what is relevant is that the ideas and opinions we’ve gathered through life are put to good use.

This is obviously not the best way to go about raising a child.


Why?

Here we come to the dimension of responsibility towards your child that is not directly related to you and where it comes to being all about the child. The child is a person on his own. He or she is a life-form, which came through you, but is not owned by you. Every child has his or her own unique expression, and that expression will differ from your own and other members of the family. Your child as a life-form happened to have come through within your family-setting, but could have sprouted up anywhere else just the same. There should be no entitlement involved in raising children; where you believe you have the right to raise your child ‘this and that way’ because ‘he/she is MY child and I can do with MY children whatever I want’. Children are not supposed to be possessions, they are gifts. They are gifts with an immense amount of responsibility attached to them. Because here we have a life-form, that like Osho says – is completely helpless and dependent – and here we have you, the parent, as an able-bodied individual – that can stand in as a point of support where the child cannot for itself. And everything you do, everything you say will impact the child. Better still, the child counts on it that you know what you’re doing, and that you’re looking after its best interest. It gives you its trust completely.

Most of us have our own experiences with our parents where we are less than happy with the way they treated us, with ways in which they imposed their ideas, their way of doing things, their opinions and their values. Some we rejected forcefully, others we are not even aware we are living. We’ve all seen and realised the extent to which our own parents influenced us and influenced our life’s path. Some we are grateful for, others we’d like to erase from our minds.

So: Who Am I in relationship to my Child? – is that of Self-Support to ensure that one is working on breaking down the walls of self-limitation to open up the way to self’s utmost potential.
Who Is My Child in relationship to Me? – is that of a life-form here to express itself, to develop itself and grow into its utmost potential.

Which then brings us back to the role of the Parent, where Who I Am in relationship to my Child is that of support, direction and guidance – as self has walked and is busy walking the path to utmost potential and is aware of the stumbling blocks, the temptations, the falls, the consequences and what it takes to correct ones misalignments.

Within this, an interesting thing takes place, because as you commit yourself to the development of another to its utmost potential, new dimensions and aspects of yourself and your own self-expression open, where the limits of your potential will shift in the most surprising moments and ways.

So realising that having and raising a child within this principle, the principle of Life, is a task of utmost responsibility – it is best to develop and work on one’s own potential as much as one is able to before taking on this task; as it will make it easier to develop your child’s potential rather than its limitation.

Currently when we look at family and having children, we go by sheer ‘feeling’ to decide when we want to have children. We get a feeling that we want a baby, we get oozie at the idea of having a family, pictures and imaginations start popping in our heads, they seem so nice – and then one day you say the words: I want to have a baby! If you’re lucky, the adults looking at starting a family will first consider their financial stability before entertaining the reality of having a family – but many will allow the feeling and desire for a family/baby to overpower common sense practicality and bring into this world a child that is necessarily compromised.

Raising a child being the responsibility of holding Life in your hand, to grow it, to develop op it without rigidly moulding it, without breaking it – is a massive task in itself. To lay this responsibility unto yourself whilst not being in a financially stable position makes it that much more massive, if not impossible. It is easy to get carried away by feelings, pictures and imaginations of what it would be like to have a child. But realise that there, you are looking at your own ambitions, your own interest of how you want things to be – and are not actually taking into consideration the life of the future child, who will suffer the consequences.

I really want to stress this point because, parenting is the most important job in the world and it’s an all-or-nothing situation. Once you are a parent, that’s is: no take backs – and it’s a responsibility you will have to live with for the rest of your life. It can be fun and rewarding and it can also send you straight down to hell – if you have the choice, prepare yourself in the best way you can to make sure that you are up to the task.

So really, a parent’s responsibility towards the child doesn’t start with self, but starts with self before there is even an actual child.

To be continued

Parenting, children, family – why do we do it? What is the point?

This is a question I’ve walked – though not per se explicitly – within my Motherhood Paranoia blog series.
Through walking, investigating and examining my own mind-set within the context of being a parent/mother – the starting point that currently prevails in our world is: survival. Where, each one of us basically thinks that ‘we know best’ and within this belief, think we are entitled to ensure the continued existence of this ‘know-how’ by passing it on to our children who will in turn pass it on to theirs. To what point? This is not really clear – since if we keep going down the road we are heading, we are on to road to global annihilation. So while the final destination’s not really clear, there’s a clear sense in each one of us that ‘we must just keep on going’ – maybe just to ensure that someone of our lineage would be present at the end of the race as the end of our race.

But – that’s not really a worthwhile scheme to invest your time and energy in, but that’s just my perspective.

So, what is?

Well, if I look at the type of world I would like to live in, the type of world I wished I would have grown up in – it is one of exploring and testing out the limits of my potential; in other words, pursuing and realising my utmost potential – being and living the best possible version of myself that I can be.

And this is exactly what Parenting should be about.

One little problem though, is that our world hasn’t been set up to allow us to explore and realise our utmost potential. So even though we would like this for our children, the reality of the situation is that within our own limitation – our ‘guiding hand’ is more likely to control them and condition them to grow within the bounds of our own limitations, rather than our hand being a guiding force for the child to explore its own self-expression and utmost potential. Whether we like it or not, who we are and how we live impacts our children.
We all want things to be ‘better for our children’, compared to ‘how things were for us’ – but the truth of the matter is that we can’t just ‘want’ things to be different; we have to actually be and live differently, to manifest the opportunity for our children to live things differently. Often, people want things to be different for their children, and will spend a lot of time, money and energy in ‘getting the best’ for their children; but will do so within already having given up on themselves. Where “it’s already too late for me, but my child may still have a chance!” Yet, within that very act of self-defeat – you are sending the exact opposite message to your child. Not one of utmost potential, but one of ‘settling’ and ‘accepting that you are all that you can be’.

If you believe you can fix yourself through having a child, or believe a child will make things better for you – think again; because everything you are unhappy about with yourself, everything that bothers you about yourself/your life that you do not direct or bring to correction – will only blow up in your face a hundred times over – screaming for attention.

The bottom-line is – that parenting starts with the parent first. Whatever you want for your child, you have to live first. This adds a whole new dimension to parenting, and this a dimension of utmost responsibility. Your responsibility towards your child, starts with your responsibility towards yourself first. Unless you are actively engaged in fostering and developing your own utmost potential, there is only limitation ahead in the child’s future.

To be continued…

In this blog I want to share a little ‘method’ I’ve been applying with Cesar which has been working out nicely.

I have to move around a lot during the day, going from room to room, going to different place – and everywhere I go: Cesar comes with me. Whenever we are in a space, Cesar will find something that he wants to explore or play with. When I am done with whatever I had to do in a particular space and have to move on to the next point – Cesar is usually ‘not done’ in that he is still busy exploring or playing with something.

At first, I would see that he is obviously enjoying himself or being intrigued by whatever new object he got his hands on – but within having to go, and only considering my schedule and ‘what I need to do next’; I would pick him up and remove him from what he was busy with or place back what he took and then pick him up – where he very often would let out a shriek of discontent; but where I figured that ‘he needs to just get over this’ as we can’t always do ‘what he wants to do’ and so would cringe a bit inside myself but move on to the next thing.

This pattern started happening more and more and I wasn’t satisfied with my own inner-experience as these scenarios would play out. The cringing-experience inside myself, to me indicated that somewhere I am compromising and missing a point – because if I were confident in my actions, then there would be no experience, as what I would be doing would simply be: common sense. But this cringing-experience kept coming up each time I would remove him and we’d move on, so I decided to slow down and zoom-in to what goes on in these play-outs.

So the one day, as I was in the bathroom with him and he found himself an empty shampoo bottle to play with – I was looking at what I was about to do, as picking him up and going back to our room and how it usually plays out. As I played it out for myself within myself, I saw that I was only ever taking my perspective into account, where I was only worried and concerned about ‘getting to everything’. I realised, that I had completely forgotten about Cesar and how he ‘fills up’ his day. I only ever looked at how my timeline was playing out and not looking at his!
There was this idea that, I, the grown up has specific plans, with a specific purpose and specific reasoning about these plans – where I saw Cesar, the baby, as kind of just being random in that there’s no particular direction or structure in his day, and so he can just ‘tag along’ because you know, he’s just kind of like ‘whatever’.

So what I saw then and there is that, even though he doesn’t have an organized way of going about his day or giving himself an overall structured direction – he does give himself direction in every moment, in his own way. Sure, his trip to the bathroom wasn’t planned and only occurred because I had to take a potty break – but him reaching for the empty shampoo bottle: that was a specific decision. Him touching, moving, throwing – interacting with the empty shampoo bottle in various ways: this was him directing himself, this was him being involved with something. And if I am stuck in my world where I am going ‘okay, done with this lets go on to the next thing’ and simply pick him up while he is participating with an object in this manner, then I am in fact interrupting his ‘purposed-plan’ as what he decided to do now and interact with.

So even though I have my world where certain things need to be done, Cesar also has his own world where he is doing things – it’s just not as apparent since it doesn’t conform to ‘adult logic’ but relates his experience and whatever way he in that moment/stage is exploring the world and developing his relationship with his environment and himself.

So in that moment where he is playing with the empty shampoo bottle, he is just as ‘purpose-driven’ as I am in wanting to get to the next room to get on to the next thing – just in a different form. I know I don’t like to suddenly be interrupted and ripped away from something I was giving my attention to and sharing my moment with, so why should I treat Cesar as such?

If I was busy reading a book and someone would just take it away all of a sudden – I’d also be like ‘Oi!! I was busy with that!!!’ So, that’s what Cesar’s doing when he is playing or exploring something. He goes totally into it, and for that moment, the only thing that exists is him and the object he is exploring/playing with.

So when I realised that I was actually being quite rude to interrupt him just like that and expect him to be okay with just ‘tagging along’ and expecting him to be able to ‘immediately let go’ of whatever he was doing – I changed my approach. Sometimes, if time allows it, we will stay a bit longer and I will let him play a bit longer with what he is doing or join in. Then, when it is time to go – I will tell him, and I also announce to him now every time that I am ‘going to pick you up now!’. Then, as I let him know, I will place my hands around his waist – but instead of then immediately picking him up – I will just leave my hands there for a moment and count to three inside myself or out loud. So that, when I announce to him what’s going to happen next, he knows there’s about to be a change, and then the moment I am placing my hands on his waists and leaving them for a moment: he has time to internally let go of what he is doing. Then when I pick him up, he has been able to process the change through space and time, instead of in one second being ‘ripped away’ from what he was doing.

I’ve found making this one adjustment in how I interact with him making a big difference in his demeanour, where before he was more frustrated and on edge and now is more flexible and easy going; which makes sense because he is now being considered, and in me slowing down and taking his experience and how he takes things in into account: our relationship is more balanced since I am treating him the way I’d like to be treated, and within that treating him as an equal instead of me role-playing as “adult” and treating him as a “baby”.

So this one point of in essence, ‘stretching things out’ where instead of just picking the baby up and going, where it is now divided and spread out into announcing, giving a moment, and then moving + making it a habit to not only look at my timeline but to basically in every moment that you’re with your child see things from yours and his perspective = adds up to a much better relationship between parent and child.

An EQAFE interview which gives perspective into this and other points is: Understanding Your Baby Within Sharing - Perfecting the Human Race - Parenting – Part 47