Unconditional Love

Being a parent is like guessing what is behind door number two..You get what you get and you make the most of it by loving and caring and taking care of your precious bundle.
The closer you come to unconditional love the easier it becomes to make it through the moments, the days, weeks, months and years of raising your family. You see, unconditional love means exactly that—you love your child no matter what: no matter who he is, no matter who he is not; no matter what he does, no matter what he fails to do; no matter what he says, no matter what he fails to say and so on.
There is no loving him when he fulfills your picture of how he should be and withdrawing that love to any degree when he is different from your expectations. Accepting your child exactly as he is at all times—that is the only unconditional love there is.

Who Parents The Parent

The whole concept of becoming a parent is so exciting and also pretty darned scary whether or not you have taken care of children before. When you are the parent you are the responsible person, the one who makes the choices that affect your young child’s total well being.
I know when my children were born no “How To Parent” manual accompanied them into this world. There was my son and there were the rectangular diapers and diaper pins. I could not figure out how to make that darned rectangle into the triangular shape I had seen on TV. Fortunately his Dad figured out something that worked until we were shown why rectangular diapers work so well when you know how to fold them! Well and also why they are so good at protecting you from that little boy’s uncontrolled spray! Hey, why doesn’t someone tell you that can happen?
While I am at it, how come no one ever tells you that gum ridge hurts like heck when that new baby latches on to nurse? Oh my goodness, there is so much to a being parent beyond the coos and smiles and cuddling. No one tells you about all that stuff—about staying up most of the night and day too, about never eating any hot food until your nursing child weans himself, about forgetting about sleeping until your kid leaves home ( slight exaggeration). Well, what I recall is the good times of being a young parent. In fact I believe Nature makes it so we only remember the good things and good times. Heck, if we recalled all the pain of the traumatic moments why in the world would we go through it a second time, or a third or fourth or however many times?

Your Focus...Your World

A key player in the brain is the Reticular Activating System (RAS). Our environment is filled with stimuli. Four billion of bits of information (Learn more details in the video What The Bleep Do We Know.) fly by us each minute. The RAS allows us to screen out all that is not important to us and to focus just on what we care about. The RAS lets us switch back and forth between our phone conversation and the conversation in the room, for example. Your RAS will continually draw your attention to whatever you think about. When my daughter was auditioning for conservatories as a dancer she suffered an excruciatingly painful back injury. Suddenly every place I looked I found books, articles, furniture, information and products for natural back care. All that information was always there but since I had no need for it I never saw it. Since I was thinking about her back my RAS zeroed in on all information relevant to back care.
Okay... so the RAS zeros in on what we think about, what is important to us. Here is an interesting statistic: 90% of self talk is negative. (Internationally known trainer Chet Holmes notes that number on his DVD The Power Of Goals And How The Brain Works) The RAS hones in on what is not working, what is wrong, what is missing—everything that is bad gets noticed!
What do you think happens when you worry? A bugle call sounds to awaken the RAS to your worry! So you worry even more. The brain says , ”Oh. Attention is going here. It must be important. Let’s focus on it and find all the evidence in the environment to prove it.” In that moment awful scenarios build in your mind and they get worse with each passing minute! Now you really have something to worry about!
What is your child thinking about most of the time? Is he thinking he is not good enough? not smart enough? tall enough? thin enough? strong enough? cute enough? popular enough?
So long as my daughter focused on the pain of her back injury it got worse. In fact it got so bad there were times she could barely move and she usually cried herself to sleep. Then she learned about how her mind was running her life with that pain. She told me she could not get better as long as she was going for physical therapy and focusing on the pain. She asked if we could cancel her physical therapy appointments. And so we did. And my daughter went on to a great conservatory and even to the Broadway stage singing AND DANCING! That accomplishment, after her doctor had said she needed to find another career because she could not be a dancer after that injury! Thank goodness she did not buy into the paradigm of that doctor.
The RAS serves us in many ways. The other day I was in New York City’s Penn station. My bus had not come and I was deciding whether to wait for another one or take a train. Have you ever been in Penn Station in NYC on a Saturday afternoon in the summer? It was mobbed. I have no idea how many thousands of people and noises filled the space. I was wandering around looking for the information booth when suddenly I heard “Culpeper” over the PA sytem. There is only one train a day to my small town and here it was being announced as I was walking through the place! Without the RAS I would have missed it as I didn’t hear the names of the other stops on the line. Powerful system, yes?
What does the RAS of your child focus on? What do you notice in your busy environment? Notice any overlap? There are no coincidences.

Earth Is One Big School

I believe Earth is one big school for learning life lessons. When we live that truth we see the magnificent gifts constantly being showered upon us in our daily lives. When we look for the good in each moment we see it. Even in the darkest times, when the last thing we want to do is find something to be grateful for, that Light shines. We choose to see it or we choose to wear blinders. Everything in life is a choice. Some choices are more difficult to make then others. Lessons come in surprising forms. Those deemed to be the most painful usually turn out to be the most powerful life-altering successes.