Soul Work With Your Kids

As a higher consciousness parent, you inevitably will be teaching inclusively loving values to your kids. But you may be wondering more specifically what you can do as a parent to help your children be the love that they naturally are, while also figuring out discipline and the confusing range of issues you have to deal with as a parent. Here are some of my thoughts, speaking as a therapist who has worked (and made mistakes) with so many of these children, but also juveniles and kids in social services, on what to consider as you move forward as a parent.

1. Use your power as a role model – As you “be the love that you are”, your kids will watch what you do to nurture your inner essence, how you deal with the crises that arise, how you cope as a higher consciousness soul in your daily life, how you hold steadfast to your mission of doing your own soul work, which is love, and how you find balance with it all.
2. Perfection is impossible and unnecessary – Stop trying to be perfect. It will give your children permission to not strive for perfection, which is humanly impossible. That doesn’t mean you (and they) don’t persist in your soul work, getting back up each time you are knocked down. It does mean you give up wasting unnecessary energy that festers into a boil of neuroticism and backfires your whole system into a breakdown. Besides, think of it this way, your kids will learn something, no matter what. When what you are modeling to them works, they learn that. When it doesn’t, they get to learn what didn’t work for you, but most importantly, how you kept going and persisting in your aspirations, and how you coped with the disappointments, sense of failure, sadness or depression, worries and anxieties. And such skills are among the most important independent living skills they need in order to be healthy adults. When you cope in a healthy way, you teach them that. Then they don’t need to go to a therapist to learn that later.
3. Be patient – As they grow older, most likely they too will forget the love that they are. They too will look to other role models for what to “like” or “not like”, for what is popular and avoids rejection. This is simply part of their learning and process of awakening. What you can do to help, is to be patient with them and let them go through this. Don’t rescue them from the needed lessons and natural consequences of the world.
4. Know the difference between rescuing and helping – Rescuing is when you do for them what they need to do for themselves to grow. Helping is discerning what they need from you to support them in this process of evolving. Hint: they usually will ask for what they need, before you have to ply it out of them.
5. Make discipline about teaching – Don’t fight negative power with a surge of your own power; it amplifies. When they are most out-of-control with their own emotions, their frontal cortex is shut down and they can’t reason. Speak calmly so that their energy can resonate with your calm and be brought down in volume and intensity. When they have calmed down, then their brain is back on line (as it can be when they are children whose brains are not really developed until their 20s). The most effective discipline teaches a lesson, and feels like you care about their long-term well-being. When you speak to them, be firm and fair. Be consistent, following through with the warned consequence. Make consequences not about punishment, but about lessons, and similar to the natural consequences they may learn in life, within reason. Consider that consequences need to be developmentally appropriate to your child’s age, intelligence, and spiritual place. Some of your children may be like most children, and forget their soul essence by about the age of 7 to 9 (but that is usually, not always, because their soul essence was not nurtured). Such children will feel fear and its entire range of uncomfortable emotions as a result; they will test you, challenge the limits you have set, and feel more difficult for you to parent. They are in ego, and lessons for them need to be about ego development. Teach them positive power, since they are not feeling the natural power of their soul energy.
   Other of your children may feel easy to “control”. These may be the ones who have not forgotten their soul energy. They will inherently try hard to please you, to help soothe you, even to heal you with their natural healing energy. The lessons they need to learn are different from typical children, and are more related to learning how to cope with their energetic and emotional  sensitivities, how to not lose their soul self through imbalanced pleasing styles, and how to deal with mean people in loving and effective ways. The mistakes they make, that will require discipline, are often more about following others down a negative path out of the initial impulse to please that person, or because they have experienced hitting or slapping or bullying, and then try to use that, in turn, on others out of a sense of desperation for safety.
6. Listen to them – Listen to what they ask and how they ask, so that you will be in tune with the developmental (ego and spiritual) place of each of your children. Use your empathy, your ability to register their hidden emotions, to know how they feel. Intuit what they need but which they can’t put into words, and ask them if it is correct perception. Don’t assume to relate to them, because there are many different waves of souls coming in all of the time. Discover what wave they are in. See them for the unique souls that they are, and know that they are here for their own soul purpose, not yours.
7. Teach them to follow their higher heart – As they develop, it is healthy for them to learn the power of their own physical skills and abilities. To learn how to read the music of their own  emotions. To think their own thoughts, and to notice which lines of thought inspire them the most. Physical body, emotions, and mind are to work in balance. Then, as a higher consciousness parent, your job will be to teach them how to go beyond this ego essence and personality and hear the higher heart of steadfast love. Support them in being the love that they are at their core, and in following the unknown path of the heart that this puts them on. Remind them that the role of thought is to be in service of their higher calling heart, that the subtle voice within the heart is to be considered the CEO and mind is to be like the executive assistant.
8. Make them feel seen – As they follow the calling of their heart, be the first to see them. REALLY see them. Recognize their dreams and aspirations with a smile and a thumbs up. Encourage them to talk about how they might go about fulfilling these dreams. Ask if they are open to your suggestions, and if so, talk to them about some of the pitfalls they may be already having and ways they may not have thought about for hurdling them. Then let them be the one who follows through. Let them stumble and make mistakes. Let them find their own way of getting out of holes they have dug. Let them enjoy their successes.
9. Don’t smother the fire of their higher heart – There is much written on “helicopter parenting”. Don’t do their tasks for them. Doing so robs them of the lessons they need to learn while they are young, so that by the time they enter adulthood, they feel proficient, competent, and confident. This is the way to self-mastery. Don’t take it away from them or they will resent you for it  throughout their life. Check in on your own hidden motivations, and seek help if this is an issue for you. Gaining a sense of life success through your children’s successes is a selfish love. It is for you, not for them. I can’t count the number of clients who entered therapy with a sense of incompetence, poor self-esteem, lack of self-confidence, clinical anxieties and the like, due to parents who, in one way or another, weren’t able to teach them how to try, practice, see what works or doesn’t, try again, and persist until they realize the goal. This reminds me of a recent news post, where a high school was advertising for mentors to help teens complete their college applications. Both high schools and parents have failed these kids, if they don’t even feel skilled enough by their senior year to submit original essays, and compete through a determination to communicate who they are and how they are different, and win acceptance to a college of their choosing. On their own.
10. Be judicious with medications – Many higher consciousness children are born strongly sensitive to energies. It is because of this that they exhibit symptoms of withdrawal, even pain, at over stimulation. They can be more sensitive to impure foods and all substances, including medications by the way, so amounts may need more attentive monitoring. They are in tune with higher creative energies, and get bored more easily; they are frequently diagnosed as ADHD and given medication to cope, which doesn’t teach them what they really need to learn…which is how to honor their creative mind, and how to cope skillfully with internal psycho-spiritual tools during times when they feel like they have to put up with boring material at school and with subjects that are not aligned with their soul energies. More recent waves of such children are wired from birth in such a way that they can’t do what is not aligned with their soul energy.
11. Be a role model – Where you started, is where you go back to again and again. Your highest job is to do your own soul work, so that your kids will see you and be inspired to do their own. Parenting may be a beautiful way to learn many of the lessons you may need to learn, but it is never the intention of the universe that it be the end of your soul work. Remember, in soul work, you are creating for the good of us all. Not just your own family.

If you need help in this, I am here for you. But seek support somewhere, know that it will teach your children that it is simply part of the process of life to ask and receive assistance when stuck.

~Valerie