Holistic Parenting

One of the most valuable parts of going through the HuMethod Life Coaching Training and Certification process was becoming a student myself and experiencing all the powerful lessons and exercises firsthand. As a parent to two kids, the parenting section was one of my absolute favorites. Whether we are parenting our children or learning how to parent our own wounded inner children, or both, the information and exercises on Parenting Mastery are invaluable.

Children mirror their parents’ actions, not necessarily the wise words that we share with them. As we become the masters of ourselves, our children will naturally mirror and imitate those holistic actions and become emotionally, mentally, and spiritually strong adults.

Children Are Mirrors

I’d rather watch a winner than hear one anyway,

So please my loving parents, let your life show me the way

Because I am but a mirror of how you live today.

I might misunderstand you and the high advice you give,

But there is no misunderstanding how you act and how you live.

So my loving parents I can only mirror what you actively live.

- Dennis Waitley

It can be a heavy thought, that our children will copy what we do and not do what we say. Most of us didn’t grow up with parents living a self-mastered life and setting a holistic example of how to be in the world, how to responsibly communicate their feelings, or how to meet their own basic physical and emotional needs. As you do the life coaching sessions and learn how to do these things for yourself, the greatest gift is that you are then able to set a healthy example for your children, and you will have the tools to guide them in meeting their own basic needs as they grow into adulthood.

In the Holistic Parenting Mastery work that we will do together, you will learn that there are:

Three Primary Phases of Holistic Parenting Mastery:

- The Nurturing Phase (Birth to Age 4) – Period of time during which you fortify your children’s self-esteem and self-image by bonding with them so that they will feel safe, sane and secure in the world.

- The Teaching Phase (Age 4 to 12) – Period of time during which you teach your children how to live a holistically balanced life through instruction and positive modeling.

- Self-Parenting and Detachment Phase (Age 12 to adulthood) – Period of time during which you teach your children self-reliance as you teach yourself how to detach.

- From Self Mastery: A Journey Home to Your Self

Even if we don’t choose to do the Self Mastery work for ourselves, we can choose to do it for our children because we will only be able to help our children to the degree that we have healed our own Self. Just like every single one of us has basic physical needs, we also have basic emotional dependency needs. We may not be aware that we have these needs because they aren’t talked about. Nobody told our parents that they had emotional needs, and they didn’t tell us, and so we may not be aware that we have them, or that our children have them. With this new knowledge, we can shift the trend of “passing on the sins of the father” to passing feelings of safety, security, confidence, love, and mature communication and expression of feelings onto our children.

Remember that emotional dependency needs are the intimacy, nurturing, unconditional love and boundary protection that children need in order for them to feel safe, sane and secure in the world. Consciously fulfilling your children’s emotional dependency needs will allow them to function in the world as emotionally mature, highly functional adults.

- Hu Dalcanzo from Self Mastery: A Journey Home to Your Self

I am so infinitely grateful for learning all of these things when my children were still fairly young, and very sad that I hadn’t known from the time they were babies. But no matter what age your children are, even if they are now grown adults, doing this work for yourself will affect them in a very positive way. They key to all of this is shifting our view on basic human nature. Children don’t come into the world as little tyrants ready to challenge everything we do and make our lives difficult, though it may often seem this way. Children come into the world as perfectly pure little sponges, ready to soak up all the information they see from the people around them on how to act, speak, behave, and survive in the environment they are born into. They need a strong, positive example but most of all they need unconditional love and acceptance.

As the Self-Mastery work I was doing really started to sink in and I began to put it into action in my life, the shift I saw in my children was palpable. I started responding to and treating my children as whole and perfect individuals, giving them the same courtesy of listening and acceptance that I would give an adult best friend. Instead of seeing them as a weak and helpless, incomplete humans who needed to be shaped and punished into a good person, I saw them as already perfect and whole. I started demonstrating that it was safe for them to have and express their feelings, because we all have feelings that need heard and expressed so we can release them. I provided a safe and open space for them to ask any question, because it is a child’s job to question everything. Instead of correcting them and telling them how things should be according to me, we started exploring all the possible different answers to their questions, and seeing what felt right to them.

I no longer claim to know anything for sure. I give my children and others in my life the benefit of the doubt, that their knowledge comes from their own unique perspective, and can be true for them even if it isn’t true for me. I shifted from the “tough love” model I had grown up with that says you can spoil a child with too much love and affirmation, to the smother them with love and acceptance and understanding method because I want them to feel safe, sane, and secure in the world. I shifted my automatic, programmed responses in parenting that I learned from my own parents to conscious loving responses that empower my children and myself, and the entire family unit.

Now my children love talking to me, even though they are 14 and 16 years old. They come to me to be heard, and they can tell me anything and they know that I won’t get mad at them or tell them they are wrong. This is the greatest gift I could ask for, for my children to trust me and in my love and total acceptance of them.

Please Listen to Me

When your children ask you to listen and you start giving them advice,

You HAVE NOT done what they have asked.

When your children ask you to listen and you begin to tell them why

they shouldn’t feel the way they are feeling, you are trampling on their feelings.

When your children ask you to listen, please don’t feel that you have to do something to save them or solve their problems. When you try to make them feel better you have failed them,

as strange as this may seem to you. They are asking you to listen, not talk or do something, but just listen. When you do something for them that they need to do for themselves, you contribute to their feelings of inadequacy. When you accept as a simple fact that your children’s feelings are not right, wrong, good or bad, no matter how irrational they sound, they can quit trying to convince you and they can go back to understanding why they are feeling what they are feeling. Listen to your children, duplicate what they say, so they feel valued enough to be heard.

- Unknown

I am so excited to work with any parents or individuals who need to learn to self-parent their wounded inner children using the powerful lessons and tools provided by the HuMethod Healing Modality. The Parenting Mastery chapter is one of the longest chapters in the Self-Mastery: A Journey Home to Your Self textbook and packed full of information. To give you a quick overview I have listed below the topics and headings in just this one chapter of the book:

- Do You Have a Spiritual Relationship With Your Children?

- Soul-Searching Parenting Questions

- The Spiritual Trilogy… Prayer, Meditation & Visualization

- Establishing a Healthy Self-Image For Your Children

- How Your Children’s Self-Image Was Formed

- The Five Monkeys Parable

- Seven Warning Signs Of An In-Fear Complex

- About Self-Esteem

- Building Your Children’s Self-Esteem

- How To Self-Parent Your Children and Your Inner Child

- Mature Boundary Protection

- Validating Your Children’s Feelings

- The Language of Feelings

- The Four Cornerstones of a Self-Mastered Family

- The Socialization of Your Children

- Understanding Your Child’s Birth-Order Tendencies

- Understanding Your Teenager

- Balancing How to Discipline Your Children

- Irrational Payoffs For Poor Parenting

- Dis-Creating Parental Payoffs

- Nutrition, Diet, Sleep, Money, and Exercise

- Active Body Equals An Active Mind

- Holistic Health Exercise Triangle

- Secrets Of A Good Night’s Sleep

- Are Your Children Financially Literate?

- Holistic Parenting In A Nutshell

If you are ready to experience the healing power of the HuMethod, go ahead and schedule your free introductory session today. Tell me what your main healing concerns are, the areas of your life where you are seeking guidance or feel the need to improve, and I will pick some exercises we can do together to give you a taste of what doing regular life coaching sessions with me would be like.

Namaste!

Coach Katie