Children Archives - The Paradigm Shifts

Before Enlightenment—Cook Meals, Do Laundry. After Enlightenment—Cook Meals, Do Laundry. (A Modern Take on an Old Zen Proverb)

My client, Badrah, a Pakistani woman living with her husband and two teenage sons in Texas, has traveled through the depths of depression to exhilarating moments of enlightenment. She is not committed to enlightenment, only to relieving the suffering of depression and anxiety. Badrah began working with me almost two years ago, not only to find answers to her suffering but also to train with me to be a transformational coach. Weaving training with personal work allows her to experience self-empowerment where only self-deprecation lived for so long. Much like for Badrah, most people who suffer from depression

Families and Learning to Live Together

(This is an excerpt from the book: Parent Like a Guru, which was written in 2016. It is available on Amazon.com.) While many of us desire to parent as a spiritual practice, we sometimes get confused about what is spiritual – as in right-action, or right-thought, and what is not spiritual. The answers to this confusion will vary, depending on your religious training, your culture, and your family’s traditions. My perspective is that we are all spiritual beings here in human form, learning by engaging in the direct experience with the circumstances in front of us. Just like in elementary

Positive Discipline Part 3

Part 3 – I’ve Never Been Here Before Every morning we wake to a new day – a new version of our children, of our work, our lives, and of ourselves. Truthfully, none of us have been here before. The remarkable reality that surrounds us often gets cluttered with a regiment of rituals, in service to getting through the day with relative ease and grace. Mundane patterns of thinking, seeing and acting fog our senses, and we ignore the true beauty that unfolds eternally before us. I am a Child of Light Growing up, I was constantly shocked and disappointed

Positive Discipline Part 2

Part 2 – I Definitely Have Some Positive Self-Discipline to Do Last month, I shared with you the degree to which I was disciplining my children from unconscious patternings that I didn’t know existed. As a young mother – the woman that I was 35 years ago, I wasn’t considering the long term results of what I was practicing in regard to discipline. I just wanted my children to do what I wanted them to do, when I wanted them to do it. I wasn’t successful, and in their teens our relationship degraded to virtually nothing. They couldn’t wait to

Positive Discipline Part 1

Positive Disciple Starts With Me Positive Discipline is easy when you know your highest intent for disciplining, and you personally practice positive discipline for yourself and for your children. As well, positive discipline is easy when you willingly let go of the need to control, especially when those needs are pretty deep-seated and unconscious. This is not so easy! I’m visiting friends Sara and Kirk in Bali this month. They have an eight year old daughter Hanna, who is brilliant, creative, playful and sociable. Hanna seems to have a pretty positive relationship with herself and the world. I love watching

Parent Like a Guru: Hope Is Not Enough to Make Things Happen

For many of us, we spend a lot of energy hoping that things will turn out the way we want, while we aren’t actually directing our intentions, thoughts, and actions into making things happen. Wishing and hoping really aren’t that powerful, until we put some muscle behind them. Think about it for a moment. What do you hope will be the best outcome for your children’s lives over the next week? What are you actually doing in support of ensuring that your hope is fulfilled? Quite often, we would rather live in hope, because, by just hoping, we aren’t vulnerable

Parent Like a Guru: How Do I Know I’m On the Right Path as a Parent?

Quite often, when a potential client calls me to make an appointment for a coaching session, they ask: “How do I know that this is going to work? How do I know that this is the right thing for me?” The bottom line is that you don’t know, and you won’t know until you begin to engage personally and directly with the practice of consciously evolving yourself as a person and as a parent. What does it require to evolve consciously? Evolving consciously requires a degree of discipline, presence, and mindfulness to your thinking, to the thoughts you think, and

Before You Take That First Step Towards Parenting Like a Guru

Stepping onto the spiritual path called parenting requires that you clarify, for yourself, not only what is compelling enough to step on the path, but what is compelling enough to keep you walking on that path. People are often inspired to take that first step because it sounds exciting, feels exhilarating, and worthy of the commitment. Few follow through with the second, third, or fourth step. Why? Because it gets scary when we begin to stretch beyond our comfort zone. We begin to feel the discomfort of the reorientation that is naturally occurring as part of growing and shifting our

Declaring Your Place in the World: Check These Off Your To-Do List

Young, Daring and Unstoppable! In the late 60’s, the summer of my Junior year of high school, my sweetheart, Paul, and I took on a project of creating awareness in our small Island community in Michigan, of the importance of environmental support. Using an electric typewriter and the manual cranking mimeograph machine at the local library, we made over 1,000 pamphlets, listing the many ways to help the Islanders become aware of how we could save the planet: recycle, reuse, population control, small volume toilets, etc. I rode my bike around the Island carefully placing our answers to world devastation

Category: Children