The short answer…stop seeing them as being out of alignment.
It’s only natural that we fear losing the ones we love when we awaken to more of ourselves and begin to change. We want to pass on the tools we’ve learned to our children and hope they use them to stay aligned, happy and free…and I ask: are they not already?
There becomes a point in our spiritual seeking where we start to believe that to feel anything but joy means to be out of alignment. I get it. I get that we have beliefs that are closer or further away to the perspectives of Source itself, but I also get that we are never not connected, we cannot be.
While we may think that it is our children who need to catch us up on the enlightenment front, the opposite it true. They did not come here to learn from us, well in a sense they did in order to be physical beings here on earth, but they came to teach us. While me may think they are not far behind, they are always one step ahead. What we may see as out of alignment in them, is actually full alignment.
You see, in order to be aligned we must listen to how we feel. We do not need to be aware of our own alignment (self-awareness) to be in it. Children are already very in tune with this part of them, which I call their inner guidance, or intuition. They feel and they don’t tell themselves they shouldn’t. When we begin to wake up to who we really are, we think that life is supposed to be about feeling good, and I agree, it is. But it’s not just about that; it’s also about accepting and transcending negative emotion.
We tend to skip this step at first. We get on such a role with feeling good and adopting new perspectives, that the moment we feel bad, we tell ourselves we are out of alignment. What we are actually doing is the same as before…rejecting our negative emotions, the only difference is that we are aware of them and can define them. And so we define them as out of alignment, essentially defining them as wrong.
Let’s say it is true that we fall out of alignment with the perspective of Source, or the Creator…why is that so bad? If we were in alignment 24/7 there would be no expansion, no learning, no new desires. Life would be pretty boring. And here we are trying to figure out how to help our children stay fully aligned at all times. We place ourselves in prevention and fixing mode. We give the same message to them that feeling bad means something is wrong.
Some could argue: but why would you want to feel bad? And I say it’s not about feeling bad, it’s what you do with it. Children know very well what to do when they feel bad – let themselves feel and process the emotion fully. When we have reason to believe we can’t do this, if we don’t feel safe enough to express ourselves fully as children, we suppress the emotion and it never gets a chance to fully process and integrate into the entirety of our being. It will then creep up again and again throughout our lives until we become present enough with it to let it move through us willingly, or letting it show us what it means. We can then choose to change the meaning if we wish.
This does not mean we have to sit through every emotion that comes up during our lives, but if every time we feel negative emotion we desperately attempt to positively think it away, or ignore it, we are telling it it shouldn’t exist. We are missing an opportunity to become more whole, and learn more about who we are, and who we are not. So if we do this with our children, we are getting in the way of this natural process for them…the process of knowing what we want through what we don’t want, which is shown to us through our emotions.
If we hold the view that our children should learn to become aligned we must hold the view that they are not. If we pay close enough attention to them without our judgements of who they are, we find that they are always following their joy. They are 100% connected to their inner being and listening to the guidance. And if they appear sad, hurt, angry, or scared, they do not escape it, they embody it and transcend it. They grow from their emotions and use them to learn. It is when we get in the way with our beliefs about how they should be feeling, and what they should be choosing that we are interrupting this process. We are replacing their own learning with our ideas of them. We become the guidance that tells them who to be, instead of letting them listen to their own. And their own guidance may want them to feel bad from time to time.
It is the same with suffering. We only try to escape, fix or help suffering when we believe it means something is wrong, and again…was there ever a time in your life that the suffering you endured didn’t lead you to being stronger, more wise, and more loving? Would you be the person you are today without having gone through what you did? Would you know the things you know today? And yet, how can we expect our children to know more, become stronger, and more loving, if we try to prevent their suffering all the time? Where is the fun in that? Suffering equals growth, and here’s the thing…it’s only suffering if we define it as suffering. To a child who is having a meltdown, feels terrified, or is crying uncontrollably, it is normal to them. It is us parents who add a label and a meaning and call it suffering. We turn our children into victims with the idea that they cannot handle their emotions, that they shouldn’t be feeling them.
So what do we do when our children are not happy? Nothing. We stay out of their business and stay in our own. And I do not mean to ignore them or not be of service to them. Being of service to someone is not what we’ve been taught. It is not buying into their stories, nor is it leaving them to self-soothe. We can provide listening and comfort while remaining free of judgement and meaning about their experience. We can soothe with our unconditional presence, knowing that nothing is wrong, and that nothing needs to change. We can offer help and guidance, so long as it’s not coming from the need for them to be any different; they already know who they do and do not want to be.
Our children are right where they need to be at all times, and they too have their lessons to learn and themes to live out. And they too have an inner voice guiding them and giving them pointers. All we need to do is give them the space to hear it.
Leisa Coleman 