The Conscious Parent

living. How? By their ability to respond to life in its as is form, without
the encumbrance of egoic liabilities such as fear, guilt, attachment, or a
need to control. When we raise them unconsciously, we take them out of
this natural habitat and cause them to feel the pressure of the future.
Jolting them out of presence and into the mind, we cause them to
exchange their spontaneity for the predictability of habit.
Very young children especially are able to reinvent themselves on a
moment-by-moment basis. Intrinsically spontaneous, they are unafraid
of a fluid way of approaching life, which renders them open to change.
They see a flower and stop to gaze at it, or notice a cloud and are able to
drop what they are doing to admire its shape. Because they have
boundless imagination, rooted in a lush inner landscape, they can play in
the sand for hours, needing no gadget or machine to entertain them.
Always consciously in their body, they honor its needs without shame, so
that when they are hungry, they eat; and when they are sleepy, they sleep.
To respond to our present as if it were the only moment of relevance
can be scary because, instead of interpreting a situation according to our
past, we are asked to see the newness of each situation in the way a little
child does. We have some rather clever ways to disguise how we obsess
about the past and agonize over the future. Regret, remorse, guilt, and
nostalgia sound so honorable, but they are simply a preoccupation with
yesterday. Similarly, worry, fantasies of what will be, and excessive
planning and organizing can sound like we are just concerned for things
to go right, yet they are forms of preoccupation with tomorrow.
When we are blinded by our past or yearn for our future, we miss the
opportunities that are evident to the eye of wisdom but invisible to the