The Conscious Parent

his corporate career doesn’t begin to compensate for the joy of spirit and
sense of purpose he felt when onstage. For him, acting was his true
calling—an expression of his essence, his very being. Now, mired in
mortgages and student loans, he feels little freedom to change course.
Samuel’s father parented his son from a place of pure projection. At
the root of his anxiety over his son’s choice of career was an emotional
script he carried within himself that said “uncertainty is bad.” Consumed
by the anxiety he had suffered as a first-generation immigrant, he sought
to control his son’s destiny.
As long as the pillars of your ego remain intact, as they were in the
case of Samuel’s father, you will struggle to live authentically; and if
you are inauthentic, you will have difficulty allowing your children to be
authentic. To parent children from ego is to live with the unconscious
mandate that your way is the right way. Consequently, you urge your
children—as happened to Samuel—to enter your world and miss the
opportunity to enter theirs. Sadly, it’s likely you feel the most competent
when your children are under your domination, willing to follow your
word as gospel.
Our ego-attachments are a mask for our fears, the greatest of which is
surrendering to the mysterious nature of life itself. When we come from
ego rather than from pure being, we don’t connect with our children’s
essential being. As a result, they grow up disconnected from their own
essence, and thus learn to distrust their connection to all that exists.
Approaching life from fear stifles the emergence of their genuine,
uninhibited, unaffected being. Our ego therefore needs to crumble to
allow our authenticity to emerge, which in turn frees our children to