The Conscious Parent

feelings. To the degree we live in a state of falsehood, our children learn
to squelch their feelings and thereby also enter into falsehood. Were we
to encourage our children to be real about what they feel in the way
children naturally are until we shut them down, they would have no need
to deny their emotions and would feel no desire to displace them onto
others. For this reason, if we wish to teach our children how to live
integrated lives in which they take full responsibility for their actions,
we need to honor all their emotions, which means they don’t have a need
to generate a shadow. In this way they come to appreciate life as a
seamless fabric in which every action and relationship is energetically
connected.
Having said this, it’s important to note that there’s a difference
between reacting emotionally and feeling our feelings. Many of us
assume that when we are angry or sad, we are feeling our feelings. On
the contrary, we are often merely reacting. Truly feeling an emotion
means being able to sit with the incoherence we experience at such a
time, neither venting it nor denying it, but simply containing it and being
present with it.
Feeling our emotions without reacting to them can be terrifying. To sit
with our emotions means we have to be in solitude, which is unbearable
for many of us. We are too used to having a thought and being triggered
by it, experiencing an emotion and reacting to it. For instance, if we feel
anxious, we eat or self-medicate in some way. If we feel angry, we
experience an urge to vent or even explode at someone. Sitting and
watching our thoughts and feelings in stillness may seem pointless to us,
but it’s by doing precisely this that the core lessons of consciousness are