| How we get to know ourselves better though our children |
| Have you every heard about mirror neurons? I don’t want to go too much into science. You can google that if you’d like to know more. I would like to explain how I use them to work on my self-development. I always thrive to be the best version of myself and create a happy, positive and with lightness filled life. So here we go. This is the explanation why I call my kids my greatest gurus: Everybody who we meet in life, who we stand in relation with is there for a reason. There is no coincidence in meeting people. Everybody we meet is serving us someway or another. When children come to us they will stay for a while and while they are small we create this deep relationship with them that can be nourished and stay forever. When they are babies usually even have them directly on our bodies, super close…They communicate with us. It might take a while until we understand their commands when they are little, but when we really connect to them, we’ll know when they need to be fed, when they want to be changed, when they are tired, when they are uncomfortable, too hot, too cold, want to be carried… also these things…We learn to meet their needs. They also clearly can mirror us! They will communicate us when we are not present with them, when we are stressed out, when we are tired, when we are sad… Their needs of having us present with them is not met… It takes a little bit to understand this and a lot of openness also, because we might feel ‘critiqued’ or bothered when somebody communicates this back to us. Many moms, don’t understand this communication. They only see a baby that is not happy and try to do everything ‘on the outside’ and find out that they can’t make baby happy, because it would take work on themselves to help their baby calm down… for example, if I am scared of getting the corona virus and my body tenses up every time I hear anything about it on the TV, my baby feels all these feelings too, because it is so connected to me. It’ll feel that something isn’t safe and kids want to feel secure! Now that my kids are older and I have been practicing to take the clues they give me and do my work to come to a better state, it’s almost natural for me to take on these challenges. Children have this sense of knowing when we are not aligned with our truth. They have an in-build bullshit detector, because they are still connected with their own soul’s truth. You might think that the communication differs a lot from a baby, but that’s not always so. Rarely, I get a: ‘Mama, please understand that I am not scared of waves, that’s your fear.’ Which I was very impressed by about half a year ago, when we were on Sri Lanka and contemplating if the kids should go surfing or just swimming in the big waves and my anxiety went like crazy. I am very fearful of waves since I felt like I almost drowned as a 12 year old. Usually it’s the kids behavior that somehow triggers me. And I might think to myself: ‘Why can’t they just play nicely together, instead of being so rough?’ As long as the kids are fine and are just themselves..why do I need to care and change this. The questions, I would ask myself here could be: Am I always playing nicely? Am I rough with them? Or with myself? Do I just want to control them? Why do I care what they are doing when they seem happy? Am I afraid of them hurting each other? If something triggers me then I have a problem with it. There is something inside of me that resonates/mirrors something back to me. This is a very good practice if you want to get more conscious about yourself: When something triggers you and you are about to try to control another person, take a deep breath and feel into it, what is exactly going on right now? What part inside of you feel triggered? Is it really the other persons problem or is it something in your childhood that is showing up? A conditioning? A fear? Is it really yours or is it somebody else’s rule that you have always complied to? Do you really believe in it? Go deeper and deeper and figure out what it is that is telling you to intervene and control other people. Once I was driving with my kids in the car and was very stressed out. I don’t remember why. But I had asked the kids to stop fighting in the backseat. I think, I had just cleaned my car and I was worried that they would dump all the gold fish all over the backseat, in the state that they were in. It got so loud and rambunctious back there that I started blackmailing them. (Mind you, this was years ago…I don’t blackmail them anymore.) I said something like: ‘If you guys don’t stop the fighting, mommy won’t be able to concentrate and I probably will have a big accident and drive into a tree.’ (I could have added something like: ‘We will all die’ or ‘you won’t have a mommy anymore’, if I was really frustrated.) I had the feeling that this would scare them enough, (because that’s what blackmailing is for: scare them) to stop flighting and shut up. Oh, and I even was so angry that I hit the steering wheel as if making a point by slamming a hand on a table or so, that my hand hurt.Instead of stopping, one of them took the whole gold fish bag dumped it all over the backseat and said: ‘Ok, mommy, now drive into that tree!’ Wow! What????? Wasn’t that brilliant of him?! You might say that it’s absolutely respect-less or naughty and he needed punishment or something like that. What I felt was this: He caught me! He saw that I was not aligned and gave this powerful message to me. I instantly understood that I was totally going bananas and I started laughing. We all had a big laugh together which really helped calm down this heated situation.I apologized for being a crazy stressed and unfair mom. I apologized for blackmailing them and told them that it wouldn’t be their fault at all if I ever hit a tree. I am the person responsible for being able to concentrate while driving and I would have to make sure that I stop the car before I was not able to do so. I would need to calmly talk to them and not blame them for something that I was responsible for. I thanked them for showing me that I was behaving badly. But we also talked about which words would have been more appropriate than dumping the whole bag. ( Because I was in such a crazy state of mind though, I wouldn’t haven been able to hear a calmer message from them. It might have had to be that radical. He matched my state perfectly.) This was one of these moments when I was so glad to have such intelligent, smart and connected children in my life. There are so many situations almost daily that I reflect on what exactly is triggering me with their behavior to find out more about myself and also about our connection to each other. Sometimes topics come up that I need to work on for several days, even weeks. One more thing, I’d like to share: When my kids are going crazy, the first thought I have is usually, how can I stop them figure out or fix their problem. Then I remind myself and first of ask if they need help. I want them to know that I am always there for.them if they need me. In many cases, instead of needing time to cool down by themselves, they need a really big hug from me. And I can do that, even in situations when I am really angry at them, a big bug helps us both to reconnect to each other and to ourselves and let the truth back in. Because be are all connected anyway and we only have problems when we feel disconnected. It really takes courage to take on the challenges of self-development, but once you are hooked, you’ll never go back again. It’s an ongoing process of understanding yourself and also to freeing yourself from all the things that affect you from your past. All these habits, beliefs, fears interfere our connection to our children. When they take on our baggage they will have to go through the same process of freeing themselves when they are older… What if we let them grow up free and they never lose themselves? Wouldn’t that be absolutely wonderful? I believe that it’s possible. So mamas, let’s step up our game and take responsibility of our own shit! Our kids help us by mirroring to us what needs to be transformed! We just need to take them seriously and we’ll be able to not burden them with our baggage. Free our children! I am super curious what you have learned from your gurus?If you like, write me an email or connect on FB or Instagram. Much love to you, Annika <3 |