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The Spirituality of Parenting
Written by Margaret Stephenson Meere

Author of The Child Within the Lotus, Margaret Stephenson Meere,
enlightens us on the spiritual growth inherent within the role of parent or nurturer.

Parenting is probably the most important and challenging of all our undertakings...imparting wisdom and knowledge - handing down through younger generations new levels of consciousness. This is part of the evolution of Man. Our children, our art, our music, our natural environment - all express the behavior of our forefathers and the behavior of ourselves as parents and creators. Little children up to the age of seven are so new and willing to learn. They have no concept of failure, just a true faith in what the world offers them. The children of middle childhood, from eight to twelve years of age continue this learning, though with a new consciousness that comes with rational thinking. At the end of middle childhood, a child becomes an adolescent.

Adolescent revolution

Adolescents...know everything. They create their own art, music, language, their own ideas, and they are going to change the world. The world needs this adolescent revolution, because as conscious beings, we are reaching new levels of existence with new ways of living, and we need new skills to meet the challenges of this rapid change. We need our children, to show us the way. With their ideas, and art and music and culture, they become our teachers.

So often we impose or project our own ideas onto our children without asking them what their ideas or perceptions of some person or some situation are. By doing this, we miss opportunities to grow spiritually. When a baby is born into the world he/she is a very spiritual being. He/she is honest, authentic, and he/she "lives in the now". He/she has no grasp of his individuality. Instead he/she is one with all others and particularly with his/her mother or nurturer. This is why we are drawn into the aura of a newborn - he/she is one with us. When we are in the presence of a brand new baby then we get in touch with a lost part of our own self.

Age of individuation

Sometime in the second 100 days of life, around about the age of five months, a baby begins to lose its connection with this special and spiritual part of themselves. They begin to be attracted to the stuff of worldly human existence. This is the age when a baby begins their early development as an individual person apart from all others, in a process that philosophers such as Carl Jung have described as individuation. Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience and is the goal of our psychological development. This process brings into expression the true personality of a person and it is a lifelong process. And even though some think that the process does not truly start until we take our initial steps of self-recognition, it needs to be recognized that there is a time in our life when our desire begins to influence our behavior and this happens in the second 100 days of life after birth.

It is also in the second 100 days of an infant's life that it begins to make choices born out of this early development of desire. This is the age when an infant's color vision becomes more developed and his/her movements become more coordinated and he/she is able to reach out with his/her hands and grasp whatever he/she wants. At this age he/she does not have rational thought but he/she is very intuitive and he/she acts instinctively. As he/she grows into early childhood he/she begins to experience insatiable desire, which in all spiritual traditions is seen as the core problem for Man. As parents, we want or desire our children to "be" as we want them to be. With this we have not only a tug-of-war with our own process but also with our child's and this is when tension arises between personalities and also within our own self.

Accepting self-expression

When we begin to recognize this process within ourselves, then we can be far more accepting of our child's self-expression. It is in this acceptance that we can grow and develop our spiritual wisdom - and experience spiritual parenting, not only of a child, but also of our own inner child. We experience spirituality through three essential elements: what we see; how we feel; and why we choose. What we see is not only the seeing of our eyes. It is the seeing of all our senses and more - for smell is memory, taste is experience, vision is insight, touch is kinaesthetic experience, and hearing is listening. It is the sense of touch that brings together all the other senses into a whole experience, for touch arises from the heart. We therefore learn to see with our heart. So much tension can be relieved on a physical and emotional level, if we simply ask a child if they would like a hug. It gives them an opportunity to accept or refuse it and generally they will accept, because in the end we all need to be held and loved. If we can remember how it was for us when we were children, then we can see our child. How we feel, can be through the feeling of empathy: walking in another's shoes, developing knowledge or understanding of what another person might be experiencing.

Empathy also comes from the heart. Rather than judging our child's friends, idols or ideas, we can ask them to explain them to us. That way we can learn to see their beauty through our child's eyes. Positioning ourselves through engaging with a child, at his or her own level helps us remember what it is like to be a child. This involves being positioned at the child's level, squatting before a little child to converse with him or her; sitting with a child of middle childhood age, remembering what it was like to be a child of 10 years, being torn between a need for the protection of family and wanting at the same time to be part of a peer group. When we are interacting with our teenager we remember the humiliations of being an adolescent, with our bodies changing and our hormones jumping; wanting to withdraw from family constraints; needing to be completely accepted by our peers. It was not an easy time of our life.

Know thyself

Our children hold a mirror to us, and we come face to face with the parts of us that are not always very comfortable with. We need to remember our own inner child, our own childhood and how it felt to be growing up. The ancient Greek axiom "Know Thyself" refers to the ideal of understanding human behavior, morals and thought, because ultimately to understand oneself is to understand others, particularly our child. This, then, is how the journey of parenting is a spiritual one.

The Child Within the Lotus is published by Rockpool Publishing www.rockpoolpublishing.com.au