MOMENT | The most important thing we can do as parents is model how we handle our emotions, with Rupert Spira

0:03There's so much sort of parenting sort of advice around how we help our children with their feelings, talking about their feelings. I can see you're feeling anxious. I can see you're labeling the experience for them. What I'm hearing from you is that perhaps it's more about helping them understand that underneath that weather, underneath that drama, underneath there is peace. How do you do this with a child and how can we model it and learn it so that they see us doing this? You've answered your own questions or you model it. You don't try to explain. You don't try to have the conversation that you and I are having with a four-year-old child or a six-year-old.

0:43You have to model it. That's the most important thing, model it, because children are very sensitive. They pick up, as you well know, they don't just read what's going on on the surface. They pick up the deep experience of their parents. So the most important thing is to feel this for oneself and model it. If you feel it and live it for yourself, then you are without even trying modeling it to your children. Your children will pick up. They'll just feel when there's a drama going on in the kitchen. They probably won't formulate it to themselves until they're adults for many years, but they'll be aware.

1:16Oh, mom's cooking tea for three children. The phone's going, the plumber's mending. There's just drama in the kitchen, but they will feel that there's this imperturbable quality in you. It doesn't mean to say that you're not engaged. You're multitasking. You're always multitasking as a mother or a father. But underneath that, they will feel, because you're in touch with your being and your being is always silent, present, open, unaffected, imperturbable, they'll feel this quality in you. And then, of course, you can find skillful ways of speaking about it. Obviously, not in these rather kind of rational analytical terms that you and I are speaking.

1:58You can make a game out of it. I had some friends once who would there, I think he must have been about six at the time, they would play a game with him. Every time an emotion arose, if he came back from school, he was upset or he was lonely, they would have to go, oh, upset has come to visit today. Loneliness is visiting you today. So they would personify the emotions and consider them guests that came to stay. Okay, loneliness has come for dinner today, and then loneliness leaves. In a playful way, you give the child the sense that loneliness is not what they are. It's what they experience. It's natural for anyone to feel loneliness, to feel upset, to feel hurt, and so on.

2:43But these are not emotions that define us. They're not what we essentially are. They are feelings that visit us, that come to us, that linger for a couple of hours, and then they leave. But what normally happens is that we lurch from one feeling to another. We feel, I am lonely. I am sad. I am anxious. No, we are none of those things. We experience those things, but they are not what we are. What are we? We are simply this inherently peaceful presence of awareness that is totally open without resistance to the whole of life, to all experience. But no particular experience defines us. And with a child, there are playful ways.

3:24But first, most important thing is to model that for one's children. And then if the situation calls us to speak about it, to do so in an age appropriate way, to make a game out of it or something like that. I love that. And I wanted to ask you something that you said. You said, the child will always perceive what's going on at a deeper level. And that is absolutely my experience of growing up in a very loving home, but where lots was unsaid. I always knew what was really going on. But when I've shared that in the past, and to be honest, I feel it a little bit too myself. It's like, oh, I'm so imperfect.

4:00And in any given moment, there is always so much going on for me at a deeper level. I'm healing from so many of those tabs being open that were unhelpful and restrictive and trauma. And it's hard, isn't it? Sometimes to hear that truth that our children are always picking up the deeper parts of us and to hold that contradiction that at the same time, there's always going to be, well, for me, I'll speak for myself. There's always in that deeper part of me, not always, often a disturbance, as you would call it, a stress, something that is emerging in me that perhaps I'm triggered or I've had a thought earlier that's really upset me or or one of my children has re-triggered, re-traumatized something that happened to me at the same age.

4:44So how do we hold those two truths that I'm so imperfect and I'm sure my children are picking up on tons of stuff I don't want them to. And yet that is the sort of truth they are picking up on that. How on earth do we square that circle? It's interesting that you said two, if not three times, I'm so imperfect. What model of perfection are you measuring yourself against? And do you know anyone who demonstrates that model of perfection? In other words, is it a real attainable model of perfection? I certainly don't feel that I was a model of perfection as a parent. I've never met anyone who was. How would it be not to label those emotions as imperfections?

5:29Because if you feel them as imperfections. Whether you realize it or not, you are transmitting that attitude to your child. Your child will grow up feeling, I am imperfect. I'm no good. I'm unlovable. I'm a failure. If you're doing that to yourself, you're breastfeeding it to your child. I think there's still a part of me that so wants to be this sort of clean slate, that all the generational trauma is going to stop with me and I'm going to heal it and I'm not going to pass it on. There's so much pressure. You are that clean slate. Your being in the background of experience is that clean slate.

6:10You're not going to become it. You are already that. The clean slate is not something you're going to become after 30 years of work on yourself, when you've cleaned up all the generational trauma, the early wounds, et cetera. No, That's never going to happen. But that's the bad news. But the good news is you are already that clean slate. That clean slate is prior to the content of your experience. It's not something that is going to be developed as a result of the work you do on yourself. That's the thing to be able to go all the way back through the feelings, through the layers of trauma to your innocent being that you are at the core of yourself and to realize that that one is already free of your family trauma, already free of your childhood wounds, already free of your imperfections as a parent.

7:01If you begin to feel that, and this becomes the place, so to speak, where you live, you will be communicating that to your child. Your child will sort of through, just through empathy, through osmosis, pick up. You will be taking them to that place in themselves without having to speak of it. They won't have to fight with their emotions. Emotions won't be considered imperfect manifestations, things that you shouldn't really be feeling. No, it's natural to feel all this flow of emotions, sadness, anxiety, sorrow, shame, and so on. These are not things that need to be perfected. They're just part of our conditioning.

7:43They don't need to be improved or perfected so that we might become this perfect person. No, the perfection lies in our being behind the content of experience. We can't become that. We are already that. So that takes off the pressure, oh, I'm so imperfect. If you're saying to yourself, I'm so imperfect, that's what you're saying to your child. Your child is growing up with mom thinks I'm imperfect. That's crippling for a child. You can't say to yourself, I feel that I'm imperfect, but I think my child is wonderful. Perfect. No. If you think you're imperfect, you think everybody else is imperfect.

8:23If you think you're failing, you'll think your child is failing. Is that what you want to give to your child? To grow up in an atmosphere of I'm always failing. I'm no good. I'm imperfect. No. You want to praise your child. You want to encourage your child. You want your child to feel good about themselves and positive. And if you're not doing that with yourself, you're not doing that with your child. And if you feel one thing about yourself, but you say something else to your child, the child will know you're faking it. The child will always pick up on the deep feeling behind your words, irrespective of what your words actually say.

9:06.