I would like to introduce to you, one of our newest authors, Dr. Shefali Tsabery who graciously agreed to write this inspirational guest blog.  In 2010, Namaste Publishing will release a book by Dr. Shefali Tsabary, A Call to Conscious Parenting. In the meantime, we hope you enjoy and benefit from her insights.

We each enter the parenting journey with visions of what it will be. For the most part, these visions are egoic fantasies.

We hold thoughts, beliefs, values, and assumptions we have never questioned. Indeed, many of us don’t even see a reason to question our worldview because we believe we are “right.” We think we have nothing to examine, nothing to change.

If we are super-successful at what we do, then we naturally expect this from our children. If we are artistic, we push our children to be artistic. If we were an academic genius in school, we carry the flame for our children to be brilliant too. Or if we were the opposite, then we live in constant fear that our children will turn out like us and hence do everything in our power to ward off such a possibility.

Our children are not ours to possess or own in any way. Yet as parents, we are often unaware of the way we lay down rigid doctrines for how our children are expected to express themselves. Through our imposition of our ways on our children, we constrain their essence. In this way, the parent-child relationship has the potential to deaden the child's spirit and hence become a source of dysfunction.

We all want what is right for our children, but in doing so we forget that the first thing we should want for them is their right to be their own people and live their own destiny in accord with their spirit.

It is crucial we realize we aren’t raising a “mini me,” but a spirit throbbing with its own unique spiritual signature. We must take a deep breath and begin to separate who we are from who our children are. Only then will we be willing to fit our raising of our children to their needs, as opposed to molding our children to fit our needs.

Children live in a world of “it is,” not in the world of “it isn’t.” They come to us with their inner being brimming with life. It is we who drain these vessels, filling them instead with ideas and expectations rooted in our own unconscious conditioning. Children don’t need our ideas, expectations, approval or disapproval, only for us to be attuned to them with our full, awake, engaged presence.

Each of our children comes to us with their own life plan—their own karma, if you will—to live out. Because children carry the blueprint of their essence within them, they are already in touch with who they are and what they want to be in the world. But when we don’t know how to listen to them, we rob them of their right to live out their destiny.

How can we listen, when we barely listen to ourselves? How can we feel their spirit and hear the beat of their heart if we can’t do this in our own life?

We get chosen as parents to help our children actualize their life plan. Instead, we end up imposing our own judgments on their spiritual destiny and rewrite it according to our rules and desires.

Until we understand how we have been operating in an unconscious mode, and awaken to how this affects our children, we will resist opening ourselves to a different approach to parenting—one that rests on entirely different ideals from those we may have been used to until now.

As we shift our axis to a delight in simply being, so that all our activity flows from this childlike state, we spontaneously find ourselves honoring our children for those qualities that may be less quantifiable but that are infinitely more essential—qualities such as authenticity, awe, joy, peace, courage, and trust.

This isn’t an easy shift for a parent to make. We find it much easier to say yes to those aspects of life that are connected to our child’s performance in society than to their authentic being. Hence a paradigm shift is required--a shift in which we discover that it is our children who are our greatest teachers.

In other words, while we think we hold the power to raise our children, our children hold the power to raise us into the parent they wish us to become. It is in attending to this development of our own authentic being that we parents are exposed to the truly transformative potential of the parenting journey.

Unless we invite this transformation, we will parent with a certain irreverence, callous to the cry of our children’s spirit, blind to the force of their wisdom. Only if we are aware of the manner in which our children mirror our own development will we treat them with the dignity they deserve.

The degree to which we honor our children’s true being is reflective of the degree to which we honor our own. The only meaningful way for parent and child to relate is in mutual spiritual restoration.