A Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Workbook

The reason there is no definitive guide on parenting is because every baby and child is unique and all parents come with unique baggage from childhood and genetics. Becoming a parent is wonderful for stirring up all of those old memories and connections from our own upbringing. Mix this in with our fractured attention spans and we begin to see why it is becoming increasingly important for us to learn how to practice presence with our own thoughts, feelings and emotions so we can have the ability to do that with our children.

Note: To get more direction with the power of bringing more presence into your parenting please join my wife, Stefanie Goldstein, PhD and I, as well as 20 other leaders such as Marianne Williamson, Harvel Hendrix, Don Miguel Ruiz, John Gray, and others for a powerful Parenting with Presence FREE teleseminar, hosted by Susan Stiffelman author of Parenting Without Power Struggles, June 4-7.

One of the things that make it difficult to be present as a parent is because as children we coped through disconnection. For many, childhood was a time of betrayal and invalidation where parents were potentially disconnected from their inner worlds of thoughts, feelings and emotions. As a result, security and trust wasn’t fostered and this bled into our intimate relationships and we swore that it would be different with our kids.

One of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is their presence, validation and security. When we’re present with our children, it lays a path for attunement and resonance. Attunement is when the parent is aware and present to the child’s inner world of thoughts, feelings and emotions. When attuned, a state of resonance occurs where the child “feels felt.” Think about anytime you felt completely understood. It breeds a sense of safety and when a person feels safe, they cultivate the ability to trust.

This is an invaluable gift to give a child.

BUT…It can enormously challenging at times to be a parent. Author and blogger Therese Borchard often writes about her struggles being a mom and suffering with depression. As a parent, we are now responsible for a whole host of new responsibilities, trying to do the best we can while feeling guilty that we’re not doing enough.

Mindful parenting informs us to first begin to practice attuning ourselves and others to develop trust. Sometimes just taking a moment or two to let the dust settle and tune into how we are feeling physically, emotionally and mentally can be a wonderful gift in helping to cultivate self-attunement and resonance. Through this process, we can begin to come down from the chaos in our minds and trust ourselves.

When practicing with yourself, you can begin to do this with your children. If you find that all day you have been frantically running around, practicing continuous fractured attention and not paying attention to your children, rather than riddling yourself with guilt, see if you can recognize that you are now present, let that be, and invite yourself to be present to your child now.

If the little one is crying because he skinned his knee, you might notice the urge to make a happy face or give him a lollipop to ease his woes. See if you can instead validate his feelings, letting him know that his response is appropriate and allow it to come and go. This teaches the child that it’s OK to feel hurt and it’s OK to cry when you get hurt. This earns the child a sense of security within him or herself.

This could be more difficult if you have many children and the crying becomes contagious. So when the voices arise that you’re not fit to be a parent, see if you can be aware of that trap, become present and remind yourself that you’re good enough.

As is said in The Now Effect, we will never be the perfect parents so let go of the burden of that fantasy. However, we can be good enough as the well-known Psychologist Donald Winnicott pointed out. Mindful Parenting is the process of being aware of how you were parented affects your style of parenting and also to make it a practice to be present and attuned to your child’s inner world. If you stray from this, that is perfectly fine, just let it be, and invite yourself now to be with your child.

As soon as you notice yourself drifting, you are present and can shift to tuning into to your child’s inner world. It is that close. Be compassionate to yourself knowing this is a practice.

As always, please share your stories, thoughts, and questions. Your interaction here provides a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Family image available from Shutterstock.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

The new holy bible of psychiatric diagnosis is about to go on sale tomorrow. No matter what our conclusions of it are, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) is destined to be a best seller as it is the defacto guide to mental illness that most all institutions, physicians, therapists, healthcare providers and educational systems use. But it’s important for us to take a step back once in a while and ask, is this book helping or hindering the field of mental health and in turn, our individual and cultural stigma of mental health?

It has also struck me as strange that someone could struggle with, let’s say depression, and show completely different symptoms than the next person struggling with depression, yet it’s still major depression. Are we just creating another dis-ease from the human experience of suffering? For example, the experiences of anxiety, depression, and Post-traumatic stress disorder all show over activation in the fear circuit of the brain, the amygdala.

Now we don’t want to reduce mental health conditions just to neurobiology because there’s more to it than that. However, I often think of panic attacks and depressive episodes through a trauma lens. Do these always need to be teased out as different and given a specific label like this?

Here’s a new label for you: Apparently there’s a new diagnosis for kids of “disruptive mood dysregulation disorder” a term that was earlier referred to as temper tantrums.

There is a place for diagnosis, it gives us a common language and allows us to test interventions that can be helpful to one group of people suffering with similar symptoms. Also, some people feel relieved with a diagnosis because something concrete has been identified and can be worked with.

However, since the dawn of man there has been suffering and perhaps creating more diagnoses complicates the human condition. Perhaps the answers to healing are simpler.

What do you think?

Please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

I often write about the demanding and criticizing voices in our heads a lot because it is so amazingly prevalent and I figure just about anyone can identify with that and almost all of us need support with them. Every day these voices kick in out of habit telling us “I can’t do that right” or “what a failure I am.” More often than not we become overwhelmed by them and indulge them, and as Thich Nhat Hanh says, “water the seeds of our own suffering.”

What if we were able to see these voices as having good intentions? How could this ever be?

Many of us have past wounds in our lives whether it was parent seeming too busy to pay attention to us or losing someone early in life, or being the victim of assault. Voices start arising inside us to help us maintain some control over our environments to keep us safe from being wounded again. These voices may judge us or others so we don’t get too close and run the risk the danger of either losing them or being hurt by them. Or maybe the voices just criticize us so we don’t have to face the discomfort inside and spend all of our time taking care of other people. Although at the end of the day, these voices serve to water the seeds of our depression and anxiety, they can be viewed as trying to help.

The end result is that we can learn to be more kind and caring to ourselves instead of damning and hating.

What would change if instead of damning and hating these voices that keep us down, we learn to be a bit kinder to them, acknowledging their presence, and then choosing a different path. For example, if the voice arises “you’re not good enough, don’t even try it,” try and notice it and see it as a part of you that is simply trying to keep you safe from a past wounding experience. When the bad voice arises rather than entertaining it, thank it for trying to keep you safe and rather than cursing it, see if you can acknowledge the pain. You can tell yourself that you know this is a difficult task, but that was then and this is now and you’re going to give it a shot anyway.

Easier said than done, but in practicing and understanding that even our damning voices have the intentions of keeping us safe, we can begin to shift from watering the seeds of depression to watering the seeds of resiliency and even happiness. We can all break the habitual cycle of sending hate into ourselves and instead sending compassion and care.

See if you can notice the inner voices from past wounds in your life that keep you from getting too close to others or risking success to keep you safe from harm. When they arise, thank them for trying to keep you safe. Notice what a difference this can make than struggling with the messages.

As always, please share your thoughts and comments below, you additions here provide a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Megaphone head image is available from Shutterstock.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

It was all from a single leaf.

“I had no idea,” she said. “I thought I knew exactly what they felt like, I was shocked. When I think about it, I realize now how reactive I am to things around me. I think I know exactly who this person is or whether I’ll like a certain experience or not. When a test comes my brain interprets it as something to be feared when maybe it isn’t. Wow, amazing.” This 17 year old girl was talking about an experience she had on a mindful hike that my wife and I lead as part of a mindful teen retreat.

What can we gain by stripping our preconceived notions of things and engaging life with fresh eyes?

Maybe a renewed lease on life.

Thinking of our brain as a sponge is not a new metaphor, but it’s accurate. The sponge is made of memories that are constantly referenced to make sense of the worlds inside and outside of us.

While this is essentially adaptive for helping us walk, talk, and have highly enough hand motion to drink without spilling liquid all over our shirts, it’s not always good when it makes our perception of how we see other people and our abilities in life routine.

Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Life is routine and routine is resistance to wonder.”

Sometimes just entertaining seeing something with fresh eyes, whether it’s a conversation with a friend, eating something or even just touching a leaf, can open up a world of possibility you didn’t know was there before.

Consider for a moment. What in your life has become routine? Who do you think you’re an expert on? What do you feel so certain about? What would it be like to spend a short time every day choosing to put what you know aside and open up to something with fresh eyes?

Would you rediscover some wonders in life that you had been blind to? Might you open up the possibility of learning something?

You don’t grow new neural connections by being the eternal expert on things. Neurons fire together and wire together as a result of learning.

Now that we know the brain is plastic and continues to shape itself throughout the lifespan, we can open up to seeing things differently.

Are you someone whose mind often tends toward the negative or shutting options down? Do you tend to believe worst-case-scenarios? Do you think you have the world’s number?

The danger of the brain is that it makes things automatic and our perception of reality fixed so it can handle more complex tasks.

Like the 17 year old girl, choosing to see life with a beginner’s mind taught her not to always buy wholesale the stories her mind was telling her. Perhaps there’s more to life than we know.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com

Everyone has tough days and for some the days seem to be a never ending string of murkiness. All of our mental afflictions, stress, anxiety, depression, addictive urges and trauma responses are experienced as contractions in the body. An antidote to this would naturally be opening the body up and that is one among many reasons why yoga can be helpful. But to take it one step further, laughter opens our bodies up, vibrates core areas where the stuck energy resides while simultaneously igniting resiliency centers of the brain.

Do yourself a favor, simply watch this 3-minute video and see what you notice:

Laughter is a stress reliever and it’s wise to add it in as a natural medicine to whatever anti-anxiety or anti-depressant regimen you’re using. But you don’t need to go to India to practice this and in fact, you can benefit from this without even having a group to do it with.

If you’re in comfortable place with no one around, try just laughing to yourself for about 15 seconds and see how your mind and body feels.

If you notice a lift, have gratitude for this. In fact, spread this feeling of gratitude out to all the people and places in the world where healing and gratitude is needed. May all people feel an alleviation of suffering, may we all be able to enjoy love and laughter again.

You can take this practice into subtle areas of your life by practicing smiling and see if it’s contagious to others.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Breathing in I calm my body, breathing out I smile.”

If you just read this and didn’t try any of it out, put down your judgments and defenses and play a little, no one is watching. Allow your experience to be your teacher. This may be one of the best gifts you’ve given yourself in quite a while.

As always, please share your thoughts, stories and questions below. Your interaction creates a living wisdom for us all to benefit from.

Reposted from Elisha Goldstein’s Mindfulness Blog on Psychcentral.com