Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it's also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.
Interpretation
Mindful parenting is challenging but can lead to profound satisfaction and a sense of community.
This quote highlights the dual nature of mindful parenting, emphasizing that while it is a demanding role, it offers unique rewards in terms of personal fulfillment and a sense of connection with others. Jon Kabat-Zinn suggests that the effort put into being a present and aware parent can lead to lasting joy and a strengthened bond with the family and community.
In practice
In a parenting seminar discussing the challenges and rewards of raising children.
Once you have established yourself as a center of love and kindness radiating throughout your being, which amounts to a cradling of yourself in loving kindness and acceptance, you can dwell here indefinitely, drinking at this fount, bathing it in, renewing yourself, nourishing yourself, enlivening yourself. This can be a profoundly healing practice for body and soul.
One way to look at meditation is as a kind of intrapsychic technology that's been developed over thousands of years by traditions that know a lot about the mind/body connection.
Meditation means learning how to get out of this current, sit by its bank and listen to it, learn from it, and then use its energies to guide us.
Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.
The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.
In Asian languages, the word for mind and the word for heart are same. So if you’re not hearing mindfulness in some deep way as heartfulness, you’re not really understanding it. Compassion and kindness towards oneself are intrinsically woven into it. You could think of mindfulness as wise and affectionate attention.
I grew up in a family of storytellers, but Google has destroyed us because you can fact-check everything. We'd always like the stories to be a little better than they were.
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.
My daughter was asked by a little old lady in a London hotel restaurant what her daddy did. She answered, “He’s a pirate” - I was very proud of that answer.
Making the family a top priority will invariably bring success.
I feel like there are women who are genuinely born to be mothers, and women who are born to be aunties, and women who really probably not should be allowed near children. The tragedy that happens is when any one of those women ends up in the wrong category.
The three things you can offer your children to change them: attention, appreciation and affection.
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