Author: admin

As the time for making resolutions passes and the time for implementing these resolutions also passes, I find myself thinking about how people go about doing this year after year. I doubt how successful most people are.  It is wonderful that so many people have the desire to make positive changes in their life, but the way they go about it is often flawed.

I find this particularly true with the desire to lose weight. It seems that most people experience this at one time or another and therefore can almost all relate to this desire.  I find that the first problem is that people make a goal for themselves.  Goals are often considered to be postive things, but I find that they make behaviour change difficult.  I would have you consider instead exploring your values and finding how well you are following what you value in life. I often find that goals are too far off for people to see them as possible and therefore they end up falling off the path of their goals.  Valued living, on the other hand, doesn’t have an end as such. Each moment can be done in a way that is consistent with values.  There is no beginning or end of values, they just are. Losing weight is a goal, and often the goal is a long way off.  Living in a healthy and active way is a value. It is something that can be done everyday and throughout the day.  There is no quantification on this way of being, it just is.  There need not be a judgement on how well one is following ones healthy lifestyle as long as you can say that you are following what you value in this area.

I think it helps to look at children when exploring and following values, particularly on values of activity.  Children, especially young children, do not have as much of the awareness of how something should look or the “importance” of this.  When they are active, they are just “being” and they are enjoying their body and what it can do. They run fast, they run slow, they hop and skip, they do spontaneous stretches or “yoga” poses.  They do not judge how they do it, they just do it.  They do not think that they don’t do it well until somebody tells them that.  They do not have goals of being better at what they are doing at that moment until someone tells them that they should do it “better” or differently. When most adults are active, they are constantly trying to do it better, or faster, or look better while doing it or doing better then that person.  They have a dialogue with themselves while doing.  They do not tend to enjoy their body or what it can do.  They do not tend to be in awe with what their body is capable of doing. They have lost the playfulness of being.  There is always a goal to be met. These goals get in the way of being.

What if being active could be about being in the moment with our body in a non-judgemental way and just exploring what we are capable of and how our body moves.  What if we could be ok with what our body does at each moment, without having to compare it to the last moement or the last day or the next day. What if we could continue in this way day after day  without expectation.  I suspect this would take a lot of pressure off and that each day would not be loaded with so much baggage from the last time our body moved.

I suspect we could also carry this same idea into eating.  What if we could explore our food  and how we make it and how it tastes.What if eating was more about being aware of different types of food and how they taste or feel or cook.  If we could explore new recipes and how they encorporate food and different types of food into them.  What if we could be in the moment with our food and our experiences around cooking our food.  What if we could be aware of how making something relates to taking care of our selves and our family and nurturing them, instead of not thinking or exploring and instead just eating whatever is easiest. Eating often becomes afterthought and a chore or a way to cover up bad feelings, instead of exploring these feelings.

So instead of treating the idea of eating and activity as things to be valued and enjoyed for their present moment gifts, we treat them as means to looking a certain way.  As we treat them in this way, they become tools for a goal that will likely never be reached in the way we think we want to reach it. We also lose the ability to enjoy these things as they become loaded with emotional pain and avoided because of emotional pain.

Grief incompasses so many experiences.  There is the grief involved in death, the most commonly evoked experience when one pictures grief.  But there is also grief in any loss that is experienced.  Examples are divorce, breaking up in a relationship, loss of a friendship, and loss of dreams about the future. Sometimes the loss of dreams are associated with the other loss.  All the plans that were related to the relationship are also lost when the relationship goes away.  With multiple losses the grief may be even bigger. When you lose someone, either by death or just a seperation, often you lose your sense of self at that time.  Sometimes that means losing your identity as a daughter or partner or mother, depending on who you is gone from your life. You may lose the sense of being taken care of  when you lose a parent.  You might lose your identity of being a caretaker/ parent when you lose a child.  You often lose your dreams of the future with the loss of a partner, such as the idea of a white, picket fence or a family that you fear may never happen.  Sometimes the grief comes in the form of losing the dream of having children when you find you are too old or there are problems in conception.

Like many “negative” emotions, grief often feels quite intolerable.  It can feel like your whole world has fallen apart and at that moment it has because not only is the person/thing gone, but the dreams and identity are also gone.  Often it feels like a rug being pulled out from under you because your whole world can change so dramatically.  Coping with the grief means not only tolerating the unbearable feeling that is experienced but also exploring ideas about yourself and how they have changed and probably not in a way you wanted. Loss of our ideas and our identity does not mean that they are forever gone, but we may find that they won’t look exactly as we had imagined them to look and that can take time to adjust to and accept. The grief is often far more difficult to tolerate and cope with when it is closely connected to our current daily experience or our future dreams.

You will have to reexperience the grief whenever you have a memory of what is lost or when you attempt to move your life forward in a valued direction. Often the hardest part of moving forward is having to accept the loss.

Often we fight the horrible feeling both because it feels bad, but also because if we are to feel the pain it means we are accepting the loss.  Sometimes we get stuck in grief or more likely in depression because we avoid the feelings and possilby believe we avoid losing something. In fact we have already lost and cannot keep from experiencing that feeling.  We might try to avoid it, but it will still be there.  The only way to lesson this pain is to allow it to be there and allow things to enter our life that are important to us or to remain consistent with what has always been important to us, even though this may remind us of our loss in the short term.

I think having children brings up issues of control for many people, this has certainly been the case for me. When children are infants, they are entirely reliant on us for survival and we decide most aspects of their day.  They may decide when they are tired or hungry, but we decide where they sleep and what they eat.  As they get older we often decide more aspects of their day, but inevitably there are somethings we are not in control of and this will get more apparent the older they get and the more they make their own decisions.  I struggle with this when I worry about the decisions they make and think I know best. There are inevitably times to intervene but there are times when it may be best for them to learn from their mistakes. Sometimes it is hard as the parent to differentiate between these two situations, partly because it is hard when you are the one involved in the situation to see clearly and partly because of the discomfort with letting go of the control.  I think I struggle with both of these issues and probably the discomfort around the lack of control colours my behaviour the most.  When worry comes into the equation and wishing for a solution to a problem, I tend to act quite differently than what my values are in parenting. Usually my wish to control my child and reduce the perceived negative consequences of their actions causes me to act completely differentlly then what I would like to act like and I tend to feel out of control of myself at the time. At times I am completely cognizent that how I am behaving is in no way helpful, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

I am aware that this is when I really need to stop and notice the feelings I am having and realize that my desire to get rid of the discomfort of not having control over my child and the outcome of their decisions is causing me to behave in an unhelpful way towards them and toward myself.  I need to be mindful and accept that completely uncomfortable feeling of not being able to control the future or fix everything.  I have to realize that telling my child the consequences of their actions is not necessarily going to cause them to want to change their behaviour and that sometimes the best I can do is be understanding of their need to be more independent and also be there to help them when they ask for help instead of forcing my help and my values onto them. I need to be able to stop and be mindful of what in my history is impacting my behaviour toward my child and try to tolerate the feeling.

Worry is common for parents, but doesn’t have to cause them to be inconsistent with their values as a parent.  Learning to tolerate the unknown and the uncertainty of the future goes a long way in reducing worrying thoughts. Tolerating feelings of being completely out control also goes a long way in reducing the anxiety and worry of being a parent. I find that when I am able to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings evoked by not being in control, I am able to be a much more compassionate parent and a more thoughtful parent, which will likely do more for helping my child in the future then being able to “control and fix” my child at that moment.

Mindful parenting is really being able to be in the moment with our children as much as possible and when we find ourselves being hijacked by our feelings,  to stop and notice what is going on internally, tolerate the feelings and notice the unhelpful thoughts that are stopping us from being the parents we want to be.