Voicings

Very few people realize that parenting is a practice, one that can transform us into higher and greater versions of ourselves. This is natural, because the daily challenges of raising a child can obscure the underlying opportunity to evolve and grow. Some people look to the norms of the surrounding culture, or rely on their perception of what others are doing to decide how to raise their children. We also tend to parent by memory, drawing on our past experiences and replicating the ways that our own parents interacted with us.

 

Growth, however, does not come out of the past. Growth happens in the present, and it requires us to allow ourselves to be renewed.

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Spiritual parenting is guiding, teaching, and caring for our children with intention. It means seeing them as spiritual beings who have honored us by giving form to our own loving thoughts. It means constantly elevating our thoughts and feelings to keep our greater purpose in view, no matter what challenges and obstacles may arise.

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In The Art of Raising a Puppy by the Monks of New Skete, famed children's author and illustrator Maurice Sendak shares his personal insight on the similarities between raising a pet and a child. He states that both require us to have a deeper understanding of ourselves, because we see reflected in our charges the mirror image of our own emotional states. The infant child and the dog cannot speak; they have no way to extricate themselves from the weight of our influence, so those of us who care about our children and pets must learn to hold ourselves to high standards of behavior. We have to remain calm, fair, peaceful, and mature to instill a sense of trust and safety in those we are taking care of.

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The first step in spiritual parenting is deciding to parent with intention. When we see our role as parents as a divine one, and our children not as property, but as spiritual collaborators in a mystical yet perfectly ordered interplay of destinies, we raise our conscious intention above simply providing for our children's physical needs. 

 

We act and speak from a basis of love, and remember that the person we are caring for is tender and formative, magnifying in her own consciousness our every word, expression, and gesture.

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In spiritual parenting, we continually examine ourselves, and check ourselves against the living mirror of the child in our care. We assume fully the awesome responsibility of preparing a young person for the long journey of life by modeling only the behaviors and mental and emotional states that we most admire.

 

This practice necessarily changes us. We begin to abandon some of the unloving tendencies that we tolerated in our immaturity, and drape ourselves in the mantle of love. We have to love ourselves deeply in order to parent from a spirit-centered state. As our commitment to nurturing the greatness and divinity in our children deepens, we become more gentle, more peaceful, more reflective, and more reliable.

 

Through spiritual parenting, our expression of love expands in ways we never thought possible, even extending to those outside of our families, social circles, and other group identities. We who are parenting with intention one day find that we have been raising not only our child, but also ourselves. In giving all of ourselves to the practice of spiritual parenting, we give to ourselves the gift of divine transformation.