Category: Making conscious choices

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Don’t “should” on me!

Language is a powerful thing.  I’m constantly amazed at how simple word choices can make such a huge difference in my everyday life.  For instance, if I think to myself, “I can’t…” I feel deflated and ineffectual, but when I think, “I choose not to…” I feel inspired and powerful.

We each make choices about which words we’ll use to describe our lives every single day.  Don’t we all have a friend who almost constantly whines and complains?  Or know someone who uses language that is offensive to us?  I do my best to be hyper aware of my language and which words I choose to use.   I want to use words that are empowering and inspiring as much as possible, especially around my daughter. read more

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Attune to your child…some of the time

Attunement:  it’s a word that gets thrown around a lot in the world of parenting and psychology, but what does attunement really mean?  Attunement is an innate ability that almost all humans have to internally and externally match the experience of another person with whom they’re connecting.  When we see someone crying, we easily and naturally feel sadness ourselves.  When we are with someone who just found out that they won a big contest, we feel excitement too.

But attunement is not simply empathy for another person’s emotional experience.  It’s an energetic matching game.  We may feel the sadness, but we’re not really attuning unless we’re matching the physical and non-physical energy of the person we’re with.  Attunement is the ultimate connection.  It’s a joining and sharing of an experience, an experience of oneness. read more

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Financial consciousness

It’s spring-cleaning time!  Hooray!  Out with the old and in with the new.  Flowers are blooming, trees are budding and leafing out, and my husband and I are taking a good hard look at our finances.  Ouch.

I don’t know about you, but becoming aware of exactly what is happening in my financial life is challenging for me.  Recording my spending and then analyzing it is frightening.  Creating and sticking to a budget feels foreign, and planning our financial future feels like sitting at the bottom of a very deep well and inching my way up brick by brick.  And then there’s the issue of increasing our income and decreasing our bottom line.  So now I’m hyperventilating.  Well, not really, but you get my point. read more

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Storytelling, it’s more important than you think

Whenever the same idea comes up again and again in my life, I try my best to pay attention.  For me, the fact that I’ve heard the same thing said in different ways a bunch of times, especially over a short period of time, means that there’s something special I need to pay attention to.  This belief has served me well over the years and brought some interesting insights.

This week the concept that keeps popping up is that the ability to tell a cohesive narrative about our lives makes all the difference in attachment and parenting.  I first read the idea in “Parenting from the Inside Out” by Siegel and Hartzell and then just moments ago, I saw a video on facebook about the exact same concept.  Coincidence?  I think not. read more

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The truth about separation anxiety

OK, I’ll admit it, when I was a preschool teacher I used to shake my head at the moms who had such a hard time leaving their child.  It seemed obvious to me that by prolonging their goodbyes and furrowing their brows they were only escalating their child’s separation anxiety.  If they would just leave swiftly, their child would settle in and enjoy the day much sooner!

Now that I have my own child, I definitely have more compassion for those moms.  It’s so hard to leave sometimes!  And when your little one is clinging to you and asking you to stay, I imagine it’s almost impossible to walk away. read more

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