Your Valentine’s Day Gift: Self Acceptance

Are we trying to raise our adult children?

 

It’s a common theme these days: parents of adult children worrying about how their “kids” will fare in the world. At a time when we should be focusing our attention on our own lives, we often divert that energy to our progeny way past the age that our predecessors did.

 

Long gone are the days when our children moved out into the world to establish their own lives, and we had to let go, knowing that updates on their well-being would be rare and intermittent. Before the information age, news travelled slowly, so you simply had to get on with your own life and hope for the best.

 

Today, we are plugged into each other in a constant stream of status updates, blogs, and tweets, with many young folks using an evening out as a photo op for immediate posting. We KNOW where are children are, and that may not always be a good thing.

 

So, here are my suggestions for retrieving your sanity in a world of linked and synced adult children:

 

1. It’s your turn now. As parents, we give a great deal of our time and energy to seeing delicate babies into sturdy adulthood. We generally do this work when we are young adults and have the fortitude to apply ourselves to the task. As we age, we are meant to let go of our children and use our energy for our own experiences. If our children are grown, and they are still our primary focus, it would be wise to ask ourselves what change we’re avoiding making in our own lives that we prefer to distract ourselves with theirs.

 

2. Believe in yourself. If you are worrying about how your offspring are coping in the world, what does this say about your faith in yourself as a parent? Trust that you did the best job you possibly could. Forgive yourself for any mistakes you made along the way. Children don’t come with a training manual, and we all learn through trial and error. Now, it’s their turn to go out into the world and learn the same way we did. If we aren’t making any mistakes in our lives, we’re not taking enough risks.

 

3. Believe in them. Trust that the wise soul inside your son’s or daughter’s body chose their path, including all the trials and tribulations that come with walking on the earth. They will fail. They will also succeed. The more you worry about them – and project your fears on them – the more you are sending the message that you have no confidence in your children. Trust that they will fall and get back up again. They’ve been doing that since they were two years old.

 

4. The world has changed. It is more conscious now. People talk about ways of parenting. They consider how they were raised and think of ways to improve on the family model. They consult experts and each other. Your children may do a better job of raising their kids than you did. Their kids will improve on the model as well.

 

5. There is help. With the wealth of information available to us today, and with our visibility to each other in this networked world, there’s a much better chance that your adult child will find the help they need. It only takes a Facebook status update from an overtasked individual to receive support and helpful suggestions from friends. There are a plethora of online groups that share information and tips on every possible subject. It may hurt that they aren’t coming to you for advice, but they simply may not need to do so. The choices your children make are educated ones – and, right or wrong, they are theirs to make, coming to their own conclusions on their terms.

 

6. Let go. When our kids leave home, they are adults. They have chosen to be on their own to stand or fall just as we did when it was our turn. They make their own choices and live with the consequences. If you project a positive, confident belief in their skills, with the understanding that you are available should they wish to chat or ask for advice, they’ll call – because they want to do so, not because they feel obligated. It’s far better to get the rare phone call or Skype from a son or daughter who is happy to share their news than to get a regular interaction founded on duty or based on the fear that there will be a negative reaction if they don’t call.

 

You raised your children in a free world. Honour their freedom. Let them go, and let them know you believe in them. It’s the greatest parting gift they’ll ever receive. Now, go live your life – doing all the things you couldn’t do while you were raising your kids. It’s YOUR time now.

Adventures in Lucid Dreaming

Image from Stock Xchng

Looking for a direct connection to your intuition? Look no further than lucid dreaming. You can successfully program your mind to give you answers to your questions in your dreams. However, your subconscious may give you a different response from the one you expect.

Before I fell asleep last night, I asked to be shown a picture of my future. Instead, I had a dream about a TV character whose job is to find the truth. She is shown her future and then sets out to ruthlessly create it in the now, deciding to buy the house she will have and to marry a man she just met, whom she’s been shown she will marry. In the dream, it’s obvious that the woman is rushing to create a future that was meant to unfold at its own pace. The message to me was clear: some things I’m not meant to know yet, because I would pursue them before their time.

On the other hand, I’ve had dreams where I was given specific information regarding my future. I learned my children’s sex before their births. Sometimes, this requires interpretation of dream symbols. For example, I had a dream that two young colts were galloping around our backyard. One was larger and russet-coloured, and the other was smaller and dark. Since I already had a red-haired boy, I assumed from the dream that I would have another boy with dark hair, since I was seeing the same type of animal, only a different colour. Sure enough, I gave birth to a boy with darker hair. Years later, watching my sons chase each other around the yard, they possessed the same playful energy as those young colts in the dream.

When I was pregnant with my third son, I had a dream that I drove in a car with relatives to the local dump where we found a black wooden cradle, brought it home, and painted it blue. The symbolism this time was completely obvious.

In my daughter’s case, she appeared to me in a vision during meditation, wearing a yellow bonnet. I conceived her three months later, and she received two of these yellow bonnets at her baby shower.

If you wish to program yourself to receive information from your dreams, you need to be very specific in your language and know how to interpret what you see. To learn more, consider taking my course on lucid dream technique. Sign up at www.tarotkingston.com. See you there!

Growing Up – The Final Stage

expectations of our parents and other authority figures. Rebelling, we discover, makes our lives more difficult, so many of us begin to govern our behaviour in order to win the approval of the people with the power.

This adaptation becomes such an intrinsic part of our behaviour that it can carry over into our lives as adults. While to some degree, this adaptation is a good thing – ensuring that most of us adhere to laws and use cultural cues such as manners to get along with each other – it can also become a stumbling block to our own development.

The final stage in growing up is to truly become who you are meant to be, and that of necessity means basing that evolutionary process on your intuition and not others’ opinions of how you should behave and what goals you should pursue.

This stage of development is extremely difficult for many of us who have family responsibilities and work obligations. Still, it behooves all of us to the best of our ability to listen to our intuition and recognize when we are needlessly limiting ourselves because of our concern about how others may react.

We’ve forgotten who we were as children, before we got overly concerned with the opinions of adults. We’ve forgotten to be silly. We’ve forgotten to take chances. We’ve forgotten to trust our initial feelings about things and people. We’ve forgotten to listen to our intuition.

Several times a day, try to catch yourself altering your behaviour based on how others will respond to your actions. Decide whether you really need to take their opinion or reaction seriously. If the choice you’re making doesn’t affect that person directly, ask yourself if you really need to take their viewpoint into account on this occasion.

It’s unsettling when we strike out on our own, doing what feels right for us despite people who disagree with our choices or who want us to conform to a particular view they have of the kind of person we are. It’s unsettling to stand apart from the herd and trust an inner voice that may ask you to be a maverick from time to time. Yet, in the end all you leave this life with is you – and the choices you made.