Conscious Parenting: A Week in Patience.

My four year old daughter, Ava, chose patience as our weekly intention. I thought our week in patience would be about reminding and reinforcing patience within myself and within my children… And there was a little bit of that, but more than that, it showed up as a need within myself, to have a greater patience with the overall natural flow of life. It’s funny how life works sometimes because as I was holding the intention of patience all week, bringing my mind back to patience throughout the day, in thought and in conversation, breathing it in and breathing it out, slowing myself down, I reached almost a pinnacle of impatience by the end of the week! And it wasn’t necessarily with my kids, but rather an impatience with the flow of life just not flowing as fast as I would have liked... My impatience was born from this desire to try and have it all figured out, all perfectly mapped out without any surprises (ha!), and the effect of that impatience caused me to be super impatient one evening with the girls at bedtime. My impatience caused this atypical neediness in my daughter… She was so affected by my mood, even though it had nothing to do with her… this was a powerful reminder for me not to take people’s bad moods personally, because most likely it’s about their own sh*t, just like my mood had nothing to do with my daughter. The next morning, I apologized to her, explaining I had been experiencing an inner-grumpiness and impatience that had nothing to do with her, but that it was sort of just spilling out of me and onto her. She had a good little laugh about that and we hugged. And so my work this week was about trusting the natural flow of life, still setting my goals and intentions, but also allowing for destiny to work it’s magic. Also, I definitely noticed a greater patience in how my four year old daughter treated my youngest daughter, simply through setting the intention for the week and letting it naturally weave in and out of conversation. This week, Ava’s chosen intention is kindness...