A good morning together in the Stone Circle. A round in which everyone found something to be grateful for, and then we gave each other some listening time. We then moved freely for a while, putting aside the sense of being responsible grown ups, and playing in the circle together – laughing and roaring and generally being a bit more animal. We spent time considering the idea of perfection and the human necessity of Imperfection, and while I had fun exploring “playlistening” with Rio and Mahni, the parents did paired enquiry – feeling through some of the detail of where we tend to hold ourselves away from our feelings of inadequacy, weakness, incompetance and chaos, and so on, rather than allow ourselves, and our children, to include these feelings as a healthy, transient part of the Whole human experience. Inspired partly by a Ted Talk by Brene Brown who said: “Our children are hard-wired for struggle. Our job is not to keep them perfect. Our job is to look at them and say “you are imperfect. You are hard-wired for struggle. But you are worthy of love and belonging. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and I think we’ll end the problems we see today”. This is the essence of Sustainable Parenting. And because raising children this way brings up strong feelings in us about where we weren’t unconditionally accepted, it’s so important to take time, as parents, to enquire into what is stopping us welcome reality, feeling by feeling, situation by situation, thought by thought. You can watch the Ted Talk (see link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o).
It was lovely to have old-timers and new families too. Thank you Moon for holding the children so gently and clearly – as one of the mums said : you are like the pied piper.
NEXT SESSIONS – Open group on Monday June 25th: 9.45am. £10 per family. (plus group for people who’ve been before on June 11th – please let fiona@embercombe.co.uk know if you are coming)