One day I was speaking on the phone with a
mom I was coaching. She had called me after a fight with her daughter and left
an emotionally charged message on my voicemail. I was unable to get back to her
until about three hours later. When I reached her, she sounded perfectly calm, and
she was saying, “I feel like everything’s falling apart around me, my kids are
completely out of control, and here I am standing in my kitchen arranging
flowers for a dinner party. How crazy is that?”
We both laughed when I suggested that
arranging flowers was the least crazy thing she’d done so far that day,
especially because, as she’d just told me, it makes her happy. Doing something
that makes you happy is far less crazy than spending the hour between 6am and
7am in a screaming match with your 15 year old daughter about the outfit she’s wearing
to school that day, and much less crazy than replaying that hour in your mind
on a an endless loop, finding ways to justify your anger, or beating yourself
up for yelling, or entertaining dire predictions about your child’s future,
based on the length of the skirt she wanted to wear.
The word mindfulness has been used so much
in therapeutic circles over the last few years that it sometimes makes me want
to stab myself with a fork when I hear it. However, it really does mean
something, and this mom, on the heels of feeling rage and panic and
hopelessness, manifested mindfulness in its full glory as she stood in her sunny
kitchen organizing roses and petunias into shapes that pleased her eye and
calmed her central nervous system; and she did it without being told what it is
or how to do it, because mindfulness is
just a term to describe something we humans do naturally. I could hear her
voice soften and her breathing slow down and deepen as she regained perspective
and a sense of humor—two of her greatest strengths as a parent.
She questioned her sanity for doing this
because, like most of us, she has been taught or told that, in order to solve her
problems, she needs to focus on them incessantly and with great distress, and
if she’s not, she’s being irresponsible. And yet, as Einstein said, “We can’t
solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
Mindfulness is a way
of leading ourselves into a different kind of thinking than the one we used
when we thought that engaging in a power struggle with our kids in order to get
them to change was a good idea. Or that yelling would somehow solve the
problem, rather than create new and increasingly more difficult problems, which
is what it usually does.
The trick is
convincing our central nervous systems that it’s safe to drop the bone. We ask
ourselves, “Shouldn’t I be spending all my time focused on the very upsetting
fact that my child is smoking pot, or always on social media, or failing out of
school?” Well, let’s look at where that gets you.
Those thoughts
create tremendous anxiety and feelings of powerlessness when we realize that we
can’t actually follow our children and monitor them through every hour of their
days, and they tend to spiral us further into feelings and thoughts that leave
us on edge, depleted, and ready for a fight. Those thoughts leave us
desperately running away from the situation in a fit of hopelessness—burying
our heads in the sand, or in work, or literally running away from our kids. In
other words, those thoughts keep our central nervous systems in fight or flight
mode—a state of mind distinguished by black and white thinking. Feeling
threatened and scared, we believe we have only two options—conflict or escape.
Given all that,
it’s no wonder we lash out and make things worse when our kids come home with a
problem, or a belligerent attitude, or a bad grade.
Choosing
mindfulness over our disturbing thoughts and emotions is like choosing not to
stay in a small, windowless, overheated room in which many highly emotional
people are arguing with one another, and choosing instead to open the door and
walk outside into the cool and quiet of the evening. Looking up at the stars,
with the angry voices receding into the background, you remember you can
breathe again.
One of the keys to
practicing mindfulness is simply remembering that you have access to that more
spacious state of mind. If your hair is on fire, or you’re being stalked by a
lion, that’s a different story. That’s when you need that narrowly focused,
fight or flight intensity to survive. Other than that, by all means, arrange
flowers. Get in a round of golf. Paint. Do whatever connects you to your innate
sense of joy and peace and that feeling of being in a positive relationship to
the world. The more you do that, the better prepared you’ll be to handle a real
emergency, should one arise, and the clearer your mind will be to make
important decisions regarding the well being of your child and your family.
And remember,
mindfulness is not something you need to get certified in. It’s just a word
used to describe something we humans do naturally, if we let ourselves. It’s
really just doing something you love to do, something that calms you and makes
your breathing deeper and your thinking slower, and doing it completely. In simple terms, it is just paying attention, fully, to where you are
right now, and what you are doing, free of thoughts about the past and the future.
