Parenting: Your Child As Zen Master

I am studying Emotional Freedom Tapping (EFT), planning on using it for the Parent's Course Claud and I are teaching this summer in Bozeman, Montana. Yep, that's right, after Claud and I completed the fourth of our five session Couple's Course (that in the future we'll call UNPAC for UNconscious Partner Attractor Characteristics), I asked Claud if he'd like to teach and help design the upcoming Parenting Course. He said an enthusiastic 'yes'.

It was a rich and fulfilling experience teaching UNPAC: A Couple's Course, and the participants, after completing the course, acknowledged Claud for his contribution. They appreciated having the perspective of a man and a woman, and they appreciated being with another couple who have been through the common struggles of intimacy. I'll send you some of their comments when we get them.

So, back to the Parenting Course--I have been deeply influenced by Gordon Neufeld's work (I took his Power To Parent course this summer with our daughter and son-in-law). I walked away from it struck by how good parenting comes from over and over, strongly attaching to our children. In other words, don't be held hostage by the latest theory on how to gain control over children, but instead gain enough wisdom and authority to deeply attach. Then our influence over them is because they respect and love us, not because we know how to manage them.

This is an elegant request, but not always easy to do since it's not easy to keep our intelligence in the midst of raising them, or our maturity in the middle of our own immaturity (and this immaturity can happen at 27 or 37 or 59, as I recently turned).

The general design, the 'cut' on this upcoming, soon to be released Parenting Course will be how to grow ourselves up while we're growing our children up. This will include real time, today issues, and we'll lean into them and learn together, taking back our projections, reclaiming our role as Parent and calming ourselves down enough so we can actually do all this.

I plan on using EFT and do recommend the EFT Forum--a discussion amongst folks using this method for kids and issues about them. Like chi gong, it is a kind of energy psychology, which I've found personally empowering--and empowering to the people with whom I've facilitated .

Let me know what you think about the forum and any ideas, thoughts, reflections or questions you have about the Parenting Course. It already has a name--Parenting: Your Child As Zen Master. Sound familiar?