Out of Control by Shefali Tsabary

All quotes from Shefali's book

Your children are here to challenge your integrity.  

Our subconscious patterns hold tremendous energy.  This energy causes us to create an atmosphere our children react to.  We could say they pick up our emotional “vibes”…. Our children don’t respond to our surface instructions.  Instead they are attuned to our subconscious script.

The key to effective parenting is to turn the spotlight away from the child as “behaving badly” to our own “badly behaving emotionality”.  Unless we identify and untangle our emotional patterns, we will unwittingly foster dysfunctional behavior in our children.  We will search high and low for ways to fix our children, not realizing there’s nothing to fix, only a need for us to grow ourselves up.

All conflicts with our children originate with our own internal subconscious conflicts.

What we think of as a need for discipline stems not from the child’s behavior but from our emotional attachment to a particular idea of “how my child should be”.

An unconscious aspect of human nature involves judging and labeling those things we don’t understand as “bad”.

Every conflict in our present lives – whatever with our children, spouse, or other adults – is in some way a recreation of our childhood.

Instead of reacting emotionally, the parent needs to calmly decipher the meaning behind the behavior and shift from the content of the child’s eruption.  The key is that the parent remain centered, not thrown off balance by the remark, so they can gently probe for the real issue.

Natural consequences are always consistent.

Learning to walk the fine line between being attuned to our children and overreacting is an art.  It requires the parent to become aware of how their own neediness may be in operation at any given moment.

Our children didn’t come into the world to be our puppets.  They came here to struggle, fumble, thrive, and enjoy – a journey for which they need our encouragement.

Each time our subconscious agenda doesn’t get met, we enter the space of a hurt child.

All negative behavior is a manifestation of hurt feelings.

Precisely at the point where it appears that our children are trying to exclude us from their lives, defy us, or manipulate us, they are signalling they need us.

To live in the grey requires differentiation, between true feelings and our emotional reactions.  They are vastly different.  A feeling comes from the heart and is a response to what’s arising in the moment.  An emotional reaction is a programmed knee-jerk from our subconscious patterns of our past.

Witnessing is about being able to connect with reality just as it is.

This isn’t about whether a particular behavior is okay.  It’s about the relationship being okay.  A child needs to be learn that it’s safe to confess their mistakes and admit their weaknesses.  It affirms for them that no matter what they do, they are still a good and valued person.

For another human to come into our life, especially into our care as in the case of a child, is a privilege.

What is it about us that led to the reaction we are getting from our child?

It’s our ability to experience the burning sting of our pain, without assuaging it, that empowers us to receive joy in all its magnificence. 

The Awakened Family by Shefali Tsabary

All quotes from Shefali's book

We are operating out of the feeling of lack created by our missing self.  In the absence of our real self, we rely on our ego for an identity, which of course consists of layers of programming picked up in our childhood. 

Our lost self is always present in our reactivity to others.

Rather than judging others for triggering us, we need to express gratitude for the situations that allow who we really are to reveal itself, for this is our golden opportunity to go within and integrate that which has never been addressed.

You can’t get rid of fears by willing it to disappear.  The only way it will naturally fade is by holding it in your awareness, which means you neither wallow in it, act it out, or suppress it.

Unless you become aware that all your reactions stem from the past, you will constantly be deluded into thinking someone or something is causing them.

We create entire scripts for our life based on our unmet needs and pain from the past we haven’t addressed.

Simply accept ourselves as a work in progress, allowing life’s lessons to show us the many ways we have yet to grow from within.

It takes becoming parents ourselves for us to discover how immature we really are.

It may not be easy to see how fear is the driver of our reactions, since it is a master of disguise.  It wears many

masks, such as anger, frustration, inauthenticity, control, and sadness.

Where there’s no fear, we never react.  Instead, we formulate a mindful response to the present moment.

The feeling of fear sets off an alarm that instantly triggers our emotional blueprint.

Fear can be transformed into consciousness.  It requires us to be bold in our willingness to explore it.

Our growing awareness of how the past influences the present allows us to shed stereotypical ways of being and reacting and instead create carefully attuned responses to all of life as it manifests in the here and now.

Our emotional patterns are inherited over generations and can be broken only through present moment awareness.

If we find ourselves reactive and overwhelmed, it’s because some aspect of our past is interfering with the present – either an emotion that was left dangling and unintegrated, or a fear-based myth we were conditioned with that’s now paralyzing our ability to act in an empowered way.

If we dare to ask ourselves why our current situation is overwhelming us, the present can be a powerful portal for transformation.

We need to take responsibility to raise ourselves to a higher level of maturity.

Enlightenment comes from letting go of our dependency on others to fill the void we feel within.

The liberated self doesn’t emerge overnight.  It arrives as layer after layer of our ego gets peeled off and replaced with mindfulness and the wisdom that comes with it.

Every moment is a new one, and the key to navigating any situation is to listen to the messages embedded in each moment.

Entering the present moment means joining with the “as-is” of a situation without resistance.

Acceptance of the present moment doesn’t mean you are passive or resigned to things.  It simply means that the sting of emotional charge is taken out of the situation.

Grounding ourselves in the present means we enter each moment in a state of aliveness and receptivity.

The universe responds to the belief systems we harbor within.

Acceptance of the “as is” of a situation brings grace, surrender, and most of all gratitude.

If anything is to change in our life, we need to have zero negativity about our “as is” reality.

Your desire to feel differently is stopping you from living in the now.

To shift from believing that life happens to us, to understanding that life happens for us and with our participation, enables us to find the jewel in every experience.

Most of us prefer to blame someone for what we encounter in our external world instead of picking up on what’s being mirrored back to us about ourselves.

To talk from the heart instead of the head means to say little.

Although our desire may be strong, things take time to manifest in the physical universe.  Nothing happens before its time.  For this reason we can’t rush life in order to assuage our insecurity and anxiety.  In fact, the more insecure and anxious we are, the more we interfere with the positive vibes we send out and the longer things take to manifest themselves.

All the beautiful things in nature require time and space to emerge.

When we feel our feelings, we don’t have time to engage in reactive emotions.  We tune in and allow the feelings to speak to us, wash over us, and transform us.  Aware that we are under waves of feeling, we do the opposite of emoting.  We hush up, become still, and allow the significance of the feelings to grow us up.

Our feelings are barometers of our soul, whereas our emotional reactions are indicators that our ego has become activated.

Consumed with a mythical standard of “how things should be”, we often feel we have no choice but to react.  We are compelled.  However, by examining each reaction and identifying which myth is driving it (and often it’s more than one), we can begin to tame our reactivity.  All that’s required is to observe what we tell ourselves in such situations.

By allowing your fear to be as it is and recognizing it for what it is, you integrate it.

Painful experiences have the potential to deepen us in a far more profound way than “happy” experiences often do. By putting us in touch with our limitations or fallibility, they remind us of our common humanity, dispelling all need for one-upmanship.

When we truly feel empathy for another, there is no agenda.  A genuinely empathic response immediately recognizes that the other is in a state that’s vastly different from our own, and that in order to connect with them we will have to forgo completely our own agenda. This swift letting go requires an alive presence that understands how connection with another is an engagement in which energy flows back and forth moment by moment with no guarantee in how things will end up.

Anxiety is normal, so don’t worry about the fact that you are anxious.  Treat it just like you do excitement or happiness. Just allow it to be, neither denying it nor resisting it.  When we neither deny or resist it, anxiety turns rogue.  Better to face it in its raw and natural state.  Then, in its own time and way, it will diminish. Not because we have driven it away by force, but because we have grown out of it with grace.

Awareness is fundamentally different from having an internal dialogue with yourself.

When we are mindful, we simply observe our internal dialogue, but we don’t get involved in it.

Awareness is transformative, whereas self-talk is debilitating, since we can never talk ourselves into a more effective way of living.

How did our ego develop?  Although it often represents itself violently – against either the self or others – it really develops out of a quiet desperation of spirit.

Most of us had to develop false ways to cope with our childhood realities, ways that started out as protecting us from the pain of parental rejection but ultimately became the chains that kept us bound to them even more.

Fear is the reason our parenting somehow manages to produce results that are the exact opposite of what we were aiming for.

The experiences of our childhood create a template upon which we build our life.  From this template emerge our current patterns of behavior.

All disciplinary issues with children occur because of a lack of discipline within the parent.

The more immature we are emotionally, the more our children will present us with complexes, insecurities, and behavior problems.

Aggression is actually a form of defensiveness.

It’s a mistaken idea that conflict needs to be adversarial.

Relationships are partnerships, not dictatorships.

If we didn’t already carry pain within us from our own upbringing, we wouldn’t react unconsciously.

Awareness requires us to hold a dual lens, one facing inward and the other outward.

Our insatiable need to direct, encourage, improve, and manage ruins wonderful moments of potential closeness.

The more ungrounded and insecure we are, the more insensitive, rigid, and righteous we are likely to become.

Our children come into our life to present us with an opportunity to raise ourselves, growing ourselves up.

Every moment in the parenting process serves as a wake-up call for us.

When we look closely, we see that a child’s “goodness” is masked by how easily the child’s behavior fits into our life… We love “good” children because they allow us to feel in control.

Parenting involves a lifelong commitment to changing and growing on a moment-by-moment basis.

Love… is the ability to fully see, accept, and honor the other person for who they are.  To love someone consciously is to harness the ability to step outside of our own self and consistently connect with the other.  It means we don’t ask the other to love us back, and neither do we set conditions for how they should love us if they choose to do so.  In other words, our feelings don’t come into the mix.

We equate happiness with the outcome of events, not the process.

The key is to … stay in touch with [your] inner power and not feel defeated by how life presents itself to [you].

Dispel all illusion that it’s [anyone’s] fault when I react.

I don’t see… behaviors as triggers.  I see my own wounding as my trigger, and [the] behavior as just the match that enflames it.

Understanding what enflames our inner wounds is important and fundamental to stopping our outer reactivity.  But we need to come to this understanding without judgment or blame.