- [Voiceover] The Parenting Junkie.
- Welcome back to The Parenting Junkie,
the place to go to love parenting
and for parenting from love.
Today I'm gonna be sharing
a little bit of my past experience with my four year-old
and changes in sleep patterns.
From his earliest days,
I used to describe my son as sleep-resistant,
or as a difficult sleeper.
You name it, rocking, nursing to sleep,
rescheduling our lives around nap time,
complete pitch-black darkness,
white noise machines, swaddling,
we did it all.
He has always been
a very alert and observant person
and he was never the type of child
who would just put his head down,
or just doze off at times.
It almost looked like he was fighting to stay asleep,
awake, fighting to stay awake. (laughter)
When I started to learn about conscious parenting
from the incredible Dr. Shefali,
a true soul teacher of mine,
I began to internalize one of the movements'
main messages and that is that whatever lack
we are perceiving in our children,
is in fact a reflection of our own selves
and a lack in our own selves.
Rather than looking to fix a problem in our child,
we need to embody the change ourselves.
I thought okay, that makes sense.
If I want my child to be polite,
I should say please and thank you,
but my son doesn't even see me go to sleep,
how would changes in my own sleep affect his?
But somehow, on a more spiritual level if you like,
it resonated for me and I felt like
this was something that I needed to take seriously.
And so I began a conscious process
where I let go of my expectations for my son,
of his sleep and instead I began to focus on my own.
Or as Dr. Shefali says,
"We cannot expect them to become something
"that we are not willing to embody ourselves."
So as soon as I had made this shift,
I realized I had come up against something
really important for me.
I have had a history of nightmares for years and years
and I've always referred to myself as a light sleeper
or a difficult sleeper,
or someone who doesn't like to sleep
and I would make comparisons between
my husband and myself, saying that I couldn't
fall asleep as fast as him, or I couldn't sleep as long.
I also started to realize that I wasn't taking care
of my own time and I wasn't being protective
as I needed or wanted to be of my sleep.
So I began to focus on going to bed earlier,
on re-wiring my brain to think of myself
as a flexible, rested sleeper to kind of open up
the opportunity to change the way I thought about
myself as a sleeper and I began to
take more practical steps, like unwinding before bed
and going to bed earlier
and switching off devices in the evening hours
and that type of thing.
It was really just about opening up to the opportunity
of becoming a really great sleeper.
And at the same time, I began to analyze
what I might be projecting onto my son
and I really stopped saying things like,
why couldn't he get his father's sleep genes,
or he's a difficult sleeper
and instead we began cultivating a more trusting,
open and separating approach to his
sleep personality.
So we began to think of him as someone who
knows his own body and who can be trusted
that he will rest when he needs rest.
And also of course, to model this behavior ourselves,
even when he couldn't actually see it.
So our sentences began to sound less like this,
close your eyes and sleep,
go to sleep, it's time to sleep
and more like this,
you'll sleep when you're ready,
your body wants rest and you can listen to your body
and that type of thing.
We'd stop saying, please just go to sleep now
and start saying, can I stroke you while you rest?
And just taking the pressure off falling asleep
and having more trust.
We stopped getting upset and frustrated
that he woke up at 5:30 am every day
and began to accept and embrace even,
that this is his body clock and we are the ones
who need to adjust our expectations
and our schedules to accommodate that.
All of these perhaps seemingly minor shifts
accumulated into a very big paradigm shift in our family
and sleep is no longer an issue
that we even really think about,
it just comes more naturally.
As Dr. Shefali says,
"You don't fix your child.
"You create conditions for them to rise."
So, if you're struggling with sleep,
I hope this little story might inspire you
to think about your own relationship to sleep,
your expectations, perhaps your unrealistic
expectations of your child's sleep
and what stressful energy,
what pressures you might be bringing to the table,
what projections, what history.
I'd love to hear if Conscious Parenting has helped you,
in this or other areas of your life,
cause for me it's simply trans-formative.
The best place to have this discussion
is over at theparentingjunkie.com.
So head on over there now and leave a comment.
If you liked this, I would love for you to share it
with anyone who you think it might help
and keep on parenting from love,
because your kids need you
almost as much as you need them.
See you next time!
Bye-bye.