|
Saturday, 03 May 2008 17:00 |
|
The following article is offered for free use in your ezine,
print publication or on your web site, so long as the author
resource box at the end is included, with hyperlinks.
Notification of publication would be appreciated.
Title -Valentine Moments With Your Children Author - Margaret
Paul, Ph.D. E-mail- mailto:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Copyright-
© 2004 by Margaret Paul Web Address -http://www.innerbonding.com
Word Count: 812 Category: Parenting
VALENTINE MOMENTS WITH YOUR CHILDREN By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.
One of the things I loved doing as a child was making very fancy
and creative valentines for my parents. I would spend hours
designing and building wonderful cards with little poems in
them. The only problem was that, while my mother would receive
her card graciously, she never received it with her heart. She
would smile and tell me how lovely it was, but I never felt her
love coming back to me. My mother did not know how to open her
heart, how to smile at me with love and cherishing in her eyes.
My father would never even notice his card.
I wanted to connect with my parents, to share love with them, to
know their hearts, but their hearts were hidden. Sadly, my
mother died last year at the age of 85 without ever being able
to truly share her heart with me. My father is 91 and his heart
has always been closed.
Your children need to feel your heart and soul. They need you to
take the time to stop what you are doing and just be with them.
They need you to really see them – to see who they are beneath
their outward ways of being.
One of the greatest gifts we can give to our children is to see
their essence, their true Self, their individual expression of
Spirit within them. When children are deeply seen and valued by
their parents, they learn to see and value themselves. All
children need this profound mirroring from their parents to feel
intrinsically lovable and worthy.
The problem is that we cannot see the souls of our children and
embrace their intrinsic worth unless we see our own intrinsic
worth. If you suffer from core shame - if you feel intrinsically
unworthy, unlovable, not good enough, unimportant, or inadequate
- then you cannot energetically communicate to your children
their inherent worth. Your own feelings of unworthiness will be
projected upon them, no matter how loving you try to be with
them. You can let them know in many ways how wonderful they are,
but when they energetically pick up your core shame, they will
either integrate that shame into their own beings, or move into
the opposite direction, believing that they are superior to you,
which can cause entitlement issues.
In order to love and cherish your children in the way they need
to be loved and cherished, you need to love and cherish
yourself. The greatest gift you can give your children this
Valentine’s Day and every day is to embrace a daily process of
healing your own core shame, a process such as Inner Bonding.
(For a free Inner Bonding course, see www.innerbonding.com).
Core shame comes from two different sources:
If you were shamed as a child for who you are, you may have
absorbed these false beliefs about yourself and continue to act
as if they are true.
If you were not loved in the way you needed to be loved, you
might have decided at a young age that it was your fault that
you were not being loved – that you were flawed, inadequate,
unworthy, and so on. Core shame is often connected with a need
to have control over getting love, so a child may decide, “If
it’s my fault that I’m not being loved because there is
something wrong with me, then there is something I can do about
it. I can try to become the “right” way and then people will
love me.” Sometimes we stay attached to the belief in our core
shame to maintain the illusion that we can actually control how
others feel about us and treat us.
If you commit to a daily Inner Bonding process of loving
yourself and letting go of trying to get love from others, you
will find that your core shame gradually resolves. Core shame
resolves when we let go of believing that we cause others to
feel and behave the way they do. As you heal your core shame,
you can love your children from your true Self, your own
individual expression of Spirit within. When your children
experience your love for them from your true Self rather than
from your wounded self that carries your core shame, they will
feel your heart and know that they are truly lovable and worthy
of being loved.
As Valentine’s Day approaches - this day of sharing love – why
not commit to learning to love yourself so that you can deeply
share love with your children? There is nothing more profound
than the sharing of love that comes from an open heart. Your
children need and deserve to have this sacred experience with
you. Because children often project their experience of their
parents onto God, their ability to stay spiritually connected as
adults is greatly facilitated by your own heart connection with
them.
|
