Top 20 Tips for a Better Relationship with Your Teen #19 is ‘Share funny stories of your life with them. Laugh with them often’. Really great if it’s a story from your teen years.
One of my funny stories is from my high school years. It was the Spring Festival and I was a star ballerina in a skit that was rehearsed as a serious, beautiful, spring movement. My partner was one of our star football players, one well accustomed to performing before crowds of people.
We rehearsed for weeks. Finally got it perfect…lifts and all. Day of the performance…on stage…he FROZE! I was running up to and into him expecting him to lift me, twirl me, regal me. Get a picture of me running to fling myself at him repeatedly and he’s frozen in place like a statue!
Every time I ran to the sidestage, I’d could be seen flailing hysterically at the Director, begging her to make him MOVE! I was distressed but the audience thought it was hysterically FUNNY! People thought it was HILARIOUS!
I wonder to this day if it was a setup…that the Director told him to freeze… The more I think about it the more I think…maybe…
Whenever I hit a low point in my evolutionary scale, I turn to my art work. Creating some thing out of no thing is a physical and spiritual mantra for me. It soothes my anxious heart.
There have been many and varied low points in my life. The most severe was when love was lost, immediately followed by a lost business and finances. It was particularly wrenching. Depression…at the time, I had a little mouth to feed in addition to my own. I had at hand a pencil and paper. To draw or write.
Pencil, paper, little watercolor sets served as free therapy. I was not really conscious of the process at the time. Just soothing a busy mind and wounded spirit…a built-in gauge that kicks in when happy gets too low.
Nowadays I’m fully aware of what was happening – I was mirroring creation as our God creates…a birthright…a getting back to the spiritual roots. I was being rescued by my Self….the child of God within…the one who watches silently from within my walls of flesh.
I dare say we all have this capability to create. The crux of the matter, though, is, do we fully appreciate the magnitude of this gift…the ability to create. Do we understand that it is harnessed lightning…from the mind of God to our hands. Do you respect, cherish and use yours?
What is your creative means for preserving the happy and thwarting depression?
When I think of saving my breath, I have a number of different fronts to address. There is the literal ‘save your breath’ as in ‘clean the air’, there is the figurative ‘save your breath’ as in ‘stop talking, no one is listening’ and there is the ‘save your breath’ that is the combination of the two and speaks to saving your life. Many meditation practices recommend we begin the practice with focus on the breath… the gentle inhale and exhale that keeps us alive.
Our children need to be taught at a young age how to calm themselves through the focus on their breath. Through their QUIET release of thoughts with every breath, a deeper silent conversation beings. In this silence, their problems can be conquered. The sooner they learn this, the happier they’ll be…. and happiness is what we do EVERYTHING for.
A combination of clean air and silence cannot be beaten when it comes to mental clarity, understanding paradox, accessing wisdom and paradigm shifts. I’m in the midst of a shift right now. I know, I know, I’ve been shifting for quite a while now but I finally have the right gear. I’m taking my own advice now and saving my breath. Saving it now for what I really want to say and shifting to that ULTIMATE happiness available to us parents NOW!
What is this ULTIMATE happiness available to us NOW? KNOWING that as we seek it, it is seeking us. KNOWING that we have been found and our children, our lives are cues for our DECISION to ‘click and accept’ it! Happiness is a choice.
What difficulty do you have, if any, in maintaining your happiness or bliss?
Parents! Relax! All is well. All you need is an endless supply of cash, energy and patience. What you need is a means to usher in various opportunities for the aforementioned amenities to manifest!
Now, I know you think I’m being glib about this but I’m serious. It is in the ‘quiet’ moments, the ‘peace’ of mind, that we are able to bring forth our most efficient ideas for wealth creation, our most laser focused energy, our deepest reserves of patience when most needed (be it child discipline, nutty adults or bad traffic).
I propose, to help us usher in various opportunities, that we ‘seize moments’. We take hold of them, capture them and melt into them silently, thoroughly, lovingly. Melt into moments and extend them into minutes, then hours. From this exercise, will materialize, surprisingly deep wells of patience, a fulfilled life fed by lots of energy and mountains of cash. I know. It’s happened to me. I’ve done this before.
But, how to ‘seize the moments’? When you find yourself at the end of a sentence in your busy head, stop there and hold the silence, the space between sentences, for as long as you can. When I find myself ‘waiting’ anywhere, I ‘seize the moment’. When feeling compelled to ‘say it for the hundredth time to your kid’, put the Save Your Breath CD on to say it for you, then go ‘seize the moment’.
What other ways can you think of to ‘seizing the moment’?
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