Getting to Know You: How Our Children Become Our Zen Masters

or When their journey demands your truth.

In their book Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, authors Myla Kabat-zinn and Jon Kabat-zin talk about how our children can become our Zen masters. This take away alone makes the book worthwhile; it’s something to think about, perhaps meditate on, as you begin or are on the parenting journey. In the book they state how getting up to take care of your children is your practice, how brushing your teeth is your practice, and how not getting to brush your teeth because there is no time for you also becomes your practice.

So, as it seems that parenting is often all about everyone else, it can also become about you. Just not about you the way you thought it would be. Not perhaps the way you thought parenting, or even life would ‘be.’ These thoughts keep getting in our way. Thoughts of parenting, thoughts of life, thoughts of what is success, what is not success, competition. I struggle with competition more now than ever. I thought I’d escaped that condition but it haunts me now, chases me down, as I compare my life to others at this point. And I wonder, will I be successful, wondering if I’ll find my dream, even as I remind myself this is my life, this is my dream, right now.

Sometimes, I think it is this same competition that fuels parenting and leads us so far astray. Trying to mimic, when we are unsure what to do, and it ends up feeling unauthentic to ourselves and is just plain confusing to our kids as we’re also teaching them values about being honest and about respecting themselves and others. So, how do we parent authentically in an imperfect world? In a world where we as parents are imperfect people, the truth is contextual, and sometimes, the truth is so painful we try not only to hide it from others, but from ourselves as well.

Over the weekend, there came a point where Kathleen’s journey in her life demanded more truth about my life, my past, with her dad and well, I needed to know “how to tell”? How much to tell? Not only did we talk about what needed to be said, but also about how do parents share painful past histories? Each family has their own painful stories in both big and small ways. And both individually and collectively.

We try to show our children and each other what we’ve come to know in wisdom and guidance for their lives, but we all step in and outside of those lines, learning other truths, harder lessons, and how do we shape them and feel free to share these harder life lessons with those we love the most, those we hope so strongly to protect from these very life lessons? I shared with Kathleen, the irony of the story of the Buddha, whose father tried so hard to protect his son, Siddhartha, from any pain of life, as do most parents! But the Buddha left his protected life looking to find his own path, and he found in suffering that truth was the middle path, and left us this wisdom. We can’t escape the pain of life, but we can hope for the middle path, a balance of pain and joy.

As a therapist, I am prepared for hard stories, for sad stories, stories of loss of esteem, loss of love, loss of fortune and more. As a parent, I parented my children through their own valleys of the shadow of death and we are all mostly more towards the top of the hill right now, but roads twist and turn, irregardless of our hopes and/or choices. So, as parents how do we deal with our inner, personal struggles becoming shared life lessons? Perhaps, this is how our children, into adulthood, continue to be our Zen masters, if we let them. We follow down the path of what’s best for them, not considering the pain we need to go through to give them truth. We open our hearts, and tell our truths with compassion for ourselves, compassion for the past, and compassion for our children, on their own journey. Then perhaps, with each step, each breath, the universe opens us, and we, before we know it, have become our child’s Zen master.