My own personal experience of conscious parenting is that it isn't easy, but the current result is so much more than I could have envisioned. My unconscious thought process was to be the best parent I possibly could and to provide my child with a better childhood than I myself experienced. A beautiful concept, but what I didn't realise was how much my own parenting was moulded by the unhealed wounds I carried from my own childhood. And, once you see the learned behaviours within your own parenting approach, you can't unsee them. It's a process and a journey that takes time and patience with acceptance that it's not about being the perfect parent but working towards a deeper, more conscious parent-child bond where we accept our mistakes and open to learning through each other's emotions with awareness in order to provide our child the tools so they can make different choices and not repeat the same learned behaviours.
It's so much deeper than learning a new set of tools for parenting. Each parent has their own unique experience and the same applies for the child. How those experiences relate to each other will be unique and different for everyone. It's about having the conscious awareness as a parent to look beyond our unconscious behaviours to pause, reflect and choose differently in order to decide what we take forward. It's about becoming curious about both our own and our child's behaviours to learn where they come from, is it something learned and what the emotional reactions are trying to communicate. Some of our own reactions as parents come from our own upbringing that our children learn, some of our reactions are from our own experiences and when we meet ourselves through our children we become more self aware.
It's important not to judge and to have compassion with ourselves throughout the journey. I organically moved into conscious parenting through my own personal healing journey. When I learned to recognise my own behaviours and patterns with better awareness as to where they came from there was a pivotal moment and realization that if I was this way based on my own childhood experience then what is my own child experiencing. The truth be told as a deep feeling and sensitive to emotions, the reality felt deeply painful to accept but it's accepting this truth that allows us to become more aware and positively selective around how we build the foundation with our children to break the cycles and open up the relationship bond in a way I never thought possible. It is incredibly powerful but does take time, patience and compassion dealing with the complexities of individual emotions, triggers from both parent and child.
We are not simply parenting but instead playing a part in our child's journey that they get to carry with them one small moment at a time where we as parents get to decide how that journey continues.