Mindfulness and Parenting: Mary Ann Christie Burnside

I'm very happy to be here tonight to talk to you about something that's very near and dear to my heart and an everyday practice for me. I began to study and practice mindfulness for myself about 10 years ago, before I had children. And so for me, mindfulness and parenting have unfolded together. And I think the two couldn't be more well suited to one another, and I want to tell you a little bit about why so. The home is our first community. It's our children's first community. It's where they learn what it's like to be in the world, what it's like to be a person, what it's like to be in relationships with other people. And we, as young people, as children, we construct mental models or maps in our heads of what all that means, right? As humans, we are sense-making beings, so we're making sense out of everything as it's happening all the time, even young children. And so these maps that we create in our heads as children, they stay with us for the rest of our lives, you know, unless and until we learn a new direction, a new map. So what we say and do matters more than we know. And we all have love and good intentions, right, in our families. But love and good intentions are not enough. And I'm going to tell you why. When things are going your way or my way as a parent, right, or as a person, it's pretty easy to be loving and easygoing and going with the flow, right? When things don't go our way, it becomes a lot harder, and here's why. It's natural for us to resist what's uncomfortable. You've heard a lot tonight about the amygdala and stress response, and all of that comes up in the body. So our natural state of mind is clear. We have clarity, right? I don't know if you can see. I'm holding up a glitter ball that I can see right through at the moment. There's clarity there, right? When things are going our way, it's easy to lead with love and good intentions. It's easy to speak and act skillfully in front of children, or I should say more easily, right, in here. When things aren't going our way, we get a little muddy inside, right? We get a little stirred up, and we get really stressed out, and the mind and body are connected. So whatever is happening in our mind is affecting our body, okay, and vice versa. So we can really get lost in our experience. We can move away from what's actually happening because we happen to be stuck in either our thinking about the experience, some emotional energy that's coming up as a result of the experience, or sensations in the body, right? Now, every present moment experience is comprised of those three things, thinking, emotion, and sensations in the body. When we're not aware of our direct experience in this moment, we're usually distracted, okay, and when we're distracted, we're not always aware of what we say and do. So we may say and do something that we regret. So before I continue, I'm just going to ask you to take a moment and think about what it's like to be you when you're resisting your experience, when you feel like this. And now I want you to extend the thought a little further. Think, imagine what it's like for your child to be watching and listening to you when you're resisting your experience, right? When you're struggling, when you're not really saying what you need, when you're reacting instead of responding, okay? So that's why love and good intentions are not enough. We need skills. We need skillfulness. And the way I talk about mindfulness often is that it is this kind of skillfulness. When we can drop into our present moment experience, literally drop in, noticing what's happening in my body, okay? Noticing what I'm thinking about this exchange I had with my child or my partner or whomever, a stranger. Noticing how I feel about it. What is the emotional energy going on right now? When I can really connect with my own inner experience, I am less likely to spill it all over the place, right? To dump it on somebody else or deny it completely. When I'm really with my present moment experience, I can skillfully manage that. I can skillfully handle that. So mindfulness, you know, you've heard some of it tonight. You've probably heard definitions before. I just want to share a little bit. So one of Jon Kabat-Zinn's definitions is mindfulness is paying attention on purpose to what's happening as it is happening without judgment as if your life depended on it, which is what it does. Another of his definitions that I really love is beautiful. Mindfulness is about spending time with yourself and knowing a little something about who that is. Okay? And so the mind is going to judge. And by judge, I mean evaluate. The mind is going to say, this is good, this is not good, this is safe, this is unsafe. That is a survival mechanism. There's a reason that that's there. Otherwise, I wouldn't be here, right, and neither would you. So we need that. But we can learn to pay attention to that and not necessarily act on that as soon as it comes up. Right? We can access the other part of our brain that allows us to make a decision about how we want to relate to our children, to the world, what we want to say and do. Right? By the way, those are the only two things we get to control, our own words and actions. That's it. When I finally figured that out, I had a lot of time on my hands. Okay? And so, and it's a big relief to me every day to remember that. Right? Those are the only two things I get to control. And guess what? That's what I said at the beginning of this talk. What I say and do. What you say and do. And it's not just about building healthy relationships with our children, which, of course, is important. It's essential. But when we are intentional with our words and actions, when we are skillful, we are also teaching our children how to be skillful because, again, they learn by watching and listening to us. They learn through observation. Right? Just like we learn. So, I want to tell you a little story about how this simple practice of noticing your inner experience and making choices about how to see in your outer experience, as simple as that sounds, as ordinary as that may sound, it can be very profound. So, one day my husband, the engineer, said to me, all right, look, in two words, can you tell me what this is all about? So, I had to think about that for a minute because I couldn't talk quite as good about myself. So, I said to him, okay, stop noticing. And he took our child to dance class that morning and he relayed this story to me later on when he got home. He said, wow, I did it instead and it made a huge difference. I said, tell me more. He said, well, I told her to get in the car because I didn't want to be late and she didn't want to get in the car. So, you can see that's a conflict right there. He wants her to get in the car, she doesn't want to get in the car. So, they kind of were each resisting their experience for a little bit. He remembered what I had said after he got himself all worked up, okay, and she got all worked up and he stopped and he noticed what was going on with him and what was going on with her and he decided to check in with her. He said, what's going on with you? Why haven't you been in the car? And she started yelling, feed the bird, feed the bird. There were Cheerios in her car seat and she wanted to leave them on the lawn for the bird. And he didn't know that and so he allowed her to do that and then she ran in the car and buckled herself and it was, you know, he was really blown away by the situation. So, I'm telling you this story because I want you to know that we all have this capacity inside, right? We're not going to become super people. We are who we are, okay? But what we can do is we can get more skillful. We can be more awake. We can be more intentional with our words and actions. So, mindfulness is not magic. It is not going to change your life overnight but with intention and effort that you make in a practice of cultivation skills, you will find that it's better than magic because it's actually real and it makes a lot of little differences every single day and small differences add up to something so big for you and your children and the wider community. Thank you for your time tonight.