Shefali Tsabary - The Parenting Map

May this book serve as a wake-up call to all of us parents,

so we realize that our children are never ours to own,

nor to control, manage, produce, or create.

Their presence is bestowed upon us for one reason only:

to ignite our own inner prophetic and profound revolution.

May we all heed this call

so that we can free them

to be.

I feel no pain greater than your heartache,

No joy greater than your triumph,

No agitation greater than your tumult,

No despair greater than your desertion.

There is no emotion compared to what you invoke,

No experience that comes near parenting you,

No journey I would rather take than by your side,

No adventure I would rather choose than to watch you grow.

You, my dear child, are my greatest teacher.

Through you I learn how to love without control,

To caretake without possession,

And to raise myself before I raise you.

In the face of your astounding radiance, I realize I am nothing.

Yet the fact that you exist suggests that I am everything

As expansive as your heart

And as limitless as your potential.

There is nothing I can give you

For you already house the sun within,

Iridescent and prismatic,

Inexhaustible and powerful beyond measure.

I may give you birth and hearth,

But without a doubt, it is you who have given me life

And an awakening I could never have imagined on my own.

And therefore, it is you who are my ultimate soul retriever.

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I just dont know what to do! All I know is that whatever I am doing is just not working anymore! Dianes eyes were swollen with tears of helplessness and frustration. Her body was stooped over, and her hands were shaking uncontrollably. She was talking about the trials she was experiencing with her nine-year-old son, who was becoming increasingly aggressive and withdrawn. She didnt know where to turn. Was it his addiction to social media that had created this change in her son? Or his peer circle? Or school pressures? Or his dominating baseball coach? Or was she the causeand the fact that she was busy with her four-year-old daughter, who had her own challenges? What was the problem? How could she fix the situation? Diane was tired of the daily battlesall that arguing and fighting. How had things come to this? She was at a complete dead end.

Mirrored in her desolation was the desperation of a thousand parents with whom I have worked over the decades. In fact, I could even see myself in her heartache. I could completely relate to her panic and her trembling fears about losing connection with her kid. Her words echoed all the times I have felt myself in a total deadlock with my daughter, Maia. If you are a parent, I bet you, too, can relate to the dejection of feeling you are at an impasse with your kids but just dont know how to turn the situation around. Or that sinking feeling that no matter how hard you try, you just cannot reach them in the ways you wish you could. Diane was at a stalemate, and she was exhausted from banging her head against the wall. She was burned out.

Like Diane, most parents are desperate to improve or fix their relationship with their kids. For many of us, this is our most important relationship, bar none. When our relationships with our kids suffer, we suffer. Few things bother us more than the relationship with our kids going awry. We would do anything to help them feel supported and connected to us, but many of us just dont know how to achieve this. I truly believe that, no matter their age, race, or income level, every single parent has experienced something like Dianes tribulations. We have all been there, done that. This is the nature of parentingit often feels as if we are lost at sea without a compass.

As I do with many parents, I helped Diane with a step-by-step plan to recover and renew her relationship with her son. After many breakthroughs, Diane was able to learn new strategies to transform her relationship with her son from chaos to connection. Watching their relationship unfold into a joyful and empowered one was deeply heartwarming. This is the reason I am so passionate about my work in helping parents become more conscious, as it creates metamorphic shifts in their relationships with their kids. Bearing witness to these shifts is truly one of the most rewarding gifts ever.

There were days during my daughters childhood when I felt utterly clueless and helpless and didnt know where to turn. I felt I was failing miserably at parenting her, which in turn made me feel lonely and terribly guilty. The predictable cycle would go as follows: she did something I didnt like, I got upset, I yelled or was mean, she cried, and I felt guilty. Feeling guilty led me to overcompensate and indulge her, which allowed her to take advantage of my softness, which led to my dropping my boundaries again and her not listeningyet again. The cycles were so predictable that it was tragic. I felt disconnected and hopeless. Even more, I felt enraged and resentful. I knew that this was not a good sign at all. I desperately needed to fix this situation.

It wasnt until I began to develop the approach of conscious parenting that I broke out of my endless negative cycles and began anew. By implementing the tools and strategies of this amazing approach, I began to find my way back to the path of a joyful and renewed connection with my daughter. By offering me a road map, conscious parenting literally saved my relationship with her. I was no longer floating at sea but instead had a concrete direction forward to build a powerful and deep relationship with her.

I get the pains and joys of parenting. I have been engaged in it for more than twenty years now, both personally and professionally, and have smelled its roses and felt its thorns almost every single day. Our love for our kids can take our breath awayboth in its limitless expansiveness and in its heartbreaking anxiety. It is the perfect cocktail of the most piercing adoration and the most excruciating fear. This is what our kids do to our souls: they expand them as never before, but also twist them to a pulp and throw a dagger at them. Then they walk away without even noticing.

I never thought such a cocktail of love and fear was even possible until I became a mom. I didnt realize that having children could take so much out of us. Kids drain us almost 24-7 not just on a financial and energy level, but also on an emotional and psychological level. Children have a 360-degree impactall around us, all the time, and potentially for the rest of our lives. The enormity of this burden didnt hit me until I was a mom myself. Before that I was clueless as to what was really involved. I was buying the Hallmark version of motherhoodthe birthday cakes, puppy dogs, and playing in the park version.

You see, no one tells us about the other side of parenthood and what it does to us parents on a psychological level. I dont believe any of us knew about the dark side before parenthood. We didnt know about all the times we would be rendered absolutely helpless and clueless about how to handle the myriad of situations that parenting throws at us. Maybe our kids are being bullied, or cannot keep up at school, or dont fit in with their peers, or refuse to go to college, or are being abused by an intimate partner. No one gives us a tool kit for these heartbreaking situations, do they? No, we are left to our own poorly conceived devices. Certainly no one warns us about how devastated we might feel when our kids reject us, our influence, or our authority, or how immaturely we might react in response to this rejection. Nope, we are thrown into the high seas of this emotional relationshipperhaps the