you know many people think that conscious parenting is about never saying no to our kids you know treating them like these fragile little statues in a in a closet and putting bubble wrap around them and and only feeding them what they want it's not about that it's really about attuning with the child you know what does the child need right now can i not power trip my child can i just not do things because that's the way parents do things no it's about something in between it's about negotiating it's about a tuning it's about engaging
it's about connecting with our children and i think parents want the easy way you know either i'm like this or guess what i'm nothing and this is just the parents way of being lazy you know and not doing the work of kind of treading that middle space i'm dr shafali i'm a clinical psychologist and wisdom teacher i went down the path of pursuing a phd in clinical psychology but along the way i also began this intense journey of my own awakening i began meditating really seriously i began to understand that all of our suffering is
really created in our mind and i became fascinated with the workings of the mind and really became focused on uncovering the root causes of my own suffering and then inevitably helping my clients with it i found that this approach of east meets west was quite unique i didn't know there were not too many people doing it and it really allowed me to accelerate my power to help people liberate from suffering so i have a 16 year old daughter and it's quite an adventure you know simple things like she wants to go out at night and
she wants to go out with a group of boys and she'll tell me mom they're like my brothers you know they're like my best friends she doesn't know that i know that boys who drink too much can get out of control and they could harm her possibly she doesn't know that i'm driving myself crazy with all these fears so she thinks i'm being controlling when i ask her who's going what are their numbers what who are their mothers give me their mother's phone numbers she thinks i'm a raving lunatic she doesn't realize that things can
get out of control on the other hand i don't realize that these boys are good kids perhaps perhaps they are best friends perhaps she can trust them perhaps they will protect her right so it's this constant battle of who knows more and at some point you know honestly the parent has to kind of relinquish their desire for control because especially with a 16 year old they're going to go out into the world very soon on their own they've got to kind of flap their wings and try it out and test things out and part of
that is having your heart broken or drinking too much or not knowing where to stop and when to come home this is part of the growing phase i mean i made a bazillion mistakes as a teenager so i know that that's how i learned so now i have to give my child the opportunity to learn through our own mistakes [Music] people can naturally ask you know why should we trust you like what's so special about you and trust me before i wrote my first book i too sat with myself and asked you know there have
been hundreds of parenting books what's going to be special about yours and i think what's unique about my message is that it truly gets to the core of the suffering of the parent because i've worked with so many innumerable thousands of families and spoken to you know hundreds of thousands of people now um i've begun to understand human nature and i've begun to understand the parents mind and the parents attitude and i deconstruct that and i study that and i've analyzed the trends that make us as parents stressed out anxious unhappy dysfunctional and i offer
my insights so i and i and i always tell people you know don't follow me the last thing i want you to do is treat me like i'm some exalted guru i help people discover their own truth i help them to discover their own wisdom and i think that's what's perhaps maybe different about me i don't offer them a technique or an easy fix solution no i make them go inside themselves and do the hard work and find their own wisdom and discover that they knew all the answers all along they know their child better
than anyone and so i really do not take the responsibility of being the leader the expert or the guru i really give that power back to parents and i train them and teach them how to cultivate their own knowing and i think that's what's really empowering about my message so i'm so excited to be working with vision and mind valley because we have created this amazing quest it's called the conscious parenting mastery quest so you may know a quest is 35 days of this incredible journey that i lead parents on where i take them through
different lessons week by week you know say week one we uncover our patterns and we go into our childhoods and we see how mom and dad messed us up and then say in week two we uncover our fears and our greatest dreams for our children uh talk about our emotional toolkits as parents and i teach parents how to expand their toolkits or we talk about boundaries and discipline and why discipline doesn't work and what will so week by week i take parents on this journey toward uncovering their greatest anxieties towards taming their greatest anxieties and
really releasing them and eventually the parent comes out at the other side more liberated more joyful and more connected with their children so i'm so honored that mindvalley is doing this because the message of conscious parenting really needs to be out there in the world and this is one more pathway to spreading it to many many more parents who need it [Music]
