I have had an enormous response to the email I sent out earlier this week, announcing the Intentional Awareness Training, schedule for June 10-12th located in Novato, California. A number of you asked for more information, particularly about how this work applies to parenting.
I think this timely story will bring it all home:
A few weeks ago while at a crowded picnic-carnival in an urban park, a 4-year-old child got entranced in a game of hide-&-seek with her friends.
Her mother turned her head for less than a minute to help someone move something, and while she looked away, her child ran off to hide.
A few minutes passed and when the other girls couldn’t find her daughter, they gave up.
The little girl’s mom called out for her daughter to come back, but the daughter didn’t respond.
Many of the parents at the park suddenly realized that this little girl was missing.
Within moments, a dozen parents were going into panic mode, and a few of them in tears. This is every parent’s worst nightmare.
The child’s mother, who is an extensively trained facilitator in the MythoSelf Process, intentionally applied the skill those who attend this program, will learn how to master at this upcoming program.
She fixated her attention with absolute intention and precision, in a way that kept her totally calm, fully alert and “in the zone”. She knew that panicking would only make her less likely to make good decisions and more likely to be distracted, things that in these critical moments were the opposite of what was needed to find her young child.
For over 10-15 dramatic and tense minutes, while some parents were freaking out, leading both themselves and the other kids to be in tears, this mom kept her composure and her intensity in tact, in spite of the fact that there was legitimate reason to be horrified.
When one of the other mom’s finally found the little girl hiding behind a large tree some distance away, she ran to the little girl scolding her for not responding when her mother called for her, causing panic in the suddenly shocked 4 year old.
Suddenly the little girl was sobbing and terrified, not knowing what she had done wrong. In her mind, she was just playing a game and totally unaware that adults were searching for her everywhere.
In seconds, the now sobbing little girl was reunited with her mother, who still, in spite of everything that had just occurred, was totally calm and composed. With the mother’s few words and totally congruent non-verbal message of reassurance that came from being calm and at-ease, the mom quickly got her daughter to stop crying and accept that everything was okay.
At the end of the day, when the little girl told her father about her day, she spoke of all the magical costumes, the face painting, the games with friends… with no mention of the hide-and-seek incident other than to say that she learned that hide-and-seek is a game that is only okay to play in certain environments and when she knows a grown-up is watching.
The next day at drop-off at school, no less than three parents came up to the girl’s mother not to ask how she was doing, but rather to comment on how amazed they were at how composed and calm she was in a situation where they themselves would have lost (or did lose) their composure and ‘clear-headedness’.
“How in the world were you able to handle yourself like that?” she was asked.
She has since emailed most of these mothers’ the information about, ˜The Art of Intentional Awareness™ a Mythoself program, with one simple line:
