How to Meet Chaos with Calm: 3 Minutes to Return to Parenting Sanity
Written By Marsha Austin
Cooped up at home trying to balance work and childcare, I’ve found my fuse short, anxiety and frustration lurking just below the surface of calm capability. My husband recently returned to full-time work at his office, leaving me at home to do the juggling act I know many of you have been doing for what we all feel is far too long.
As pandemic fatigue sets in, we hope this week’s episode brings you a simple, quick, powerful tool for making it without losing it.
In the episode “Take 5 for a Simple Exercise That Shifts Stress & Anxiety to Calm & Resourcefulness” Amy talks about how she uses a three-minute awareness and breathing exercise to maintain calm in the face of chaos.
“Any time I feel off kilter or when my kids are having big emotions. I can tell you, it works! As we face the uncertainty of the start of the school year and, well, life!”
You can get the details of how this magical exercise works by listening to the podcast.
LISTEN TO THE SOUL PATH PARENTING PODCAST
I’ve been using the heart-brain coherence exercise for over a year. It’s funny, but I never thought of using it specifically in parent-child moments of tension. I’ve used it when I want to smooth conflict with my husband, overcome fears during air travel, and any time I notice myself holding my breath, not taking complete breaths and feeling “edgy.”
As Becca Armstrong, the psychotherapist and creator of the exercise explained to me, the link between breath, brain, heart and states of anxiety begin to form in us as children. Some of us learned to breath out and then not fully breath back in – my particular pattern.
This is a sign of not wanting to inhale life fully, or not feeling safe enough to “let it all in,” according to Armstrong.
By running my breath without holding at the top or bottom – Armstrong describes it as pushing it around a water wheel – for several minutes, while focusing my awareness on my heart and my connectedness to all things, and to my loved one, I can come back from frazzled energy to the zone of flow.
This zone is where I find my intuition can run again, and where, with my daughter, I can access her natural intelligence, rather than operate out of my cray-cray mind.
I’m beginning a practice of going to this breathing exercise, watching and listening when my child is expressing “big emotions” instead of allowing myself to snap into unconscious parenting reactions stored in my past memory.
My husband and I have intuitively felt “off” about using the traditional punishment and reward system to influence the behavior of our daughter. I dreaded the appearance of the “star chart” on our refrigerator, and every time my husband rewarded Lexi, I would clarify that the star was for “good behavior” not “her being good…because you were born perfect, whole and good.”
But sometimes, even I would use M&M’s to bribe her to do what I wanted. Then I read in a parenting book: “Rewards are deceptive. We think we are improving spelling, getting the trash taken out, solving a problem, or correcting some form of inappropriate behavior, when the true goal of rewards and punishments sis control.”
“And who is most often the beneficiary of control? The controller!”
This next passage blew me away, and anchored my commitment to step back, breathe, watch, listen and tune in to my child’s world instead of knee-jerk reacting from mine.
“Punishments and rage break the child’s will, the capacity to overcome obstacles and explore the unknown, which is learning itself. They will leave him with no self-confidence, no faith in himself, and he will fumble or retreat at every little difficulty or challenge…That youngster will grow to be one of us, thinking one thing, feeling another, and acting in a way disconnected from both.”
Whoa. Goosebumps. Tears. Yah. Let’s take this opportunity right now, to breath, let go and go with the flow.
I hope that you will find many small moments of sanity, that grow into larger ones, by practicing coming coherence.
LISTEN TO THE SOUL PATH PARENTING PODCAST
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Author: Marsha Austin
Marsha is an award-winning journalist, content marketer, entrepreneur, and mother to a preschool-aged daughter. She loves diving deep into spiritual practices, while maintaining a light heart, and self-effacing sense of humor.
