Whether you watch the news or Umbrella Academy, or both, the feeling of an impending apocalypse weighs heavily on the humans currently living in 2020. People in the United States are kind of obsessed with superheroes and stories about saving the world. Even the most popular religion in this country is based on the idea of a god-man with super powers who saves the world from…God. Yeah…we won’t go there. It’s kind of embarrassing…
Anyway. Where was I?
Oh yes, saving the world.
This message is for all the parents, caregivers, teachers, and literally anyone who spends any significant amount of time with small children: You are our only hope.
Actually, it’s the children who will save the world by fixing all the idiotic mistakes that we have made while attempting to conquer and dominate this planet.
Our job is to allow children to be their true, authentic selves.
Ah, good, that sounds easy enough, right?
Okay, so you’re ready for step 1:
Stop punishing or disciplining children.
That includes judging what they do as right or wrong, good or bad. Keep your fucking opinions to yourself, okay? Kids are impressionable, and they take what you say to heart. Don’t fuck them up by poisoning their pure, innocent minds with your bullshit ideas of morality. Seriously. Trust your child. They are actually more human than you, believe it or not. You have experienced so much trauma and pain in your life that you have been broken into so many tiny little pieces, and even Jesus can’t make you whole again (especially if you’re a millenial living through 2020). The sooner you realize that children are more whole and trustworthy than you can ever be (it’s okay, it’s not your fault — it was the adults that traumatized you as a child…which reminds me, you’re NOT going to repeat their mistakes, got it?), the sooner you will realize that children are literally the only hope for the survival of humanity on Earth, and it is they who are teaching us.
Step 2 is related:
Accept each child for who they are without imposing any ideas or opinions on them.
This one might be a little harder than the first one. After all, there are plenty of permissive parents out there who don’t punish their kids. At least, they don’t discipline them in the traditional sense (but let’s not kid ourselves, neglect is a form of punishment). Step 2 could be switched with step 1 because it’s actually a prerequisite, but it is harder to accept children for who they are than to stop punishing them. Not doing something is easier than DOING something. Usually. In any case, for this step you will need to identify the behaviors, attitudes, and characteristics of children that you reject, and instead of expressing your negative, judgmental opinion, find the source of your feeling of resistance. This will inevitably lead you to trauma and you’ll need to do some shadow work and healing before you can move on to the next step. Does your child cry when they fall down? Let them express themselves. Ensure that they are safe, lovingly check for cuts or bruises, and perhaps offer an ice pack. Don’t dramatically swoop in to the rescue with, “oh my god, are you okay, honey? Are you hurt? Oh dear!!! Shhhh, I got you. It’s okay,” etc…Don’t tell them to “brush it off”, and for the love of humanity, don’t dismiss and invalidate them with “you’re okay”. Also if you’ve responded in any or all of those ways to a child in the past, it’s gonna be alright. To err is human. We are all learning. The important thing is to recognize our mistakes and learn from them. Repeating mistakes is stupid, and even worse — it’s going to result in the apocalypse. So brush it off — I mean, let’s move on, shall we?
Before we move on, I want to tell you a story. It’s not my story. It’s ancient wisdom from the Toltec people, as interpreted and shared with the world by Don Miguel Ruiz in the book The Mastery of Love:
“You can see how real love and freedom are destroyed by looking at children. Imagine a child two or three years old running and having fun in the park. Mom is there watching the little guy, and she’s afraid he might fall and hurt himself. At a certain point she wants to stop him, and the child thinks Mom is playing with him, so he tries to run faster from her. Cars are passing in the street nearby, which makes Mom even more afraid, and finally she catches him. The child is expecting her to play, but she spanks him. Boom! It’s a shock. The child’s happiness was the expression of love coming out of him and he does not understand why she is acting this way. This is a shock that stops love little by little over time. The child does not understand words, but even so, he can question, “Why?”. Running and playing is an expression of love, but it’s no longer safe because your parents punish you when you express love. They send you to your room and you cannot do what you want to do. They tell you that you are being a bad boy, or a bad girl, and that puts you down…In that system of reward and punishment there is a sense of justice and injustice, what is fair and what is not fair. The sense of injustice is like a knife that opens an emotional wound in the mind.”
Unless you were blessed with incredibly conscious parents, this story probably sounds all too familiar to you. Perhaps it touches on some of those old wounds from your childhood. Perhaps you have already inflicted such wounds on children and you are beginning to see what a mistake that is. How punishment is violence, and violence only creates more and more violence. I didn’t come up with that idea either, this brilliant person did:
Children are little bundles of love. Literally, they are pure love.
That’s why we feel love when we see them. We recognize love, even when we are so broken in our own pain that we cannot be the love that we so admire.
I know we don’t mean to destroy love, but when we are living subconsciously, we automatically operate from the programming we received as children. So if you grew up being judged, shamed, punished, or abused, you have been programmed with negative thoughts and beliefs that affect everyone and everything around you. How important is the subconscious mind? According to researcher Bruce Lipton…
Y’all. We adults are literally living on autopilot 95% of the time.
Guess who is NOT living on autopilot?
Yep. Bingo--young children between the ages of 0 and 7.
Small children are fully present in the moment. They love, they play, they express every single emotion known to humanity. At all times of day or night. Children are fully and completely expressing themselves. They hold nothing back — they don’t know how!
So please don’t teach them to hold back. Don’t judge, shame, or blame children. Because all those feelings of rejection are coming from the parts of you that are in pain. Recognize your own trauma and please, for the sake of humanity, do NOT pass your subconscious programming on to your children.
...Now, young Padawan, you are ready for step 3:
Become a student of young children.
This one may be a little difficult for some of you to accept. Especially those of you who are so broken that you have made for yourselves a false, inflated ego to protect you from anything that might touch the painful wounds you carry. It’s time to recognize and thank this false image of yourself for protecting you and let it go so you can face reality and heal. The key to your healing is learning from children. Young children are, with few exceptions (I’m thinking Tibetan monks?), the only beings on earth who are whole, unhurt, fully human and full of love. The way of healing is through love, so accept their love, even when it hurts. Like salt in a wound, the process of healing can be quite painful.
When you become a student of children, all of our ideas about right and wrong melt away, and we begin to exist as humans with feelings and needs. We begin to see the ways that society works within a system that doesn’t support meeting human needs. A system that denies and invalidates human feelings. Think about it…when was the last time you were aware of your own feelings and needs in any given moment? Our world and the systems in which we exist seek to numb and distract us from our own feelings and needs, essentially dehumanizing us.
It’s no wonder we consistently witness harmful, destructive behaviors…we have no idea what we are doing because we are so unaware of our own feelings and needs. We want so much to control and dominate the world that we fail to understand our own interconnectedness, our own place in the world. Humans are mammals. We are conscious, and other species may someday gain consciousness as well. Will we be around to see that?
There’s more, so much more. But start with these first three steps. See how you do.
If possible, don’t become a parent until you have healed yourself and become a conscious human being. If you’ve already become a parent and traumatized your children with your own subconscious programming, forgive yourself and start healing now. Your own healing will help your children heal. If you haven’t had kids yet, listen to Shefali Tsabary, author of The Conscious Parent and don’t procreate unless you are really prepared to save the world.