The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Thursday, March 10, 2005

4th Chakra--Heart and Relationships

Measuring by the comments received on the last blog post, the question of: "what is the proper relationship between parent and child?  What can we do to influence their behavior?  What are the limits of the appropriate, the reasonable, or the doable?"  Is of great interest. I wish this was an arena in which I had enormous clarity.  The truth is that human interactions are more art than science.  But the arena of the 4th Chakra--the heart--is of such great importance in the overall Lifewriting process (note that the only form of pure meditation we recommend is Heartbeat Meditation) that we need to address this, and give a bit more time.
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Understand here that nothing I say about parenting is intended to hurt.  Our children are their own beings, and will go their own way.  Be that as it may, we also know that we have great influence over them.  Sigh.  How to balance our dreams and the achievable?  Further, the 4th Chakra involves more complex relationships--those with our wives, husbands, significant others.  These involve sex, power, and survival.  Navigating these waters is going to be tricky.  I can only go stream of consciousness here, try to speak the truth as I see it, and give you guys a chance to tear me a new one.  Together, hopefully, we can peel back some of the layers of social convenience, and get a little teeny bit closer to something useful.
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So to get this started, I'll say that, although no behaviors are guaranteed to get a specific positive response from your kids, you can be pretty close to 100% clear that they will NOT respond to "Do as I say, not as I do." So the idea of coherance, of walking your talk, is critical.  The best thing about this parenting principle is that it is identical with an approach to a healthy, happy life.  And what makes this so great is that it's not something you're doing "for the kids."  YOu don't get to say, twenty years from now, "you owe me because I was coherant, because I walked my talk."  I think that's another important thing: what you do for your kids, you are doing for yourself.  They owe you nothing but respect.  Parents can completely screw up their relationship with their kids with the guilt-tripping "what I gave up for you" nonsense.  anything I did for Nicki I did because that was the kind of person I am committed to being.  If I had left her in the Northwest and gone back to Southern California after her mother and I broke up, few people would have blamed me.  But I castigated my father for not being there for me, and it would have been scathingly hypocritcal not to live up to a standard I imposed on that good and decent man. So I sacrificed aspects of my career to be a father.  Not for Nicki, you note.  I did it for myself, and if I ever hold it over her head, I will have diminished myself. 
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At any rate, it's almost time for the Daily Show.  I'll talk more about this tomorrow.  Night, guys!

Steve

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