This sixtieth episode is an excellent way to sustain your own personal heart-practices. We also hope it will be a supportive tool for you to offer to your clients, patients and colleagues.
Today’s stressful world and all its unpredictable changes often create challenges in our home life. Many of today’s issues are adding mental and emotional strain on parents. Our’children and grandchildren feel these stressors too, which can lead to an increase in undesirable behaviors – such as acting out, talking back, not listening, etc. As patience is tested, many parents try to correct and control their kids’ attitudes and actions, without a lot of success.
In this episode, Dr. Jorina Elbers, Pediatric Neurologist, Trauma and Parenting Specialists, and Program Director for the Trauma Recovery Project at the HeartMath Institute, shares with host Deborah Rozman how she and her husband Owen have found that by focusing first on their own emotional self-regulation then tuning to their heart for intuitive direction, their communications with their boys has become much more effective.
Jorina also shares a couple of powerful heart tools she uses to manage her personal energy and shift into a heart coherent place which enables her to reduce over-reacting to their undesirable behaviors. She says many parents are told to just breathe to avoid reacting, however if we don’t add heart coherence to a situation, we often end up lecturing a child which shuts down communication. Learning how to shift into heart coherence is key for increasing a parent’s or grandparent’s ability to respond in a way that empowers them in adverse situations – and kids do take notice.
Jorina and Deborah discuss how we can allow children to experience intense emotions in a healthy way. Rather than scolding their behavior, using heart-directed practices can validate their emotions, which helps to defuse their energy and allows for a deeper heart connection and communication to unfold – uncovering what’s really going on.
Jorina says, "When we elevate our personal energy first, get into a heart coherent space, we can then also help our kids to elevate their energy. When you have kids and parents working together in this way, the connection and communication can be very deep and rewarding."
The episode closes with a guided heart meditation to help us energize our commitment to elevate our own energy first and better help our children.
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