Children Need Orientation, Parents Too

The welfare and future of our children is a theme that lies close to my heart, that is why I want to speak both to the parents here and to those with no biological children.
I have two daughters, one nineteen and the other almost ten.
I like being a mother.
There were times when I wouldn’t have said that, but now I can and it is true.
I have been living in ZEGG for 3 years; before that I lived in the metropolis – a large part of this time as a single mother. For the last three months I have been working in the children’s house here.

Parents need orientation in order to be able to pass orientation on to their children. Thus I will speak today about the relationship of the parents, in particular the mother, with their children and with their ‘being a mother’.

First a few fundamental thoughts:
We are all cosmic beings, i.e. systems that are open, receptive, and connected to everything.
Our children come onto this Earth with their own life dreams, just as we came to our own parents and we gave birth with our own intentions.  Children come to their parents as complete beings.
We as parents have the task of nourishing them, protecting them and furnishing them with their own space where they can grow physically and where their soul can blossom fully, according to their life task and life joy.
For me it is helpful to think that my daughter sought me out according to her needs for support in her life task and issues.
A quote from Sobonfu Some, The Gift of Happiness, p55
Each person searches for his life task before he is born.
But how do we find out what this life goal is?
When a woman is pregnant a ritual is performed, called the listening ritual. In this ritual the Elders of the village ask the unborn child:
Who are you?
Where do you come from?
Why are you taking the trouble to come into this messed up world? What can we do to make your journey easier?
The baby takes on the voice of the mother and answers:
I am this, I am coming to do this and that.
With this information the Elders create a suitable ritual  framework for the welcoming of the child and ensure that everything is prepared before the child is born.
We did the same here with our youngest resident, the 4-month old Hannah. We performed a similar ritual and we can clearly see that it had an effect. An example would be that she said: Don’t confuse me with my parents.

With this talk I would like to bring parenthood out of the shadows and fringes.
I want being a mother to be seen as one aspect of womanhood; and an aspect that increase womanliness and doesn’t cut it.
That’s why we need a new picture of the role of a mother, and around this to create a new picture of a liberated motherhood.
It’s all about a change in the picture of the love between a mother and child.

During this camp we have already had a few days of the Parents’ Forum and there we had a situation in which a mother used the following words to talk about her three-and-a-half year old son:
He doesn’t take me seriously – I don’t like how he treats me.
I said to her that if we hadn’t known that this person about whom she was speaking was three and a half years old, we would think that it was her partner.

There has to be an end of the power struggle between parent and child.
That is the reason why I choose today to verbalise things which may sound strange to your ears. We have a sentimental relationship to our children. We are projecting our own inner child onto our children. We have emotional tentacles – of  worry, neediness, boredom, our own fears, of interpretation – which we hook into our children.
We have a permanently guilty conscience because we can’t give them the respect and sphere of protection for their larger cosmic nature.
From this guilty conscience we stuff our children full of crisps, toys, we show them too much leniency, tolerance and give them an overly sheltered upbringing – and still permanently feel that we haven’t done enough.

The old picture of a mother is characterised by relationship and identification.
I’ll try to explain what I mean.
For example, identification means that I don’t have a problem but I am the problem.
It can mean that I don’t have a child, or have a child to look after, but that very often I am this child. Here is an example from my experience:
My 8-year old daughter is riding my big bicycle down from our apartment block to the ‘village inn’. She has a 2-Mark piece in her hand. The bicycle doesn’t have a back-pedal brake system. She is holding tight onto the money so as not to lose it. I am standing on the steps of the campus area and she is riding past me, downhill. Suddenly she screams that she cannot work the brakes.
I can already see the unavoidable crash, see myself fetching a plaster and comforting her, feeling her pain. The film is playing.
Then I notice what I am doing. I switch channels. I cry, “You can do it! Keep riding straight ahead!” I encourage her as if from the sidelines in a competition.
She keeps riding straight ahead and everything is OK. She still has her money and hasn’t crashed.
Such situations occur daily.

I have another example:
I normally wake my daughter up just before six, since she has to go to school. I wake up shortly before six and see that it is raining heavily. Immediately I think,” Oh God, I’ll have to take the children to school again” and pull myself together.
I can already see a ruined breakfast time.
I notice what I am doing.
I think, “Rain doesn’t hurt, my child is not made of sugar, there is nothing to worry about.” So I don’t say anything, I get up, my daughter gets up, also looks out of the window, has breakfast, puts on her rain clothes, sits on her bike and is off.
If I don’t change my programme in these situations then I can hinder my child’s own instinctual contact with the world..
I hinder the contact that she has to other people. And in particular I hinder her from making contact with her own power, source and energy for solving things.
Children still have a strong access to their source.

Example: Louisa
When my daughter was about six months old she often simply sat and stared into space. We developed the habit of laughing about this and bringing her out of it.
I had a friend who saw this and one day he gave me a right talking to! He said that we shouldn’t do that, shouldn’t disturb her since she was connected to her source, connected with cosmic space. “Leave her be.”
This moment influenced my behaviour from then on.

I never have so much influence on the life of another person as I do with my child, or with my partner.

In our relationship with children there is something which is completely the wrong way round. We hold back, we don’t take a position in situations where they desperately need our clear directions.
We don’t say, “So, now it is time to sleep.”
We say, “I think it would be good if you would perhaps go to bed now.”
In this way we are already thinking, as we approach the child, that there will be trouble if I want him or her to do this or that.
We have given away the power.
The child is often the boss in the house.
The other side of this coin is the way in which we repeatedly take a position with our children. For example, to repeatedly interfere in their space, in what they are doing.
From now on you could check if you are disturbing your child, if you are forcing them out of their own space.

I studied Hannah, our baby, when she was lying on her blanket. And I studied the adults who came by where she was lying. She was lying there in her own space, smiling, playing – when you come across this blanket you are magically attracted to it. “Isn’t that sweet”, you feel the need to speak with her, best of all would be to take her in your arms. Perhaps justifiably, her tone might no longer be so patient and simply happy as it was.

For the past five days I have been living in a very free mother and child relationship with my daughter. She gets up alone, since she sleeps longer than I do, and she doesn’t come home until ten, ten-thirty in the evening. In between we see each other very seldom.
I had a talk with her to ask her whether that was OK for her, and whether she feels herself capable of finding and approaching me if she needs me.
She said yes.
I have to keep a tight rein on myself, in order not to chase her and keep asking her if everything is OK and if she will come to me when she needs me.
I am stepping out of the relationship building in that I ensure that there is a full contact between myself and my child and then I let them go their own way, in peace.
Perhaps you are thinking, fine, that is all well and good for a child of ten, but my child is much smaller.
For me there is no lower age limit. Of course it can look very different, but nevertheless every child at every age has a way of its own.

I would like to make reference to Dolores’ speech yesterday. She said a few sentences in which the position of the partner could also be taken by the child. One is:
My spiritual praxis ends where my child enters the space.
This can be checked out.
Then there is the special question for mothers: what will remain between me and my child when I let it go and leave this way of being in relationship and motherly happiness.
The first answer is: you will always remain the mother of your child.
Second answer: a free, loving contact will arise between mother and child.

Yesterday I had this experience:
My daughter is busy running  all over the community the whole day. I am writing my speech and my thoughts are free. Sometime in the evening I realise that I have not yet seen her. The old pattern catches up with me – worry. I switch this around, go to the children’s house and ask if they have seen my daughter. They answer yes. So I can leave, with peace of mind. After the meal she comes home, beaming, “I was in the restaurant – I thought you’d be eating there”. “And I was at the campus, since I thought you’d be eating there!”. We laugh. She sits briefly on my lap, and then wants to go and see her new friend. “I’ll be back at ten.” “Don’t be later than that, since I’ll be gone again.”
Afterwards I sit on the campus and can see her from afar, on the swing with another child and an adult. She looks happy. She is in her world, with the people who she has chosen to be with.
When I widen my view, I can see two children, happy: they could both be mine, or they could be from other parents.
When we really let our children be free, we give room to the possibility that other people can always become important in their lives – that is logical.

Sobonfu, p34
When you, for example, have a child, it is not only your child but the child of the whole community. Right from the moment of birth the mother is not alone in her responsibility for the child. Each and every other can nourish and look after the child.
When a woman gives birth, then she can suckle other children as well. This is completely OK.
It can so happen, that a mother wants to see her child, but doesn’t get the chance to, since so many other people are busy looking after it.
I still remember how I always misled my sister. I took her children to me and disappeared with them  for long periods. My sister wondered where her children were, but she knew that they were in good hands.

There were and are peoples who find it completely natural and important that from a certain age their children no longer live with their parents but with other children in a children’s’ community. There was a people in India who had a children’s’ house which was governed by the children themselves. The children lived there from the age of two or three.
So we should not think that the model where children live with their parents is the only possible and sensible model.
This is also the link into my lecture’s second part.

Children and Parents need Community

A large part of a mother’s life is dominated by the fact that she lives alone with her children. The largest part of her day is dictated by worry, overload and a sense of being cut off from self-perception, looking after herself and her own life dreams.
We mothers live in a world of reproach against ourselves but especially against others. Against the fathers, who are not there as they should be. Against the society, which does nothing for us and treats us as marginal people. Against friends who don’t have children, since they have it better  and anyway can’t understand us. Even against our children, because they use up all our nerves, want more and more and are not how they should be.
We think that we have to manage it all alone, and we insist upon doing it all alone.
We want help but we don’t let anyone help because it is, after all, our child.
No-one can do us justice.
So it seems we have become the victims of our own decision  to become a mother.
The discrepancy between the reality of today’s family with the mother who is mainly raising her children alone and  the statement from Sobonfu Some, that it needs a whole village to raise a child, is immeasurable.

Quote from Sobonfu Some, The Gift of Happiness.
If children grow up with the consciousness that their community consists of just Mama and Papa, and then they have to deal with a problem that they alone cannot solve, they will have no-one outside the family to whom they can turn. The parents and only the parents are responsible for what the child makes of itself, and that is too much to ask from two people. Often it is in fact only one parent who has to do it all.
If children are given a wider concept of community, they will not have to be at the mercy of just one person. The child can then seek out another, to whom he wants to turn, and if this person doesn’t help him then he can go to the next. Since we are all only people, we all have our limits as to what we can do and what we are able to give. To raise children we are always dependent upon the support of others. As we say in our village, “It needs a whole village to raise a child.” And it is just as true to say that it needs a whole village to look after the emotional health of the parents.

The village is really necessary. It is an error to think that this village needs to come to us. We are living in a culture where families, children and mothers are cut off from the biotope which they urgently need for their growth and life tasks.
Mothers especially are cut off from their source.
Only we can bring about the necessary conditions again – there is no-one outside us who will do it for us.
However, it is also clear that we will get nowhere alone.
What we can and must do ourselves is to make the decision to leave the state of being a victim and take on the responsibility for that which we and our children really need.
From my own experience I can say that it is possible, with children and without the father or husband being present, to step out of this role of being a victim.
Imagine that you alone are responsible. This time not first of all for your children but for your own life, your happiness, your valuable future, your dreams for your life and for your ability to dream these dreams.
You are the creators of your own reality – the uncomfortable parts as well as the parts which correspond to your dream.
We all need the life and our place in a biotope, so that we can once again know who we are and where we are needed.
So that our children no longer need to take the place of the longings we have not lived out.
Children need mothers and of course also fathers who are committed to their own dreams instead of running around behind their children.
I make sure that I have plans and projects in my life, so that I do not need my child as a replacement for my unlived life.
Only then can I clearly recognise what a child really needs.

Now another quote from Dolores’ speech
I create for myself the necessary mental and social conditions which make me less dependent on the love to and from my child.
This year I took part in a spiritual course for parents. One of the most powerful affirmations, I could almost say an instruction, which I took from this course is:
Let go, leave the worry behind and perceive who your children are.
The circle of worry and concern between you has to be completely broken – it is a burden for them and silences them.
If that is true then it changes my whole life as a woman. How much room there would be in my life if the worry and concern were not there! The worries that frequently permeate my whole day and often the whole night as well.
Then the state of being a mother would really become an aspect of my being a woman. Then not only the children would be liberated into the world but also me, as a woman.

What does it mean then, when you go back home after this camp – with the children, back into the old situation. Or, what does it look like for the parents here on this site, when the summer camp comes to an end.
First of all, get rid of the bad conscience. Since it doesn’t change anything, and also since in that way we fit the old mother- and parent-picture from the old culture. We come from a long history and the way we behave to our children is a product of this history.
The bad conscience stops when we start to do now the things that need to be done now.
Set up committees to change the image of mothers!

I recommend that you read Rebecca Wild, Sobonfu Some, and Jirina Prekop.

A closing thought from the morning thought from Sabine Lichtenfels.
Give your children the possibility to connect with your dream. Then you will no longer think, these are my children, these belong to me.
Protect your children by giving them the freedom that they need.
Give them enough freedom to be alone, so that they don’t lose their own connections.
Protect them from the ping-pong of relationships.
Take care that the children stay free for the greater source, from which they come, even when they are in your presence.

Thank you.

Translation by Heima (simultaneous translation provided during the summer camp) and Krayg (editing and correction for written version)

ZEGG