Hello and welcome back to another in this special audio series from the Simplicity Parenting Institute. My name is Kim-John Payne. I'm the author of Simplicity Parenting and today I'd like to share with you the Compassionate Response Practice.
This practice is something that can help orient us in a time where there's a real potential for disorientation. It's tough at the moment. Life has shifted and changed for so many of us and we're not sure what lies ahead and those uncertainties can understandably bring up anxieties.
It can bring up even fear and particularly for us as parents who want to provide and protect for our kids. It's not such an easy time. I've been so touched by the many offerings that have come out over the last couple of weeks, you know, from unexpected places, from tech companies, from banks, from all kinds of other places like schools and community groups, offering all kinds of support and relief to help us in what we're going through.
What this audio will do is offer the kind of support inwardly. It's not so much outwardly with ideas of things to do with our home, with our kids. This is much more oriented around what we can do inwardly to stay balanced, to deal and integrate our anxieties if we have them or fears so that we can be really more present for our kids.
That's more important now than ever before. In one previous audio, I mentioned this beautiful image that came to me from Joseph Chilton Pierce out of his work in transcendent biology where he mentioned if you take a cell from a heart and put it in a special solution and watch it under a microscope, it'll continue to beat but then will begin to fibrillate and expire. If you take a cell from a different heart and place it nearby the fibrillating cell, the two will begin to beat in unison again and have a much longer life than they otherwise would have singularly.
Now this metaphor is so true in terms of our children needing to come close to us so that they can feel safe, secure and essentially co-regulate with us because there's been a lot that they have heard, that many of them have heard. There's a certain kind of heaviness in the air as one parent described it to me and almost an oppressiveness in the air and how we deal with it as parents will be a very powerful and effective way in which our children can, as I mentioned, co-regulate and begin to feel even more safe and secure in these times where it would be very easy for them to move into, well, a slight fight or flight response if we have that fight or flight response going on inside us as well. So rather than only offering help in terms of what we can do at home in the practicalities which we did last week, the team here at the Simplicity Parenting Institute thought it would be a very worthwhile and hopefully very helpful offering to work with how we as parents can really stay centred and calm during this time and be able to have a practice that we turn to just for a minute or two each day that help us synthesize, help us integrate a lot that is coming at us so that we can then help our children feel ever more secure and safe.
So have a listen in to this audio that will lead you through the Compassionate Response Practice. I'll also include a written form of it as well in case you want to look at that and if you want a deeper dive into this you can also find it in my latest book which is called Being At Your Best When Your Kids Are At Their Worst. It's really a book that's entirely aimed at helping us with our own emotional self-regulation.
Okay, that's by way of small introduction and now let's move right into the Compassionate Response Practice.
