Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Always so glad you can join us. It's a delight to be able to, you know, chat a little bit today and do what I can to be helpful in this extremely complicated and beautiful world of parenting.
Today what I wanted to talk about was being able to have a lightness of touch with our children so that when we need to have more seriousness, more gravity, so to speak, or gravitas, it matters, you know, so that we shift our day between levity and lightness and gravity and a feeling of firmness. This may sound like a funny old theme to be talking about, but it's a very productive one, and it's one that can often give us a little bit of pause and think, oh, I wonder how my balance is with this. So what I'll do is I'll just describe what I think of as just archetypally, you know, a healthy movement between lightness and having to be more firm.
And through the description of this, it might be helpful that you're wondering where do I exist on this dynamic? Do I exist in being very light much of the time and have a lightness of touch and I seldom go into gravity? Or am I much of the time, do I too easily go into gravity, too easily go into firmness, go into heaviness and being heavy, and I need to bring more lightness. So this is all, what I'm about to describe now has got to do with, I guess, calibrating where we are on that scale. Now I'll describe lightness and levity, and it's fairly obvious, right? This is, I'm just putting words to what we all know in that sense, is if we can move through our day with a lightness of touch, and one of the key aspects of that is not taking things too seriously, letting things just flow along, not feeling that we have to fight, you know, every single battle.
A lot of this has got to do with humor, just a light, not a big, goofy humor. I guess there's room for that, but with children, I find it's more just this, just smiling can often be just as warming to a child's heart as a great big, goofy sort of thing. It's not to rule out that, you know, but it's a lot of energy expanded to be big and goofy and pushing things around and putting, you know, strawberries on our noses and bananas on our heads and being, you know, going more into that.
It's almost like clowning around a little bit. That's fun too, don't get me wrong. That's totally fun, but it requires a lot of energy and if we do too much of it, it can be hyper.
So levity can go so far that it can actually excarnate a child. It takes them out of themselves because they're just following the parent because we can get out of ourselves. So be careful with levity that we don't go too far and it's no longer light, it's out.
It's out of ourselves. So this lightness might be a smile. It might be just a walking by a child sitting at their little table doing a project and we just stroke their hair or give their shoulder a little squeezy.
That's lightness and it's literally a lightness of touch physically, but it's also a lightness of touch emotionally. Lightness also can go into being able to just be with a child and give them the space they need and if something blows up and they're frustrated with something that they're doing, to be inquisitive and not accusative. To be inquisitive is to have a lightness of touch.
To say, oh honey, is that really going wrong? Oh my goodness, that must be very, very frustrating to have that go wrong like that. The gesture I think of it, I guess coming from an Australian British sort of background is, oh dear, oh dear. I remember as a little boy growing up next to my grandmother, she lived next door to us and whenever something was going very wrong, this is quite a little boy, one of the sort of famous family stories, you know, we all have them, is that I would take my arm and my elbow across to grandma because she would put her, she would hold her hand up and I would put my arm in the crook of her arm, I'd sit nearby and she would stroke my forearm and say, oh dear, oh dear.
And I'd be telling her about all kinds of things, and I'd say, oh dear. You know, I don't remember her ever trying to sort out any problem at all. It was just this lightness of touch, both with her heart and with her hand.
And if we can go through our day remembering that we need to have this lightness with our children, we need to have this humor, we need to be able to laugh with them when, and when something goes wrong, to just empathize with them, this lightness, just, you know, that goes an awfully long way, doesn't it? So lightness, levity, gentleness, receiving. Then there's gravity. And there are moments when we do need to go into gravity.
We need to metaphorically put on our, our big velvet cloak with a great big golden brooch at the front, one of those, those big old like royal velvet gowns, those, those cloaks and damask or velvet heavy flowing over our shoulders, flowing down behind us, flowing on the ground. And we have that feeling of groundedness, real groundedness. And that, that feeling of gravity, of groundedness is very much where we need to go to at times.
We need to have our feet on the ground. We need to feel this flow down and back. The key gesture of it is down and back.
And it's almost, you know, some parents have said to me, I actually imagine that cloak down and back, but it helps me not go forward and up and get all angry and get in my child's face, but down and back and feel our feet on the floor. One parent once said to me, I feel like my feet when in these moments become like big lion's paws, soft and spread out on the ground. And I, gosh, I just could imagine that in a moment, just feel one's feet on the floor, feel the, the, the, that energy, very, very grounded.
And then to be able to say to our child, what we need to say, you know, that it comes from a voice lower in our belly. It comes from a voice that is usually quite a bit quieter, deeper in its resonance. It comes also from not moving around.
We stand still. You might remember that podcast on 2x2x1, two feet down, two feet away from our child and one instruction, only one. But, but that whole principle of 2x2x1 is a gravity principle.
It is a grounding principle. We're not moving around. We're not like when we're in levity, we can be moving, laughing.
We're like, in a sense, we have feathers, you know, it's like a bird. We have feathers. It's light.
When we're in gravity, we have a cloak. It's no longer feathers. It's a big, heavy cloak that trails along the ground.
Feathers and cloaks, feathers and cloaks. And there are moments where we need to be in that, in that groundedness. But here's the, here's the thing about this.
It can become too strong. It can become, it can move from groundedness to hardness, to rigidity. And just like levity can go too far into excarnation and getting out of ourselves and going up too far, gravity can have us over-incarnating, not ex, but in-carnating and going down too deep.
And it's scary for a child because it becomes hard and it becomes rigid. So we can go too far in this as well. So to round off this more unusual podcast, have a think about this if this strikes you.
Am I more, am I more gifted? Do I more easily go into levity, into lightness, into feathers? Or am I good at and gifted at going into groundedness, standing still and, and having the big, the big warm cloak flowing down my back? That's one question. Another question is, do I go too far in levity? Can I get really goofy and ex-carnate and just razz the kids up? Or do I go too far into gravity sometimes and I become rigid and harsh? That's, I guess, another question to ponder. But if we do go too far into levity and get out of ourselves, or too far into groundedness and we, and we become rigid, my, my words would, don't despair.
It means that if we go deep, too deeply and become somewhat rigid, it means there's a gift in that. And the gift is we're good at gravity. Just bring it up a little bit.
It don't, don't beat yourself up about it. It means you're good at going into gravity, but you've got to be careful to not go too far. Similarly, if, if you can get out of yourself and you find yourself getting a bit hysterical, a bit, you know, a bit overly goofy and you lose it, and, and, and you end up screeching at the children, that's when you really get up and out.
You know, you feel yourself going out of yourself. Again, the gift of that is that you're probably really good at levity. Don't beat yourself up.
You're good at levity. Just bring it on down a little bit and become aware when you're, you're taking flight too fast and it's, it's going out too much. I guess the last, the last piece in this is that moving between gravity and levity in a day will help it, help us have, have light and shade.
It'll help us have balance in the day. It helps when we need to, to go into gravity and really speak to our kids about something they need to listen to. It so helps if, if the hours before that, one was in levity where you are having fun, or there was a, a light little stroke of the shoulder where there was a smile, a lightness of, of being.
Because then when we need to go into gravity, we have our children's attention much more. There's a much greater chance of having our children's attention and having them be with us. And in that way, we bring, we bring, is it yin and yang? Is it gravity, levity? However way we, we, we view this, not sure, but whatever, whatever metaphor works for you.
For me, it's the feathers in the cloak, I guess, you know, we, but we all develop our own way of thinking about this. But enjoy, enjoy this movement between lightness and groundedness, between liftoff and the earth. And, and when we get a handle on that, or when we reflect back on our day and think, you know what? That was pretty balanced.
We had some fun today, but I need to speak to the kids. I need to speak to my child a little more seriously. And then we got back to the flow of having just a lightness.
That's a really good day. Okay. And don't forget if you ever want to chat with me personally in my parent coaching role, don't hesitate.
Just go right onto the website. There it is. Consult with Kim.
And, and that email comes right through to me. Okay. Bye bye for now.
