Interview with Lynn Jericho and Give Away
I am so very excited and honored to bring you this interview with Lynn Jericho. Lynn’s work is so powerful, healing and transformative. Lynn works out of Anthropsophy and brings such a dynamic and fertile living element to ideas and phrases bantered about and read in texts. She brings it to life ~ our lives. I keep telling her to call her work Anthroposophy Alive ! because it is. A single conversation with her can bring relief and set action into motion. Her workshops are so rich and empowering.
Thank you Lynn for taking this time to answer my questions and for all the work that you do.
What advice do you have for parents of young children?
Relax!
Wonder at your child, don’t worry about her/him. If you worry, your child will pick up your tension and doubt and internalize it. If they internalize your wonder, they will learn to love life and themselves. You will learn more when you wonder than when you worry. Empathy arises out of wonder, not worry. Attunement and alignment arise out of wonder, not worry. When you worry you are focused on your anxieties, not your child.
If you free yourself from worry, and build your capacity for wonder, you will see your child and their needs with real clarity. Wonder will guide you to their needs and show you how to care for them with confidence. Wonder will tell you when to hold them, when to say no, what kind of rhythm serves them. Wonder will reveal their temperament, their sensory strengths, and their need for soothing and stimulating.
Wonder will wake you up to how your child needs you to grow as a person and a parent.
If you are a worrier, wonder at your worry. Give yourself 20 minutes with a journal and wonder at the roots of your worrying? Was your mother a worrier? Did your mother fail to wonder at you? Was there not enough relaxed attention and engagement in your childhood? Explore your memories.
What is the inner work of parenting?
You are the perfect parent for your child, so you don’t need to struggle to be a perfect parent. Your child loves you, the inner you. Nurturing and cultivating your inner life is a primary task of parenting. Inner work builds the inner core of love that radiates out to your child – they glow and grow in that love.
Put some of your energy into knowing yourself and do this with intentional rhythm – make it a priority to have a weekly walk for self-reflection or a long soaking bath when you recollect on the moments of the week that were sweet. Self-knowledge is the beginning of inner freedom and the basis of inner love.
Parents need to give themselves inner intention. Attention can be superficial. Intention always goes deep.
So many parents in their 20’s and 30’s have been spending their lives finding their way in the world. Having a child may wake up the need to find their way into their souls, but they don’t know how to do this. There is no one way. There are many doors that open up to the soul.
My messages that I send out to my mailing list support self-knowledge and inner work.I invite your readers to go to www.theinneryear.blogspot.com to sign up for my messages.
My Inner Life programs, particularly Lifting the Veils, are a great way to begin the work of self-intention, of self-discovery and can be very helpful in understanding childhood from the perspective of both parent and child.
What are the veils?
The veils are the conscious and unconscious memories of experiences, relationships, and feelings, both good and bad, that have not been digested, integrated and honored. These unresolved memories are very powerful and impact our thoughts, feelings, desires, judgments, intentions and actions. Essentially these memory veils keep us from the present moment and from the present relationships. Through these veils the present appears as the past.
The veils are filled with illusions and distortions that hide the real. They idealize and dramatize taking away our ability to know the truth of our own being.
When our children are at the same age or in the same situations we were when we had a particular experience, our memories are triggered and we project the memory on to our child’s experience and react to the projection and not to the child’s experience in the real present moment. The projection veils the truth. The real difficulty is that the child will interject or internalize our memory projection as if it is their own. Here we see the root of generational challenges. Are you being just like your mother or your grandmother even though you don’t want to be? This is the result of the interjection of generational veils.
How do we lift them?
In Lifting the Veils Part One Birth to Age 7, key themes such as vacations, nature, illnesses, food and so on, are explored. We look at the archetypal range of experience and then we look at our personal memories, our feelings about them and the judgments we made about the situation. This gentle, compassionate and respectful process begins to lift the veils. You find a new, freer relationship to your own life, to your children and to your parenting.
Although one can do this work alone, doing it with a guided group, even over the internet, enriches, expands and supports the process. The company of others brings warmth and inspiration to everyone.
Lifting the Veils begins on Sunday, July 17 at Noon Eastern or Tuesday, July 19 at 8PM Eastern. To learn more here http://tiny.cc/xca6m
Thank you Lynn.
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Lynn is offering as a give away a 50% discount for her upcoming teleseminar Lifting the Veils to TWO individuals. To be entered to win 50 % off please leave a comment below.
Comments will close Saturday afternoon.
The winners are…..Nichole and Erin!
Thank you all for participating, I wanted ALL of you to win and be in the course! I hope to see you there.
Thank you for this opportunity! Coming up on the new school year already has me “worried.” I could realy use a dose of ~~wonder.~~ :-)
This interview is amazing, and brought just the message I needed to hear today! I had a sleepless night, fraught with worry about my teenage son. After reading Lynn’s words, I shifted my thinking from worry to wonder — wonder at the interesting young man he is becoming. Lynn’s advice is not just helpful for parents of young children! Would love to partake of more of Lynn’s wisdom.
Sarah Baldwin
Bella Luna Toys
what a great contrast, worry versus wonder…wonderful, thank you!
Oh I sure would love to do this!!! I have been meditating on working with Lynn for some time….
love-liza
I love this. I think I will write this down and post it in the kitchen as a reminder!
Lynn, I am on your mailing list and I follow your blog. Everything you write inspires me to live a life of meaning, depth and growth. Another great article.
What an exciting topic! Thank you for reminding us to keep our inner being shining on our children!
I think we all respond to these words with a big YES because they come from the TRUTH that is inside all of us. I am going to try and remind myself of this every day, retrain my brain. Wonder not worry. Wonder not worry. Thank you!
I’m a young (twenty-something) mother, and come from a household where my parents simply didn’t know what to do with a person like me. I see my older son mirroring many things about myself, and want to provide him with a better, more nurturing childhood, which he comes out of with the knowledge that his mother and father love him beyond words. I would really love to take this seminar!
Gratitude to you!
Nichole
Becoming a mother for the third time last month has left me tired and definitely a bit anxious. As my oldest child moves out of early childhood and on to first grade this fall, I find my, Lifeways trained, self out of my “early childhood comfort zone”. This class would be so helpful in grounding me in my continued work as a parent.
Wonder, not worry…..I feel like a huge shift has occurred inside my whole body. Thank you!
Fantastic words just at the right time. My son is entering a phase of life that is really full of change, in a great way. However, at this time in my own life I was dealing with too much for a young person to process. I find that I am projecting some of the feelings that really can only be leftovers from my own experiences….lifting the veils is exactly what needs to happen so we can all proceed along a fresh wonderful path. Thank you for the wisdom.
Love your newsletters, Lynn.
Wonderful and deeply, simply, inspiring. This path of parenting is so rich and so challenging in the best of ways. You have touched on the finest shining threads here, lifting the veils indeed. I look forward to more, thank you very kindly.
Thank you Lynn for such inspiration! Try as we may, the worry sneaks its way in. I would love to take your seminar and live more in the space of wonder.
Honestly, I think I need all the help I can get. Guilt pretty much runs me when it comes to parenting. Thanks for the generous giveaway and the wonderful article.
My own mother got married at 14 years and had her first children (stillborn twins) at 16! I don’t believe she’s ever gotten over that – she still blames herself. Nevertheless she went on to have 11 children with three miscarriages in between. Her last child was at 38. She was and still is a great worrier. I know I’ve taken that on board. I’m the second youngest so by the time I was a child my older siblings were having children. So my Mom then took on care of grandchildren too. As you can imagine I don’t have many memories of my Mom spending one on one time with me or even really relating to me as I child. I feel that she may have been just in coping mode in order to have a clean house, get all of the laundry done, cook and be there for my dad too. I’d love the opportunity to do your course. I’m just not very net savvy though and will most likely need to be guided through the teleconferences.
Truly a great mantra! I look forward to reading more in-depth about this inner work. There are some days when I get glimpses of the wonder approach & others when the worry pre-dominates. The resulting behavior/energies are telling. Thanks for sharing this great work!
I would love to participate but I’m afraid if I win I wouldn’t be able to! Just loving reading about your program and through here and everything. We’re doing what we can and worrying most about finding a rhythm. It’s like wandering around in a fog looking for something I’ve never had, and hoping I can figure it out before my babies are grown!
Thank you for this offer. I would like to explore this idea of living in wonder with the group!
I love the idea of a journal; I really like placing my worries on paper than putting them on my children.
Thank you
Wow. I am so thrilled to read these comments. All of you are on the right path to good mothering. Just make a big sign or several saying RELAX & WONDER.
Blessings to you and your children.
Lynn
Wonderful words of wisdom. I have experienced the simultaneity of my children’s age to my own life’s experiences. It just marvelous how many chances we get to “lift the veil” as you say it. And you say it so well. Thank you for sharing your gift with the world.