Mindful Parenting
6-8 Week Series
In today’s complex and fast-paced world, competing interests vie for our attention every minute of our waking hours. There’s the pressure of earning a living, maintaining a household, providing children with a rich cultural and educational environment, maintaining social and business connections, and the strong desire to do right by our families, friends and community.
With our children, despite our best intentions, we often resort to common parenting strategies that involve punishments, rewards, threats, shaming, spanking and other forms of physical and emotional manipulation and control. They leave us feeling disconnected, exhausted and unfulfilled. Most of us long for a deeper connection with our children. We want a loving, caring environment. We want our children to trust themselves and to trust us. We want our children to have confidence, to be generous, and to enjoy themselves and others.
In our 6-8 week series, parents are introduced to the practices of mindfulness, meditation, nonviolent communication and empathy. These practices help parents bring a level of awareness into their interactions with their children, and help transform their relationships from one of stress, control, manipulation and conflict to one of ease, understanding, connection and love.
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." ~Viktor E. Frankl
This class was amazing! You answered questions so well with such wisdom. It helped neutralize the roadblocks. You didn’t just offer the techniques, but it was so powerful because of your deep human understanding behind it. Your ability to help us put the techniques into action. After taking this class, I am more present. I can separate from my emotions and so don’t feel victimized or beholden to them. As a result, I am able to connect to my kids more and be less volatile.
Eugenie R.
As a result of this class, I’m more empathetic to my family members and I really try to listen and understand how they are feeling. I really enjoyed hearing stories you shared. It was nice to hear about other parents going through the same kinds of situations as me, because it helped me feel more connected to my community and less alone.
Kiran J.
I had previous exposure to nonviolent communication and parenting classwork and concepts. Gayathri reinforced my existing knowledge, offering new perspectives, new tools, and new ideas by encouraging students to turn parenting into a spiritual practice. Gayathri led wonderful guided meditation and visualization exercises, and her calm, centered demeanor was inspiring. Gayathri empathizes with parents and teaches us to hold the space for ourselves and others to feel emotion. I highly recommend working with Gayathri as you journey along the ever-challenging road of parenting.
Sabrina M.
As a result of this class, I’m not so triggered into taking immediate actions on some of the things that come up with my family, but can now step back a little and observe what’s happening before acting. The group sharing was eye-opening and it’s reassuring that we all have different things going on, but that these mindfulness practices can be applied for every situation. I was able to find a nice, safe community to share my concerns of parenting and be reassured that while I can’t control everything, I can reflect on my needs and my family’s needs and find a way to address them.