healthykids
How Children Enrich Our Spiritual Life by Steve Taylor
The Parent Path D
irty nappies, wakeup calls in the middle of the night, a house full of screams and squeals, food
splattered on walls, a chaos of toys everywhere, no more late nights out, no time to read books, take classes or attend retreats—what could be spiritual about bringing up children? Isn’t spiri-
tual development just one of the many things we sacrifice when we have kids? Many spiritual traditions based on
meditation, prayer and solitude main- tain that nothing should divert us from our spiritual practices—least of all a family, which takes up so much time and energy.
In India, one tradition holds that
spiritual development belongs to a later stage of life, roughly after age 50. It is only once we have lived through a householder stage, bringing up and providing for our children and living a worldly life, that we can turn our atten- tion to the inner world. After our chil- dren have reached adulthood, we have the privilege of meditating regularly, and living more quietly and simply. Many parents, however, find that—far from hindering it—bringing up children actively advances their spiritual development. Seen in the right way, parenthood can be a spiritual path, bringing a heightened sense of love, wonder and appreciation.
Natural Mindfulness After all, children are such strongly
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spiritual beings. They naturally have many of the qualities that adults work to cultivate through spiritual develop- ment. For example, children are natu- rally mindful. They constantly live fully in the present, and the world is always a fantastically real and interesting place to them. As child psychologist Professor Alison Gopnik, of the University of California, Berkeley, puts it, “Babies and young children are actually more conscious and more vividly aware of their external world and internal life than adults are.” They have what she calls an, “…infinite capacity for won- der,” that adults only experience at their highest moments. “Travel, meditation and romantic poetry can give us a first- person taste of infant experience,” as can experiencing beauty, she says. This illustrates one of the most
positive effects of having children: They help us to become children again ourselves. In Taoism, the ideal is to be as spontaneous and curious as a child, exhibiting their openness to experience. On the physical plane, Taoist practices like Tai chi and qigong aim to help the body become as supple and flexible as a child’s.
Beyond Selfishness All the world’s spiritual traditions tell us how important it is to transcend our own selfishness; to stop seeing our- selves as the center of the universe and trying so hard to satisfy our own de- sires. They advise us to help and serve others, so that we can move beyond our separate ego and connect to a tran- scendent power. The eightfold path of Buddhism aims to cultivate this selfless state and ideally, the path of parent- hood can, as well. It’s impossible to be a good parent without being prepared to put your children first. Much of parenthood is about self- sacrifice. Gopnik remarks: “Imagine a novel in which a woman took in a stranger who was unable to walk or talk or even eat by himself. She fell completely in love with him at first sight, fed and clothed and washed him, gradually helped him to become competent and independent, and spent more than half her income on him… You couldn’t bear the sappiness of it.
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