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Parenting circle meetings: Exploring parenting with less reactivity and more choice

How do we help our children be able to navigate the changes that are happening for all of us? Many of us would like to be able to have power with our children instead of power over, and to learn to work together collaboratively instead of imposing obedience. A key to this is being relational, providing information about what's going on for us so that together we can adjust to the impacts that we are having on one another. Having this information creates more opportunity for us to meet the challenges we find ourselves in, where we are co-holding these challenges together.

A key is self awareness and noticing our patterns of response. The explorations in our circle support us in becoming aware of what our patterns are, and where they don't serve collaboration. We need support to stay with the tension between what's been socially acceptable and what our hearts are really asking for. As we become aware of the places where we've followed what other people told us and start feeling into what our own inner guidance is telling us, we stop asking our children to disconnect from their own inner guidance.

In our efforts to fit in, parts of us get labeled wrong, rejected or shut down. Working with what gets triggered in us can help us reconnect with these parts. What is it like to acknowledge what these parts have to say? To welcome and trust all parts of ourselves and the wisdom they hold? How can we do this for ourselves and for our children?

We will be paying attention to what stimulates us and exploring how to sit with the discomfort. We make space for what comes up to emerge organically. We explore what contributed to our stimulation and how this gives us information. Through doing this, we gain more choice in how we meet our life situations.

We'll be exploring

• habits and conditioning that influence how we parent
• working with what gets stimulated in us
• welcoming all parts of ourselves
• how to have more choice about responses vs. reactions
• how to integrate parenting ideas we each are interested in and develop our own parenting style

What we are tentatively planning is to have parenting circle meetings over Zoom on Fridays and Sundays starting in the fall starting on the 11th and 16th of September. On Fridays, the meetings take place from 6:30 - 8 pm Eastern, 5:30 - 7 pm Central, 4:30 - 6 pm Mountain, 3:30 - 5 pm Pacific Display time in your time zone. On Sundays, the meetings take place over Zoom from 11:30 am - 1 pm Eastern, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm Central, 9:30 - 11 am Mountain, 8:30 - 10 am Pacific. Display time in your time zone.

Participants are welcome to attend at any of the times. No one is restricted to attending one meeting per week if they want to attend more meetings.

The suggested contribution for participating in this circle is a sliding scale of $40 - $100 per month.

To express interest in joining us on Sundays and/or Fridays at these times or to see other time windows that work for the facilitators and propose times that would work for you within those time windows, go to empoweringwisdom.org/signup You can also go to this signup to add yourself to a mailing list to be notified about future Empowering Wisdom events.

To learn more, email contact@empoweringwisdom.org or call 734-237-7676.