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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 more able to validate and take into consideration what our own inner guidance is telling us, we can also support our children in valuing 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

We offer parenting circle meetings over Zoom every other Tuesday and every Sunday, with the exception of holidays and dates when hosts are not available. If you are new, before you come to a meeting, we ask that you orient yourself by reading about how we hold the space in our meetings. Click here to go to our page on how we hold the space.

• On Sundays, the meetings take place every week over Zoom from 10:30 am - 12:00 pm Eastern, 9:30 - 11 am Central, 8:30 - 10 am Mountain, 7:30 - 9 am Pacific
• On Tuesdays, the meetings take place every other week over Zoom from 8:15 - 9:30 pm Eastern, 7:15 am - 8:30 pm Central, 6:15 - 7:30 pm Mountain, 5:15 - 6:30 pm Pacific
• Click here to see our every other week on Tuesdays meeting schedule.
• Click here to see the dates when we won't be meeting because of holidays and because of hosts not being available.

The suggested contribution for participating in this circle is a sliding scale of $40 - $100 per month for Sundays and $20 - $50 per month for Tuesdays. We think this amount is fairly sustainable for us. We're interested in staying away from standard transactional exchanges and moving into resources flowing to where needs are. So, we'd like you to contribute based on the resources you have access to and how these meetings nourish you and your desire to see them continue to be available for yourself and others, rather than on things like how many meetings you personally show up to.

We have 2 options for making a contribution:

1. You can use the PayPal address jdhaenens followed by an at symbol gmail followed by a dot com if you want to use PayPal.

2. You can mail a check to Janet Dhaenens, 179 Flume Creek Rd, Sandpoint, ID 83864.

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