How Sarah Teaches Social Justice to her Children by Example & Strengthens Intergenerational Family Wellness with her Mother
“Having some of those physical tools [body-based practices] and the recognition of one's triggers and what's going on in the nervous system that just wasn't resources that I was aware of or that I knew were available to me.”
- Sarah Avendaño
From Autopilot to Bold, Conscious, & Decolonized Family Building…
Most of the Time
“Most of the time, carving out space for myself, doing something just for me… spend[ing] money on just myself…” was a lot to think about, explained Sarah, a full-time working mom in a bi-cultural and bilingual partnership raising two amazing bi-racial children (ages 4 and 10).
Sarah came in with a wealth of knowledge about social justice from her own practice. Plus, she had a wonderful relationship with her mother too. I still remember the moment in our weekly class where Sarah shared a heartwarming example about her mother. There were no dry eyes in the (Zoom) house.
Even without inner child wounds to heal, Sarah integrated and implemented the program’s content in her own parenting beautifully.
Sarah shared that she treated her young children in a way that showed respect for their agency and personhood. This parenting intention came from her own upbringing where her mother raised her to voice her opinions and be authentic. Talking to her children about daily experiences and even big feelings wasn’t new to Sarah, so she was already comfortable with a top-down, cognitive approach to parenting.
During the program Sarah added body-based practices (a bottom-up, body-based approach) to her parenting toolkit. In the example below, Sarah described how she used the “Supermodel Poses” with her four-year-old son:
“The tools that that you taught us about the supermodel poses - that's been a game changer because what I do now is I hug myself when [my son] is really upset. And I just squeeze myself to really keep myself present and waiting it out with him. I tell him, ‘I'm here with you. I'm right next to you. You're not by yourself.’ And so now, I'll say, ‘do you want to hug yourself with me? And we can just take some breaths together, but let's squeeze our arms and hug ourselves really tight.’ It’s actually really helped him like that, giving the space to just like let it all out in that time, let him know I'm there with him… We can hug each other after, but let's first just hug ourselves and he's starting to really model that. And, um, I've done the “Head Pose” a few times. It feels good when you kind of feel like you might lose it. Yeah, it just feels good to kind of take that little moment…I was never all that in tune with my own bandwidth or my own nervous system responses.”
The beauty of knowing about your nervous system and your child’s is that it gives you another lens to understand your child and be with your child body to body, right brain to right brain. Young children often feel a deeper, cellular sense of “I got you.”
In other words, when you come back home to your body- instead of reflexively going outside to find another strategy to try because you don’t trust your parenting authority- you come back to care and connect with your child at a deeper level.
Sarah’s example above shows how she adapted the body-based practices we did in class together and made it her own.
Let’s pivot and look at Sarah’s work in intergenerational family healing. What can someone with a good-enough and safe-enough childhood (aka no inner child wounds) do about intergenerational family healing?
Well, Sarah loved the lens that intentional and decolonized parenting is healing seven generations backward and seven generations forward – a lesson I learned from my Classical Chinese Medicine teacher which is also present in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) philosophy. To quote Sarah: “to have this [parenting] mentality of so much more than our own daily lives and our own communities and families and friends…We can work to heal from the past and all the way into the future. I mean, what a gift to give people that lens and perception and different worldview.”
Sarah found that journaling and storytelling was a powerful way to maintain and strengthen intergenerational family wellness. Sarah added: “the gift of words and storytelling for a family is so precious. There's among the most precious gifts you can give.”
She also used the writing exercises in the program to deepen her connection with her mom who she’s already close to:
“I was always curious about thinking of [my mom] in those ways [her upbringing and life experiences], but then writing about her in [the program and in the GIFT Journal] was a really different exercise that I had not embarked on and your [writing exercises’] questions are really probing and meaningful and challenging. So I love those exercises.”
Sarah’s such a norm disruptor with a fierce curiosity. The generosity of her spirit led her to want to share what she learned in the program, “I just think it's a gift that we should give, if we can, to ourselves and our children and our communities It's a gift that keeps on giving really.”
“Give this gift to yourself. I would take this course all over again, if I could…It was such a good mix of that validation, but also really learning and growing and new ways…. Like it's not until you go through six weeks with you that you come out on the other side, like, oh, you know, something is revealed in some way every session.”