My son looked me dead in the eye and said: I am not going to forest school today.
My mind started racing with the familiar stories of "I can't do this right now" -- I have two clients today. I have no time for this. WTF is happening. Why is this happening. I don't want to deal with this now.
So I insisted he has to go. But the more I insisted, the more he dug his heels in. I didn't understand why he's being so defiant for something he's done fuss-free 100 times before.
After an hour of half-pleading-half-threatening trying to convince him to go, I stopped. I looked at him in the eye, and he returned the unwavering gaze. That's when I saw the fear in his eyes. I felt the uncertainty he was feeling.
I knew I had to pause.
There was more to the story than meets the eye, for both of us.
Once I paused and intentionally brought my attention inward to the base of my spine, I noticed how scared * I * really was.
That's when awareness of the deeper layer appeared.
My son wasn't responding to what I was saying. He was responding to something that, until that moment, I wasn't even aware of in myself: I didn't feel safe when my husband wasn't home (he'd been away out West for days). And my son intuitively knew it.
My son wanted to be near me because he could sense that I did not feel safe. He knows that we're safe when we're together. By keeping an eye on me, he would feel safe too.
How brilliant is THAT?!
And I would have never gotten to the brilliance had I not been willing to pause and reconsider my moment, my reality, differently.
The layers of truth only reveal themselves when we're ready to hear them.
Most of us are taught to stop at the first and loudest answer, the first and loudest explanation, the first and loudest story we tell ourselves.
But the first and loudest answer is never the most honest one.
In this case, my first answer was about him. The truth underneath it all had nothing to do with him.
When we learn to discipher resistance from protection, defiance from attunement, we discover there's more here than meets the eye. What looks like a problem to solve is a message worth hearing.
Children don't respond to our words. They respond to the energy running underneath them.
Our experience is layered. And layers don't reveal themselves all at once. That's why we take ten days to unpack what mothering brings to the surface.
We start June 20th.
P.S. What if the thing you're struggling with isn't the thing at all? What if it's simply pointing toward the next layer waiting to be seen?
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