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FIELD OF LOVE Creating the Space for Spiritual Parenting
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arents often ask me, “So, how do you make your child spiritual?” Or, “What can I do with my children so they don’t lose this original natural spirituality?” Or, “How do you push back to protect natural spirituality against the utter garbage that kids pick up online or through other kids at school?” In a world of sometimes shocking mixed messages, parents intuitively try to create a home in which values cultivate a deeper and more resonant life, one with higher meaning and purpose. Parents often feel isolated and uncertain in this challenge. After all, we live in a culture that does not talk openly about spirituality. The entertainment and social media are focused elsewhere, and schools tend to avoid anything that might be confused with religious teaching. We may have conversations at our place of worship or we may have carved out our own meditation practice, but as a society, we do not have a common currency, a way of talking about spirituality that we all understand and work with. Those of us who have an internal spiritual practice, or are part of a religious community, could also do with a bit of vocabulary, a set of ideas about how to approach the transmission of natural spirituality. This
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is particularly true for parents who are meeting a soul at its very start in our world and want to give it an open and protected space to flourish. Your positive influence as a parent is profoundly important to your child. As we also have seen, and we’re about to see even more clearly, you’re not in this alone. Throughout this book we explore ways to support a child’s natural spirituality so that it grows and strengthens to become the bedrock of resilience and success. Science offers encouraging evidence suggesting that this support extends beyond parents and includes family members, friends—all those concerned with children’s well-being. We can distill a few basic points from deep science that take our understanding of human nature and spirituality from the lab to the living room. First and foremost, humans are naturally social. Just like a flock of geese in flight and a herd of elephants on the Serengeti, we are built to be in groups. Most people are aware without ever needing to read the science that when we lack social interaction, it’s easy to feel unhappy and to even slip into the blues or depression. Lunch or coffee with a friend can lift our mood or add logic or love to our perspective. Right down to our biology we are inherently social beings. Evolutionary biologists, such as the great E. O. Wilson and more recently Sarah Coakley, hold that the survival of the fittest includes the ability to collaborate effectively and live harmoniously together. Our social ner vous system—the neurological circuitry inside the brain—supports our collectivist nature. Mirror neurons allow us to feel what someone else is feeling, and, at the level of the brain, experience what someone else is experiencing, without actually being in the same circumstance. Mirror neurons allow us to feel firsthand the frustration of a friend on the telephone who is stuck in traffic, just as if we were stuck in traffic. As a parent, if your child is hot and frustrated, by looking at the child, it is easy to feel hot and frustrated. Our emotions and even our physical bodies are regulated by the feelings and the nature of the people around us. Neuroscientist Stephen Porges at the University of North Carolina, a leading researcher in the field of
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neurobiology and social behavior, has identified in fifteen years of research the neurological wiring of the social regulation system that connects the emotionality of other people with our mind and inner body. In his work, Porges shows that the regions of the brain that govern social communication—such as facial recognition, facial musculature for making expressions, and spoken language—are linked (via the brain stem) to the vagus, which is command central for setting heart rate and the functioning of organs. Even when our attention may be focused elsewhere, our emotions, thoughts, and physiology are meaningfully shaped by our web of daily relationships. That we are naturally social is true to our biology. We live in a relational field that shapes us, even while we also can be highly individualistic. Just as each of us is pulled by the earth’s gravitational field, even highly individualist people are swayed by a field of relationships. What does this mean for the spiritual growth of a child? When we link together the science on our collective nature with the science of spirituality, we find a promising world for a child. Into the child’s daily field of relationship, her innate spirituality and support for this natural spirituality from parents and others can now be infused. Spiritual presence, guidance, and values can come from extended family, close friends, psychologists, youth workers and clergy, coaches, and educators. Each of these important adults has a personal choice to decide to be a spiritual presence and model of love, and as they choose to do so, the child’s routine social world becomes what I call the field of love: a place to learn spirituality in daily life. We’ve talked about the nod, the joint effect, and the spiritual seekand-find of selective spiritual socialization. That a child is wired by nature for “quick absorbing” from relationships explains how she naturally gravitates to loving, spiritually significant others to find a supportive spiritual connection and how each generation “passes the torch” of spiritual engagement to the next. The nod is actually part of a broader field of loving relationships. Often the nod from a parent or grandparent is the center, ground zero, of a web of spiritually guiding relationships. Yet, there are other life-changing spiritually guiding relationships.
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As parents, you, along with the spiritually significant others in your child’s life, are key coordinates on her spiritual map. Parents, grandparents, aunts or uncles, as well as teachers, coaches, ministers, or mentors: each committed person who sends a strong signal of guidance, steadfast interest, and love may also hold a special place.
Hidden in Plain View: The Field of Love Supports, Surrounds, and Strengthens Family The field of love is a relational space—a fluid, evolving, interpersonal space that we both discover and create in relationship with one another. We access it in our hearts. It is a sacred space that we inhabit together as a family or an intimate community. Often this shared sacred space holds joy, yet it can also buoy us up in times of sorrow. It can exist in a tightly knit school or youth organization, or even in an adult organization or group. For many children, however, the first experience of the field of love is the family and emotionally meaningful friends. It is a super-sized we. Like a picnic blanket, the field of love spreads out to hold a “family”— everyone in a family and everyone who feels like family. But instead of fabric, this blanket is made of emotional connections consisting of spiritually based love. It is our natural social nature linked to our natural spiritual nature. We can see how the family-centered field of love includes the “third piece”—transcendent presence—when we consider, as we saw in earlier chapters, that children experience their parents’ love as embodying the love of God or a higher power. As George Vaillant asserts, transcendence is prominent in the positive experiences of compassion, forgiveness, hope, and joy that we share with one another. In studies, most parents, whether spiritually engaged or not, describe their role and their family as sacred. Loving family as an expanded field of love is infused with transcendent love, a natural extension of it. Researcher Wan-Ning Bao and colleagues at Iowa State University studied 407 families and found that from accepting and loving parent-
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ing, the child experiences spirituality. This finding, replicated by other research teams, reveals the inherent blend of parental love and transcendent presence. This natural blend creates the field of love. Parents are ambassadors, whether we notice it or not, so that if we harness our inherent role, it greatly benefits our child’s spiritual growth. The field of love exists naturally but can also be a collective spiritual goal toward which a family moves. We do not need to be perfectly on the mark each day, but the field can become an ever present statement of how we aim to live as family and who we are as family. When we lean into the goal of being a collective field of love, things change. Viewed as an interconnected whole, the relationships between our children and others affirm, support, and enable each and every one in the field. The field of love becomes both ground and guide to a spiritually rich and resilient life. The field of love also serves as the foundation for spiritual parenting. Working from the field as a base, you can purposefully help your young child develop her innate spiritual assets into the spiritual strengths that will be so protective in adolescence and later life. By tapping into the field of love, the parent-child relationship gains support and guidance; the wind is at your back. Clinical psychologist and researcher Gina Brelsford at Pennsylvania State University helps families resolve confl ict and move past impasses through psycho-spiritual family therapy. Brelsford’s research has shown that when parents and children invoke guidance through prayer or contemplation by listening together from the higher power, there is a more rapid and stable resolution. In the field of love, we are loved unconditionally and learn by example how to love unconditionally. We are not perfect, but love is the overarching sense of who we are, and what we do, as “family.” We are fully accepted for who we are, and learn to hold others with this same compassion. We experience, we learn, and we practice spiritual values. Essentially the field of love is our lab, our incubator, our fi rst run at living out spiritual values in the larger world. However you envision it metaphorically, the field of love, if you
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determine to make it, is a real place in which your family lives. There is nothing imaginary about it. You hear it expressed when everyone at the dinner table laughs at the same time. Or when your six-year-old races to you to tell you that her younger brother needs help with his shoes. You see it glow when you Skype with Grandma and she waves hello and you and your kids wave back while one of them lifts the cat up to say hi, too. Your child shows it in her enthusiasm when together you look at a photograph taken of her years ago during infancy or toddlerhood. You feel it when you tell them for the umpteenth time the handed-down family story of when your forebears first arrived as immigrants in this country. The field of love is in us, and in the space between us, made up of love so strong that it feels almost physical to the touch. The field of love represents our most expansive sense of family defined by love and commitment—by blood and by choice—and encompasses the love we feel for each other. The field of love holds all. On a daily basis within this space, a space that we hold in our hearts and inhabit together, your child can be sure of her place among the people she loves. She learns trust, learns to accept others in good faith, foibles and all, and feels she can safely explore life’s questions, no matter how small or how imposing. There is room in the field for upset and disagreement, for all of the emotions, conversations, and problems a family has. The field isn’t impervious to damage—hurtful words and actions can take a toll—but it can be repaired with deliberate and loving intention. We catch glimpses of this deep connection throughout the child’s first decade, exquisite in the way it reflects precisely where he is developmentally. When Isaiah was just two years old, his grandparents came to spend a winter weekend with us. Just out of the car, everyone was settling in. Grandma was arranging her cookies, Grandpa was stretched out and relaxing in the living room. Hot chocolate was warming on the stove. Suddenly Isaiah called all of us— Grandma, Grandpa, my husband, and me—and asked me to bring his new baby sister into the guest bedroom. “Everyone sit on the bed!” Isaiah called to us, full of anticipation. We all followed his instructions and took our places in a row, sitting on the
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edge of the bed. “Now, lift your feet!” he said, with an excited grin and twinkling eyes. We followed the call. All the family had come together, held in this physical space. “There!” he pronounced with pride. Isaiah was putting all the people he cared about in one room—three generations in one place—demonstrating the specialness, the sanctity of family to him. We’ll see the field of love manifest in stories throughout the chapters ahead. For now, what’s most important is to recognize it as the foundational piece of a child’s spiritual experience from birth, and as such, a sacred space for spiritual parenting. We need to care for this space. Th is is the space in which our children grow up, and it is one that they create, as well. They are the catalyst for the field of love. It is within this space that we can begin to talk about our place in the universe, secure in knowing that those in the field of love also see those questions and conversations as valuable. Much of what happens through the field of love may already be under way in your family. You may be having these conversations, may have created loving rituals spontaneously—in fact, I imagine that you have. You may find more reasons and more ideas here and in the chapters ahead, but for starters, just by bringing the field of love into your awareness and into your child’s awareness, you strengthen the field with your intention. When a family forms the field of love, the transcendent faculty in each member is primed to take that process a step further by charging the relational space—the relationship itself—with the “third presence,” the spiritual presence. What makes a family a transcendent group passes through our neurological wiring. We can feel it right after we share a heartfelt prayer, or traditional grace, or light Shabbat candles, or when a parent finishes a blessing on a child. Just as lighting candles sanctifies the Sabbath, you can sanctify family by purposefully having your family acknowledge and cultivate the field, and by building from these spiritual principles. From cell to soul, through the field of love, family manifests as a spiritual space.
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