As difficult as parenting can be, it’s all worth it in the end. Meditation certainly helps you appreciate the beautiful moments and accept the ugly ones.
Being a Happy Parent
My meditation practice began recently, when I was working for a hot digital marketing firm in Aspen. It was a stimulating position with incredibly creative, quick-witted, intelligent people, in a yellow refurbished Victorian on Main Street, smack-dab in the heart of Aspen. A dream job.
With a full-time job, I was juggling a lot and couldn’t turn my mind off from all the worry of raising teenagers in a legalized marijuana resort town: kids finding their parents’ stashes hidden in the garage and smoking them, snooping through a parent’s suitcase on a foreign “family trip” and finding dabs smuggled in, or dropping LSD at a concert their parents lovingly dropped them off at, hoping they’d be smart enough to honor the loosened reins as a chance to earn back trust. (For all you weed lovers, I’ll tell you right now: this is not about you, and it’s not about rescinding Amendment 64. This is about helping our youth who are under the legal age of 21. So please don’t give me your spiel about how marijuana isn’t a gateway drug for minors, because what we’re experiencing with our youth is living proof otherwise. Go ahead, challenge me on this topic. I dare ya.)
Even our wide-eyed, innocent Hootie-Hoo was showing signs of emotional and behavioral problems, falling to pieces if somebody looked at him wrong, or running out the door during homework time yelling that he was going to find himself a new family.
Being no mastermind in child psychology, and without the funds to bring in experts to test for the behavioral issues we feared all three boys had, the wheels in my head wouldn’t stop whirling as I tried to figure out how to fix everything that seemed broken.
My method of escape was to plug into Pandora and turn it up while powering up mountains, or to sidle up to a downvalley cowboy bar with girlfriends… and buy horses and stuff. It’s one or the other for me, I ain’t lyin’.
Don’t forget, we do live in a party town, and although I’m a work in progress when it comes to enlightenment, I’m a party girl at heart. When things get to be too much and I still have aggressive energy even after releasing endorphins or meditating, there’s always something going on in our valley and a friend to go out with.
Always plugged in, always online, often escaping and always thinking, I desperately needed to learn how to quiet the noise, lest I make myself sick.
Meditate or Medicate
One day, after a 1,000-foot vertical hike, I searched for and found the perfect meditation spot, which appeared to have been used for this very purpose before. I was pretty sure the little stone circle meticulously laid around the spot was built by the same people who are always writing messages like “Jesus Loves You” and “Peace” on the multicolored rocks they find.
Sitting cross-legged, I set the timer on my smartphone, closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, giving myself ten minutes to calm the noise. Twenty minutes later I opened my eyes to snowcapped mountains and hawks soaring over sagebrush. Thus my meditation practice began, and the windows to the magic of my childhood reopened.
As a child, I spent a lot of time absorbed in the fairy paintings from my mother’s art collection, by painters like John Anster Fitzgerald, Richard Doyle and Arthur Rackham, placing myself in a world where fairies enticed me to play among moss-covered rocks and trees threatened to trap me in their gnarled branches. My meditation practice awakened those memories, and I began to look at the world with heightened alertness and fascination.
To intellectualize what’s happening, I listen on Audible to books like Waking Up by Sam Harris, 10% Happier by Dan Harris and The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I also talk with the higher beings who enter my life, from rabbis to pastors. I’ve had nectar dripped on my forehead by Tibetan monks and been told by the minister of my in-laws’ church that I’m surrounded by a golden aura and angels.
It has been a fantastic journey, and although all of this is helping me wake up, the true awakening comes from deep within and brings the most beautiful peacefulness I’ve felt since I was a child.
The Verdict
As difficult as parenting can be, we’re teaching our children to be accountable for their actions, and I no longer let myself worry about the future. Now I’m constantly getting chills from all the beautiful moments in my day and letting out little guffaws at nature’s funny sense of humor, uncertain whether I’m going insane or at the beginning of a true awakening.
When I weigh it all out (the thirteen-year-old who finds EVERYTHING we do unbelievably annoying and tells us to be less embarrassing and stop dancing at parties he’s also invited to; the fifteen-year-old who is barely ever home and whom we miss terribly until he bangs through the door as loud as a bad storm and throws his six-foot, 150-pound frame at all of us; and a husband who, as adorably positive as he is, lives in his own sheltered world where he truly believes his wife is a “sex pot” even though I wake up at 5 a.m. and NEED to be in bed by 9 p.m., and that his sons are all exactly as they should be), being a parent to three boys consistently comes out on the positive side of the scale. The answer is a resounding YES. I am happy (most of the time), but it’s definitely the most challenging job I’ll ever have.
