The Path of Parenting : Twelve Principles to Guide Your Journey by Vimala McClure

If you live in Boulder and want to learn to be a Buddhist, you can go to the Karma Dzong on Spruce Street and study with Tibetan masters. If you want to learn to mediate in an ashram, you can go to Eldorado Springs. If you want to become a disciple of the Christian faith, you can attend services at one of the many churches in Boulder. But if you want to make a spiritual practice of parenting, you're on your own.

Boulder-born author, Vimala McClure, used to mediate six hours a day. She was on a spiritual journey. Then she had two kids and, like most mommies, she barely had time to brush her teeth let alone meditate in silence. But she wasn't willing to let go of her spiritual path, so she changed lenses and began to see parenting as an intensive spiritual journey. She couldn't get up and do something else after six hours; she had to be in the practice 24 hours a day. "I realized parenting was my mission," said McClure.

Her new book, The Path of Parenting: Twelve Principles to Guide Your Journey (she also wrote The Tao of Motherhood and Infant Massage: A Handbook for Loving Parents) is full of her words of wisdom for the rest of us struggling to make some sense out of being parents. After the first page of her book I felt I had a teacher, a master if you will, who spoke the same language and walked the same path. Raising children is by far the most difficult, most wondrous and most important thing that any parent will ever do.

When a woman becomes a mother or a man becomes a father, society is armed with an arsenal of experts and advice. Though they may be well intentioned, the focus of most parenting advice is on the kids. The current issues of Parenting, Family Life and Child magazine are full of articles such as "How to Stop the Whining and Begging", "How to Get Kids to Eat Their Veggies!" and "Strategies for Increasing a Baby's or Toddler's Attention Span." We are told we have to mold and make our kids. Advice comes from child experts and from our parents and grandparents.

"The problem," said McClure, "is that our parents and grandparents have given us parenting maps of territory that we are no longer in." The old ways of being authoritarian and controlling with our kids are no longer working. "We get scared by all the things that are out there," she said, "so we clamp down and get real rigid and try to force our kids into what we think the map is."

So if the authoritarian model is no longer effective, and the passive, "let the kids run everything" model isn't either, then perhaps it is time for a new paradigm. McClure calls her model, "Partnership Paradigm." "I believe you can be a good, strong and wise parent and at the same time be friends with your children. We need to empower them, not control them," she explains.

McClure's Path of Parenting focuses not on the children, but on the parent. "My assumption is that if you feel fulfilled, purposeful, aligned with your integrity, and satisfied with your role as parent, your children will 'turn out' just fine," she writes in the introduction. She goes on to describe the twelve principles that will help to guide you to becoming that spiritual parent. Each chapter takes one principle, defines it using Tai Chi as a metaphor, discusses how to apply it to pregnancy, young children and teens, and follows with a simple exercise.

From the rigid schedule of the '50s Dr. Spock, to the groovy, "live and let live" '60s to the self-absorbed, "I'm OK, You're Not" '80s, we find ourselves economically prosperous and spiritually poor. Churches are experiencing an increase in attendance. The Dali Lama is incredibly popular. Middle-aged Jews who have all the stuff but no substance are returning to their parents' synagogues and celebrating Yom Kipper for the first time since they were children. And as the countdown to the new millennium gave us a metaphor for a new beginning, parents are primed to find a new definition of their role. Many are realizing it's not enough to just feed and clothe their offspring. It's not preparing their kids to live in a revved up world and it's not satisfying parents' needs to feel fulfilled.

"Understand that your children have come here to teach you," explains McClure, "To learn what they have come here for requires you to be present, relaxed and attentive." If she sounds like a minister preaching to her parishioners, well, in a way she is. She is giving us a teaching that not all, probably not even that many, will choose to hear. It's a lot of hard, lonely work to walk a spiritual path as a parent. There is no church to attend, no quiet room to mediate in, no master to actually talk to. It's not sanctioned by our parents or even our friends but still some will choose to walk it.

Face it, the Cleavers are dead. The fantasy family doesn't exist anymore. The speed of life is increasing with each generation. McClure uses the Taoist metaphor of a tree in the wind. The breeze easily topples a rigid, dead tree but a young, pliant growing tree bends with the wind and stays rooted in its flexibility. The breezes, winds and storms of life come through all of our family branches. "Recognize we have new families now," said McClure, "and we need to be more adaptable to keep the incredible love and connected through the life stream of our children."

In my own experience with Tai Chi and parenting, I find that it's easier to be wholly present in the face of crisis such as when child falls off the swing or an assailant grabs my purse. It's the daily practice that's difficult -- getting up at dawn to go to Tai Chi class or dealing with the fights between siblings. The Path of Parenting provides some well-written guidelines to staying in the moment and finding salvation in the lives of those you know so well. Perhaps the Parent Temple will be opening soon.

Copyright © 2001 Anna Stewart. All rights reserved worldwide.