Stay happy, healthy & hold lightly

Khush Raho with Sangeeta 

Recently, a parent asked why children don’t listen or follow instructions. She felt the only way was to remind them constantly. Have you done this? Did you finish that homework? Have you had your vitamins? Have you showered? Have you exercised today? However, that is not a role she really wanted to play. So what is the solution?

As I write this, Eid ul Adha is being observed, and I found myself thinking about what Prophet Ibrahim must have gone through before offering his son Ismail as a sacrifice to God. The guidance I found was this: Ibrahim was not blindly offering his son. He was in a state of complete surrender to the divine will. If God asked for a sacrifice of what was dearest to him, he put his son forward honestly and without resistance. And what did that surrender bring him? His son back, at the last minute. 

There are many quotations that state if you love something, let it go and it will come back to you. This thought finds a resonance in a law of physics too: every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  The more we push, the heavier the pulling away. 

This is true with children. Perhaps we should let go, not hold on so tightly. It is in the holding on, in assuming we have control that we may be creating the very resistance we are fighting. One can’t pull a train back if it has left the station.

We had two rules for my daughter: Treat everyone with the same respect, whether an elder or a helper, and never waste food. Food was a battle. She did not like milk and the usual baby foods, which meant hours of negotiation and invention trying to find what she would actually eat. The best advice came from her pediatrician. He simply asked: Have you tried chicken soup? We tried it. And to my immense surprise, she loved it. 

Sometimes, the answer is that simple. Stop pushing. Try something else. And more often than not, when we loosen our grip on our children, on outcomes, on control, things find their own way. 

(Sangeeta Bhalla is an Energy Healer, Instructor, and Therapeutic Aromatherapist. She can be reached at www.sangeetabhalla.net )