The Mindful Parent Website and The Morning Cup

The Mindful Parent is an organization devoted to sharing with parents and other child caregivers ways in which to enhance the many joys of parenting. By mindfully attending to our children, both when we are physically present with them and when we are physically separated from them, we can enhance our sense of connection to them and, in turn, our connection to the cosmos. This makes us a better parent, a happier person, and a more vital human being.

To facilitate a more mindful approach to parenting, The Mindful Parent publishes on its website, and in its newsletter, mindful parenting verses and commentaries. The Mindful Parent website also serves as a community forum that encourages and supports a mindful parenting dialogue and the sharing of mindful parenting experiences.

In the spirit of developing a mindful parenting community, we encourage you to submit a mindful parenting verse, commentary, and imagery to share with others. We believe that through our collective experience, we can help each other develop a deeper and more meaningful mindful parenting practice. Click here to learn more about making a submssion. We thank everyone who has made a contribution.

Please contact us with your questions about mindful parenting or to share a mindful parenting experience. The Mindful Parent conducts mindful parenting workshops and seminars.

The Week of January 4, 2009

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The Mindful Parent

The Daily Sip: Happy NOW Year

Mindfulness is moving more deeply into this moment – right here, right now. For it is in this place -- this space -- that we more fully embrace and luxuriate in what it means to be alive. As parents, we offer our children a more attuned presence, and guide them with greater mastery, when we are firmly grounded in the here and now.

The new year has begun and with it a sense of new beginnings, an opportunity to make the changes we seek for ourselves and offer more of what we have to offer as human beings to our family, friends, and community.

How wonderful it is that we strive to make manifest our full potential – to bring ourselves into greater balance with the challenging and inspiring aspects of our world and daily experience.

The cycling of the seasons and the arrival of the New Year offers a compelling shift in our state of mind that allows us to move into the space of transformation with the deep belief that “this time” we will do so successfully. What a beautiful state of presence. Have you noticed its elusiveness?

And indeed, often these resolutions bring fruit that we can taste. And always, they plant or water seeds of genuine intention that may not yet bear fruit, but mark our personal journey and growth. Often we find that our motivation (like all things), arises and passes away – and we wonder where it went. And then, as the months fly, our mind again steadies itself as we look to the next New Year as an opportunity to try it again.

All the while we know that the New Year is a symbolic passage. Yet we still feel that it offers us something more and different – something that makes the changes we desire more likely to take place.

Perhaps it is merely that as we contemplate the new year our state of mind shifts into a more grounded place out of which naturally and effortlessly flows mindfulness traits like clarity, courage, intuition, wisdom, and compassion.

The insight of the New Year is that its promise resides in every moment. That every moment is its own new year. And that the arising and passing away of conviction, commitment and inspiration is not a once a year event, but one that arises out of nothing more than awareness. And what is that awareness? Awareness that the moment is Now.

Today’s mindfulness verse offers a reminder of the power of this moment and invites us to wake up and experience it more fully.

Where do I find the New Year
Now that it is here?
In this Breath
Right here, right Now.