Living From Your Heart When Parenting Special Needs Children By Karen Hasselo

There are two ways to parent your children. You can set an intention to connect with the wisdom of your heart or you can get lost in the fear-based storylines of your mind.
For most of my son’s childhood, my energy came from the swirling vortex in my mind. I now realize that this vortex of desperation and yearning deprived me of showing up as my best Self.
 
You’ve likely been conditioned to believe that your heart responds to messages sent from your brain in the form of neural signals. But are you aware that your heart is initiating continuous communication with your brain? According to the HeartMath Institute, the heart’s messages impact your emotional processing and your higher cognitive functions, including perception, memory and problem solving.

After decades of research, the HeartMath Institute has discovered that when you bring your physical, mental and emotional states into balanced alignment, you tap into higher states of intuitive guidance and awareness. It is through this state of “coherence” that you potentially awaken to your mental, emotional and spiritual superpowers.
 
When you live from your heart, you recognize that your special needs children are here to teach you, every bit if not more, than you are here to teach them!
 
You recognize that the old parenting paradigm that was founded upon the use of fear tactics, control, punishment and seclusion needs to be permanently retired. Our children are here as way showers! They illuminate a more elevated consciousness and an improved model for how to relate to one another. Our children are here to offer us a relationship template that is founded upon connection, trust, intimacy, equality, mutual respect and cooperation. 

When you tap into your heart, you recognize that the Universe is always speaking to you. When you give yourself permission to listen to the whisperings of a Loving Universe, you activate your senses, you form impressions, you wake up to key symbols, you receive spontaneous downloads and you run headfirst into what appear to be happenstance events, but what are in actual point of fact, Divine synchronicities and miracles. What could be better than that?
 
You come to understand that you have access to a vast pool of higher wisdom and knowledge that is so beyond what the tiny little thinking mind can conceive. Answers flow when you listen from your heart.
 
You recognize that the mind can only draw from it’s past conditioning, which is often quite faulty and flawed. After all, the mind is stuck in rigid patterns, deep ruts that replay repeatedly on a continuous feedback loop. The mind’s job is to continually sound an alarm, to defend you from realities that feel harsh, overwhelming and beyond your capacities to respond with ability. The mind is famous for feeding you rational lies that parade as logical facts.
 
When you enter into your heart space, you leave the dire warnings of the mind behind and you instead connect back into the present moment; the very same moment that is filled with gratitude for an untold number of blessings in your life. The present moment is also your moment of power because it is your springboard of choice.  
 
It is also in your heart where you find entry into the flow of life. This flow gently leads you step by step through the maze of life and shows you that you are forever protected, loved and nurtured, as your dreams materialize before you.
 
You can finally resign from all the mental energy that keeps you addicted to figuring life out! You can let go of turning yourself inside out as you try to control for every outcome and micromanage every circumstance, so that the right elements fall together on behalf of your child. 
 
Fighting with aspects of your life, over the long haul, will exhaust you and rob you of the joy, resiliency, grace and ease that you so deserve. I can confidently make that statement because I fried my adrenals living under the illusion that I could will mountains to move. Life doesn’t work that way. The mind will tell you it does. Your heart knows and sees a better way to navigate.
 
When you live in your heart space, you see your child as a magnificent and powerful being who can impart higher truth, irrespective of how he or she presents in a physical body. Looking back, there were so many times that my son demonstrated the way forward. Unfortunately, my logical mind found all kinds of reasons to discount his higher guidance.
 
For example, throughout childhood, Mark loved to get drenched in the rain. He would try every strategy to finagle a way to remain in the pouring rain. My logical mind catastrophized that getting drenched in the rain was a prescription for coming down with illness and therefore I tried to curb and control his desires. I’ve recently been taught that rain carries healing codes that help bring the mind/body/spirit back into balance. Had I been listening with my heart, maybe I could have honored my son’s intentions, instead of initiating a power struggle.

The heart is also linked to your language of feelings. Your feelings invariably lead you in the right spiritual direction. When you give yourself permission to honor them, embrace them and heed the wisdom embedded in their communication, you will forever be served. Even your uncomfortable feelings point you toward your lack of alignment with some aspect of your higher knowing. Learning to fluently speak the language of your feelings will support you in mastering your intuitive abilities, actualizing your potent soul connection with your child, as well as attaining your soul purpose and mission for incarnating.
 
And the heart is the seat of forgiveness! Forgiveness is a force that can transform you, your child, your family, your community and the world at large. It’s time for you to listen to your heart and unconditionally forgive yourself, your children and anyone else who is holding you back from being all that you can be in this lifetime.
 
It’s time to rejoice! Our children are here to help us learn to live authentically, powerfully and in integrity. They ask us to act from our hearts; to show up as love and to choose love, so that we may create a world of peace, equality and sustainability that honors everyone’s Divinity.  ​