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Nisha DSouza wrote: ↑August 16th, 2024, 2:54 pm
Hi Scott,
Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.
It is perfectly okay going through the grieving process after the death of a loved one and I understand it is very much needed in the healing process. It's not about money, or about a place to live. I know she will do just great in those regards because we have always encouraged her to follow her passion. My goal is that after the grieving process, she has the inner peace to get on with her life.
Hi,
Nisha DSouza,
Thank you for your question.
Assuming I am understanding correctly, this is essentially what you are asking:
How can I help my 12-year-old daughter develop invincible unwavering free-spirited inner peace (a.k.a. true happiness) so that she is prepared to deal with all the many challenges, brutal heartbreaks, tearful material losses, and wild unpredictable ups and downs that life will inevitably throw at her like it does to all humans?
As I am sure you know, to have true free-spirited inner peace is to have a form of deep spiritual resilience. It is to be resilient to a degree and depth that at least seems supernatural. It is to have
grace, especially in the sense of having grace under fire.
A person with free-spirited inner peace doesn't just have grace under fire, but rather they have grace especially when under fire.
Thus, proverbially speaking, one who has inner peace tends to be grateful when there is fire. They are eagerly grateful when forced to feel great bodily pain, fear, and discomfort. They are grateful for the dark because it is what lets their light shine. They don't see the dark as an enemy of their light or the proverbial fire as an enemy of their grace, but rather as a welcomed means to it. Without darkness, you have no light. Without fire, you effectively have no grace.
Free-spirited inner peace isn't something one has intermittently. Freedom, by definition, is holistic.
You do not just want your daughter to have inner peace
after she goes through the grieving process due to some major material loss (e.g. the death of one or both of her parents), because that would indicate she doesn't really have inner peace. Rather, you want her to also have inner peace before, during, and throughout the grieving process.
It will be the constant that exists during both the fleeting ups and fleeting downs of the roller coaster of life and ego.
Once you understand the concept of the "Two Yous" from my book,
In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All, you then understand that there are effectively two forms of happiness:
First is the happiness of the false self, meaning the body and ego. This could even be called "false happiness" or "unreal happiness" since it is of the
false and
unreal self (a.k.a. the ego). However, I typically just call it "comfort". In that way, "comfort addiction" is, at least in part, if not in whole, simply the state of falsely identifying with the ego (i.e. with the false self). Then, due to that false identification, the downs of the body and ego feel like real downs for the real you. It's a hellish illusion, but the hellishness of a hellish illusion is real. When you think the roller coaster can actually hurt you, those downs can become overwhelmingly frightening.
Second is what I call invincible unwavering "true happiness" or invincible unwavering "inner peace". It can even be called invincible unwavering "spiritual fulfillment".
The body and ego are fed with comfort, including literal food as well as things like sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, cigarette smoking, and attention-getting. The comfort is always fleeting because the body and ego are never satiated, and they are doomed to die and be forgotten in the blink of a cosmic eye. If aliens visit Earth in a billion years, they probably won't be able to even tell that humans ever existed. There could have been a hyper-intelligent race of creatures, smarter than humans, who lived on Earth a billion years ago, and we wouldn't know. There would be no trace of them.
In contrast, the spirit, meaning the real you, can be satiated and, in some sense, always is. The spiritual misery, the lack of spiritual fulfillment, and the spiritual slavery only ever exist as an illusion, albeit a very hellish illusion, whose tortuousness and hellishness are real. The real you is always satiated and free, but it can suffer under the illusion that it isn't satiated and/or isn't free, which (perhaps ironically) feels just as miserable as truly being unsatiated or unfree.
Your question to me is how to help your daughter develop and have that second kind of happiness, meaning
true happiness (a.k.a. free-spirited inner peace).
There is no sure way, of course. As
my book teaches, the only person you can directly save is yourself. For better or worse, be it seen as unfortunate or not, that is simply the nature of
self-discipline,
self-determination, and
self-responsibility. Of course, another word for 'self' is 'spirit', and so a word like self-discipline is just a synonym for 'spiritual freedom', and by extension, inner peace (a.k.a. true happiness) and spiritual fulfillment. Even the word 'inner' is yet another synonym referring to the same spirit / true self. There are a lot of words for it, but they all point to the same one thing.
With that said, the best way to get your kids to do anything or to adopt and have any habit is by doing that thing yourself and sticking to that habit yourself.
Generally speaking, your kids won't do what you tell them to do; they will do what you do.
If you tell your kids to practice gratitude and be grateful all the time, but you are consistently ungrateful and resentful, then almost certainly your kids will grow up to be miserable ungrateful resenters themselves.
You will talk to them the way you talk to yourself, and they will instinctively talk to themselves the way you talk to them. If you hear a voice in your head, as most people do, that voice is modeled after your parents. If your parents constantly said to you with a critical tone things like, "You are not good enough. You are not doing well enough. You shouldn't have done that. You could have done better. You need to do better. You ought to do better," well, then I can almost guarantee that your inner monologue now is filled with those miserable self-critical "shoulds" and "could haves" and such. It's an infectious disease, passed on from parent to child. It's a misery-inducing virus, just a memetic one instead of a genetic one.
If, throughout your kid's entire childhood, you consistently have invincible free-spirited inner peace (a.k.a. true happiness, self-discipline, and an unwavering sense of constant spiritual fulfillment), then your kid almost certainly will have those same wonderful traits when they grow up.
In contrast, if you don't, then they won't.
Teach and inspire your kids to have inner peace by consistently having it yourself.
Teach and inspire your kids to feel constantly grateful no matter what, and never be willfully resentful or judgmental, by doing that yourself throughout their childhood.
It doesn't matter much what you tell them to do because they won't do what you tell them to do, not in the long run. It matters what kind of role model you are for them. It matters what example you set. When it comes to raising kids, that is pretty much all that matters.
Those who think their children are that different from themselves probably simply lack self-awareness.
To achieve what you want to achieve, Nisha, I think you are already on exactly the track you want to be on.
For more on this topic, I suggest also reading through these previous Q&As:
What is your approach to raising children, especially keeping in mind the eleven suggestions at the end of your book?
Since you do your best to be as un-motivated as humanly possible, does that mean you let your kids grow up without any parental guidance?
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
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