The Universal Connection
By Jo-Anne Cutler

Whenever we look at a baby, we can’t help but melt into their connection of love, peace and contentment. As we gently rock these precious bundles in our arms, we can feel the connection of our own love, our own peace, our own contentment - in that moment.

Our children instinctively know that they are the reminder of this connection of love, however when they don’t see it being mirrored around them, they can lose it and begin to behave from a disconnected place.

Somewhere along our journey we too have perhaps lost our connection, especially if it wasn’t modelled for us as a child and as everything in life comes full circle, we are passing this disconnection on to our kids and they will pass it on to our grandchildren and so on and so on.

The first step to becoming more connected is to simply be aware of the moments when we are disconnected. When we are connected, it’s virtually impossible to behave in disconnected ways - this is as true for us as it is for our children.

If we as parents, teachers and other role models can be the example of this connection ourselves, we can then have compassion when our kids react and misbehave; knowing they are simply disconnected in that moment and we will be able to avoid the chaos of my disconnection meets your disconnection!

Just as flight attendants request that parents put their oxygen masks on first to better take care of their children, it is up to us to re-connect, how ever we can – paying attention to the book that is jumping off the shelf for us to read, or maybe there is someone we know whose life reflects what we desire and ask them what they are doing, attend a seminar or find a coach or mentor who can help.

Seeing a picture of a baby can even help evoke the warm feelings of the same connection that we too arrived with after our nine month period of gestation, so another great way to start reconnecting would be to post and carry around pictures of our children when they were babies and at the slightest hint of losing it, expressing our disapproval or disappointment or behaving in other disempowering ways, we could catch ourselves, look at this picture and ask, “Would I do what I am doing now to this innocent child?”

Our biggest responsibility is to nurture the connection that our children were born with but first we have to nurture our own connection and once we do, watch how harmony begins to grow in our homes, spreads to our schools and throughout the world - one connection at a time!

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About the author:

In addition to being a writer, Jo-Anne Cutler supports her vision of empowering and inspiring others to be the parents, teachers and role models the children of this world need them to be, by creating awareness as a speaker and a coach, offering programs as well as a monthly newsletter on how to keep all the great stuff we’ve learned from our parents while breaking the cycle of the, well, not so good stuff!