True to all the clichés, becoming a mother really does change your life. Parenting is challenging and very stressful at times. Despite the 4 am wake up calls, midnight diaper changes, food spills, and the occasional public meltdown, I am blown away by the amount of absolute joy my daughter brings into my life every single day.
She, like all babies, is pure, positive energy. More than just a little baby, she is an eternal soul, pure Consciousness, that’s eager and excited to take on a fresh perspective. Watching her smile, laugh, and look around this world in wonder not only makes me happy, it raises my own energy, and allows me to experience love and joy on a whole new level. And at only 9 months, she has already taught me so many important life lessons:
1. She lives in the moment.
She doesn’t waste time and emotional energy thinking about what went wrong yesterday, or worrying about what could go wrong tomorrow. She lives in the present moment. I may be absentmindedly rolling a grocery cart through the store, while on my phone, annoyed at having to complete another chore. My daughter, on the other hand, will squeal with delight as we roll past all the brightly colored fruits and vegetables, and will excitedly pick up a lemon or orange to examine it carefully. She engages with the world and people around her with such focus, energy, and enthusiasm, that even strangers will take notice and come up to talk to her. By bringing a positive energy to the present moment, she uplifts everyone around her.
2. She’s authentic.
Unlike adults, who have been socially conditioned to suppress negative emotion, be fake and say the right things to please others, and construct an artificial image of how we want to world to view us, a baby could care less what you think of him or her. Part of the reason most people finds babies to be such a breath of fresh air is because they are always authentic to who they are; they never hide how they feel (even if they aren’t feeling particularly happy in that moment), and they don’t understand or engage in toxic adult concepts like fakeness, manipulation, lying, and passive aggressiveness. What you see with a baby is what you get. If my daughter is happy, she’s genuinely happy. If she’s frustrated or tired or doesn’t like you, well, she’s honest about that too. And there is a certain joy and simplicity in that honesty- it’s authentic, and authenticity is a quality which we are intuitively drawn to.
3. She finds such joy in the simplest things.
It’s amazing to see things again for the first time through a child’s eyes rather than my own jaded perspective. The other day, my daughter and I were walking through the park, and a leaf blew down and fell on her head. Instead of being annoyed and brushing it off, she laughed, caught the leaf, and then spent the next 15 minutes examining its texture, beautiful color, and twirling it around in her little tiny hands. She got so much enjoyment out of discovering something that was so simple, but completely new to her. She takes whatever happens to come her way, and then just has fun and enjoys it, no matter how small or simple.
4. She never lets other people’s negativity or opinions get her down.
My daughter (thankfully) hasn’t yet learned to internalize negative judgments and opinions and let it influence her sense of self. She’s focused on her own game, her own happiness, her own joy. Babies don’t compete or get jealous of each other- they don’t look at the baby next to them and think “Oh, that baby can crawl and I can’t! There must be something inherently wrong with me!” It’s so amazing to see how happy and confident babies naturally are with themselves, and how they delight in learning new skills, at their own pace and on their own terms.
5. She eats when she’s hungry, and stops when she’s full.
This one’s not so much a spiritual lesson as a practical one. Adults usually have a lot of “food noise” – social cues which often influence what, how, when, and how much we eat. We often forget to really tune in and listen to our bodies and what they really need, and instead eat for social or emotional reasons. Watching my daughter eat is fascinating because she has no food noise. She eats precisely when her body tells her she’s hungry (not because it’s mealtime or because we’re at a restaurant, etc) and she stops eating at the precise moment she’s full (she doesn’t feel guilty about leaving food on her plate, or eating a bite of a cookie, for example. In fact, the concept of food “guilt” is not even on her radar). She enjoys a wide variety of food (mostly healthy and organic but with an occasional cookie thrown in there), but isn’t obsessed with any of it. Food noise and obsessions aren’t natural- we are socially or emotionally conditioned to negative beliefs around food.
As I finish this article, I realize that my daughter is here to teach me just as much as I am here to teach her. She is pure, positive Consciousness, and hasn’t yet lost her connection to source energy/ God. She brings so much joy and happiness because, through her own positive energy and strong connection to Source, she allows me, on a very deep level, to reconnect to that greater part of myself. domain worth calculator .
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