McCrenshaw's Newest Thoughts: Are You Up for the Mindful Parenting Collaboration?

Monday, October 17, 2011

Are You Up for the Mindful Parenting Collaboration?

I have been following along with Hybrid Rasta Mama's Mindful Mothering Challenge posts for quite a while now - she just finished it! I've wanted to jump in and start taking part in my own challenge, but just never had the push to do it. Writing my submission (HERE) to the Mindful Mama Blog Carnival (hosted by TouchstoneZ and Becoming Crunchy) last month got me heading in the right direction, but I still didn't have the motivation I needed.

Fate intervened and I received an email from Erin (it's OK), asking me if I would be interested in joining her in this Mindful Mothering challenge and blogging about it. I have to admit that I did NOT get back to her right away. This would mean that I'd have absolutely no choice to quit once I got going. Now, you'll notice, if you've been reading my blog for very long, that I tend to start things, say, "I plan to post about this every so often." then you never hear about it again. I don't have anyone to answer to but myself, so I just procrastinate until it's too late and then throw the whole idea out the window. I swear, I have a TON of posts in draft on Blogger, MS Word, and in notebooks that just need to have finishing touches added and they're ready to go - good posts! No motivation or anyone counting on me to post, so I don't. Well, this endeavor is different - I have another person counting on me to do my part. I will (hopefully) have people looking forward to my posts each week and bloggers who'd like to join in. When someone counts on me to do something, I can't let them down, so this is a year-long commitment I'm getting myself into!

Read below for information!

Beginning October 21st McCrenshaw's Newest Thoughts and it’s OK will be co-hosting a Mindful Parenting Collaboration.

What is This?!

This collaboration is based on The Parenting Passageway's 20 Days Toward More Mindful Mothering, originally posted in 2009. Recently Hybrid Rasta Mama (and others, as well) followed this as the Mindful Mothering Challenge. It was originally done as one concept per day to consider in examining your parenting and how to make it more conscious, loving and effective. Hybrid Rasta Mama spent more time, roughly one week, working through each of the concepts. We thought we'd spend two weeks on each one, to allow us time to consider the concept, apply it to our parenting, write about our experience, and read other people's results as well.

Why "Mindful Parenting Collaboration"? We wanted to keep this open to all parents. Maybe, if both mom and dad are going to take part in this together, they may want to take turns writing posts... "Collaboration", I think, is more appropriate to the mindful theme here. I keep reading posts on the subject of mindful parenting and see that many have written that this shouldn't be work or something that is hard to do. Since I have yet to go through all of the steps, it looks to me like I'm standing at the foot of a huge, rocky mountain. Maybe I just can't see the gently sloping path...

We invite you to join us!

How it works:

We'll explore 20 aspects of mindful parenting, such as gentle discipline, realistic expectations, rhythm, nature, working through the body, and inner work. One week, we'll post and discuss a concept to consider, invite you to set a personal goal relating to it, and share our goals. The next week, we'll post our results of working with our goal, and invite you to link up your own results. If you've done the challenge in the past, you're welcome to link up your posts on the appropriate week as well! We welcome those who've "been there, done that" to share their own experiences with us. You may even want to consider writing a short reflection post, telling us how things are going with each particular subject in the present.

Please feel free to grab the button. Eventually, I'll figure out a way to share the code in a "fancy" code box with you! For now, here's the HTML:

How conscious is your parenting?

* Image for the button is from Flickr's Creative Commons