We parent within the context of culture and community. My approach extends beyond the individual to empower all relationships around the child to form commitments of care, organised around mutual accountability, shared understanding of behaviour, and the capacity to co-ordinate together in coherent, healing-centred ways
What I stand for.
More than ever, we need to foster relationships in which we all feel safe, seen, and accepted, for the sake of healing ourselves, our families and communities. But that won’t be possible until we return to our bodies, because the body is the source of our compassionate power.
So I am committed to sharing accessible, pragmatic tools that help families, and their support systems, embody the kind of enduring love and resilience that is rooted in a felt-sense of support, worth, and belonging, and practice and create the the loving community we long to belong to.
I help you explore new ways of being in relationship with yourself, your children and community, so you trust you can take wise action on behalf of others, whilst receiving care and nourishment for yourself, even through the toughest moments
“We need help, but not the kind that turns us back upon ourselves and sends us away to pull it together. We need skill, but not the kind that makes us experts at not needing anyone. We need opportunities for participation, but not the kinds that overburden us”
— Mark Fairfield, The Relational Movement
Courage to be accountable
Embodied parenting recognises the necessity for relational, collective, care and reclaims parenting as co-creative and intuitive; we create our experiences together, we are contagious. We sense, regulate, resonate and change each other at a neuro-psycho-biological level. We quite literally live inside and revise each other’s brains and bodies.
So the responsibility falls on all of us to learn, and engage in, collective and personal practices that foster interdependence, mutuality and inclusiveness, and to build relational muscles for embodied attunement and empathy whilst increasing our bandwidth for difference and distress.
And if we are truly committed to peaceful parenting, we must gently, courageously, face towards ourselves, and hold each other accountable for the ways we subtly (and not so subtly) oppress, aggress, shame and act harshly towards ourselves and others, and together practice and create the loving communities we long to belong to.
“It is not simply the act of caring for a traumatised child that leads to blocked care, it is parenting within traumatised cultures that are quick to dismiss, judge, shame and exclude our families.
We are capable of great feats of love and resilience, when we feel held within a community that tells us we are worthy of care, consideration and support. When we know we matter too.”
Kirstie Seaborne, Echo Parenting Conference