Three steps to change

How do we grow resilience in challenging times? These three steps offer radical change for this moment and for the future.

Warm attachment to our children

We need to commit to kind, warm, allyship with our children. To realise that their whole lives depend on our friendliness. That there is nothing we have to train them to do. They already have everything they need to know inside them, waiting to unfurl in the right environment. Our job is simply to provide them with security and warmth. 

Like a sunflower seed that has every one of its glorious petals already encoded in its DNA. It simply needs the right place in the garden. Nobody needs to tell a sunflower how to grow and it will never become a rose or a lavender bush no matter how much you shout, cajole and coerce. Environment is everything, relationship is everything. If we leave a sunflower seedling in a damp shed it will do its absolute best to grow. It will make the most of every drop of water that drips into its pot, every dim ray of light that makes it through the cracked windows. But it will be frail and fragile, distorted as it tries to bend itself towards the sun.

For children, their sunshine is their mother’s warm attention, their father’s holding arms. This is not a currency, to be withheld or offered according to the child’s obedience but a deep necessity, the basic building block of humanity.

Warm connection to ourselves

We need to recover our warm connection to ourselves. To heal the damage done by generations of separation from our basic needs. We need to learn about how our nervous systems truly work, to recognise the trauma we carry that cuts us off from ease and joy, that makes us reactive and out of control in the presence of our children. We can learn to see clearly what stands between us and our easy love for our children, what makes it so hard to put into practice the kindness that we have committed to.

Three decades of neuroscience research has given us so much information about how to do this work, this healing. We, particularly in the privileged West, are ridiculously fortunate to have so many resources and teachers who can gently show us the way. We can learn how to rewire our fraught nervous systems in simple daily practices, we can find help in tuning into the map of our embodied life experience, and gently untangle the confusion and pain. 

It is now abundantly clear that we cannot do this alone, any of it. We are tribal animals, we do not exist except in a network of relationships. Our whole lives, every cell of our being has been shaped by relationship, for better or worse. Warm connection with people who care about us is essential for recovery and thriving. So a big part of this radical work is to gather around us a community of care. A radical version of the village we always needed but have forgotten. Deep interdependence and support. This is now completely counter cultural and we need to work hard to rebuild the conditions for true tribe.

Reconnecting with the natural world

We need to rediscover our connection to the natural world. Our home. Our bodies have evolved in the context of the earth under our feet, in the wild challenge and beauty of nature. 

This work starts with remembering that we are animals on this earth, that nature is not a recreational activity for Sunday afternoons, or a handy resource to mine for fossil fuels, but the only place where we can survive, the meeting of our deepest needs for life. We need to find ways to reconnect with the natural world outside the doors of our insulated houses, outside the bounds of our cities and outside the artificial boundaries of our nations and continents. This connection may involve planting a tree or campaigning for climate action, walking barefoot on grass or sand, or standing up to protect the forests across the world.

We have become separated from the land and we need it back. We are not whole without our wider family, the animals and birds we share the land with, the trees and plants which provide for all our needs, the insects which make human life possible. A small child staring in wonder at a line of ants, watched fondly by a loving parent is directly linked to the survival of life on earth. There is no separation. We must remember that. It is the only way.