StayListening – The Secret to World Peace? My Favourite Tool for Calming Angry Toddlers (and People!)

Do you have a crying baby, or a toddler who’s hit the terrible (aka terrific), twos? Not coping? Need help NOW? Or, are you someone who loses their temper easily, because of a sensitive ‘inner child’ and emotional wounding? Then this post is dedicated to you. I’ve included some photos of my sons, including Forrest having a range of ‘moments’!

May 2021 update – Ziggy has arrived and we now have three boys under 6 years old! See the blogs under Conscious Parenting resources

Introduction
Imagine that, you turned up to a new job you’d won from a pool of many candidates, based on your excellent work experience. It’s the job of a lifetime, for a lifetime. You know what you want to accomplish, and can’t wait to get started. However, after a few weeks, you’re struggling in the role due to changing conditions, and get emotional in front of your boss.

Instead of letting you explain things, so that you can resolve the problem and improve the workplace, your boss yells at you to be quiet. They tell you that ‘big kids don’t cry’, then put you in a dark room alone. Better yet, they stick a biscuit in your mouth, dance around to distract you and turn on the TV until you forget what you came here to do on the planet.

Eventually, after you give up trying to get their attention, and decide that ‘no one listens to me – my voice doesn’t count’, they come back, pat you on the back and say ‘there there, are you finished?’ before checking their phone and continuing as if nothing had happened. Unfortunately, by this point, you’re now thinking, ‘what’s the point? I don’t make a difference.’ Now, the only way your boss can motivate you is through rewards like food and money or by threatening you with punishment. You’ve switched off, at least for now.

Sound harsh? Well, that’s what it feels like for conscious children, when parents don’t listen. It’s also how your body and Higher Self feel, when you keep judging them with your mind. BTW, I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. I’m saying this to help you become free again.

People teach what they know. Emotional literacy is a language. If your parents were too busy to study their feelings (let alone translate yours), don’t blame them. Honour their efforts, by building on what they gave you, and continuing your education. Dissolve the shame through understanding and all the doors will open.

Remember, kids are entire Souls, with numerous past lives, squished into 3kg bodies at birth. They have chosen you. They have a life purpose. Most of all, they want you to succeed, and believe in love, because they are Spiritual Messengers from the Universe. Learning how to connect with them could literally, save your life and heal the planet for seven generations to come. More on the 7th Generation Principle

My Reason for this Post
“People don’t care how much you know, until they know how much you care.” John Maxwell (Leadership guru and 25/7 Lifepath, aka the Spiritual Teacher) – read more about this concept, including touching case studies from a substitute teacher

After hearing from yet another parent who said ‘controlled crying didn’t work on my child’, and speaking with my wise women friends Karina Katz, Jane Leonforte (Arrange with Jane), Hong Curley and Diane, I felt compelled to share a story with you.

In numerology, every word, name and address has a vibration and deeper meaning (see the system). LISTEN adds to 3+9+1+2+5+5 = 25/7, the same as words like HEART, MORTAL, SOULMATE and SPORT. Perhaps, effective listening truly is the secret to living from love instead of fear? What if we could make compassion a game, where the goal is for everyone to win?

As I write these words, it’s 2:22am – 222 is the Angel Code for emotional healing, patience and balanced relationships (Sacral Chakra energy). Perfect. Forrest has been saying ‘2, 2, 2’ for weeks!

Like most empaths, and healers, I spend my life listening. Listening to my children, my partner, my friends, my clients, the animals and trees – and most of all, to my Spirit Guides, Soul and inner voice. My Dad said recently ‘do the most important thing first, and everything else will fall into place’. For me, the no. 1 activity I include in my day to stay sane is meditation. Just 10 minutes of listening to a track (like this Angel Meditation), gives me the serenity I need to keep up with two kids under two!

Today, I was tested to the max. My little boy, Forrest, a 9 Lifepath, aka the Old Soul, Thinker and Healer, had a royal meltdown. I could have yelled at him, made him cry it out, or poured my incompleteness into his vulnerable aura. But I didn’t. Here’s what I chose instead, and the awesome results we experienced!

From Broken, to Whole-Hearted Relationships
In my younger years, I was taught how to talk underwater. My family have many 1’s in their dates of birth (and I’m a Master 11 lifepath, aka The Spiritual Messenger), giving them plenty of nervous energy, stamina, willpower and a passion for ‘fixing things’. As I quip in my numerology workshops, ‘if you need to get it done, ask a one’. Find your lifepath

While this upbringing was brilliant for my career (I worked in conservation, science and charity fundraising before switching to psychic readings), a severe lack of patience took its toll on my health and relationships. Not only did I suffer from anorexia/ orthorexia (a legacy of being force-fed ideas and food that didn’t agree with me, and overruling my body’s hunger), I could not seem to fulfil my dreams of getting married and having kids. One after another, my ex-boyfriends and I split up, mainly because I kept overruling my gut and choosing emotionally unavailable people i.e. can-opener relationships. Read more on Soulmate myths

Fortunately, after receiving warnings about my crappy people skills, my boss at the time (Cherie, a 31/4 lifepath aka the Heart Healer), invited Nick Freedman, to coach us in DISC personality profiling. I learned that I wasn’t broken, simply a High C (Compliance/ Conscientious) type, who cared more about accuracy than people’s feelings.

I still have Nick’s report, which reveals that I value personal growth over all else, and need to learn to appreciate those who work differently to me. Around this time, I also studied Holistic Counselling with the Awakening Group, and The Work of Byron Katie with Rosie Stave.

As a result, I finally learned to shut up and listen with my heart, instead of just waiting for my turn to interrupt! Long story short, I ended up quitting my 9-5 to fulfil my dream of being a palmreader and numerologist. I met my 11:11 Soulmate Kris Anderson straight after that. He had also left his job for a TV career, weeks before we met on a romance palmistry show. When you listen, you attract people who Trust. In. Life. Cool, huh?

So when Forrest came along, I had a golden chance to put my years of personal growth and counselling into practice. So I listened to my baby while he was in the womb. He told me exactly what to eat – home grown sprouts were a favourite, why he had chosen me, and how to prepare for his waterbirth. I’ve continued to tune in as he’s gotten bigger.

Contrary to my childhood, when he gets emotional, I zoom in instead of out. My motto is ‘raise your kids and keep them close, instead of putting them down (physically and verbally)’. Help them grow into trees of life. That said, it’s tempting to pull your hair when your little one starts hitting his newborn brother, and acting out in public. Thank goodness my pregnancy yoga instructor (Suzanne Swan from yogababy, a fellow 11 lifepath), lent me Listen, Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges.

Staylistening – The Secret to World Peace (At Least in My House)
As soon as I opened Patty Wipfler and Tosha Schore’s book, I wanted to cry with relief. Then I wanted to buy a copy for every parent in the Universe! In lieu of the latter, I’m blogging about the power of their compassionate techniques for calming down your little ones. See Hand in Hand Parenting’s site for heaps of great articles

Essentially, Staylistening involves creating a safe space for your child to express their ‘big-blast’ feelings of anger, grief, fear, while you stay present. They are allowed to cry, but in a natural and supported way. This process “lets your child know that you think that life is basically on a good track, that you’re not afraid of what happened, or what is about to happen, and that your attention is on (him or) her. When you’re not afraid, your child has room and safety to notice her feelings, offload them completely, and be done.” 

As a practitioner in the New Age industry, I see a lot of ‘light-washing’, where what people say contradicts what they do. For example, it’s fashionable to utter, ‘my child is my greatest teacher*’, while still treating them like, well, a child!  Why is this? *They are also our greatest students – it’s important not to overlook our responsibilities here.

Well, let’s just say it’s easier to sweep your doorstep than to scrub a mouldy basement or bathroom. As I say in my post on house readings, we tend to do more of what keeps us safe i.e. clean the obvious. Subconscious clearing is not only uncomfortable, it almost always requires us to admit we need help. Sadly, many people think this is a weakness, and so they keep on putting out mixed signals, and attracting average results.

Staylistening breaks down the illusion that you are separate to, or powerless in the face of, your child’s suffering. It’s empowering, because you don’t follow a formula, you just go with the flow and trust that eventually, the storm will subside without your interference. This restores your faith in life’s order. When you stop feeding the beast, it stops being beastly and turns back into your cute, lovable kid. Like all long-term solutions, Staylistening just takes time, practice and the prioritising of curiosity over condemnation.

The Situation
We are free spirits, who mainly live outdoors on the balcony (see pic). My 21 month old son Forrest was romping in the garden, when he started screaming. Really screaming, the kind of yelling that makes a parent gulp. I was in the middle of something, so I asked Kris to check him. Kris (who is literally, a psychic), said ‘he’s probably standing on the ants again and they’re biting him’.

I feel bad saying this, but Forrest has been teething and fussing recently, so I waited before running to him, just to make sure it was something important. Sure enough, his feet were covered in ants and he was frozen on the spot. Even after I brushed them off, he was distraught, and for days, kept saying ‘No!’ to everything we asked him (I’ll post an amusing video of this soon).

Having read Patty’s book, I suspected he’d need to let off steam and I was right. After we had our nap today, I saw ants in the kitchen sink and took my chance. I picked up Forrest and a plate covered in ants (we live next to the bush, so insects are common). He got excited and started pointing at them. I put him on the balcony, and we watched as the ants ran around. A couple ran up Forrest’s arm and he started to lose it, shaking and tensing up. I blew the ants away, and noticed that his energy was rising.

All of a sudden, Forrest went into meltdown. He was crying, pushing me away, then pulling me back. Acting confused. Hitting my leg symbolically (I still kept my boundaries), and wailing like he’d been abandoned.

The Process
I let him vent, because I knew he needed to be heard. In my mind, I could hear him telepathically saying ‘you weren’t there when I needed you, I feel so alone now that Charlie’s here – you were supposed to protect me from those ants’, over and over again. Instead of feeling guilty, I stayed in my body and breathed through the waves of turbulence.

I could tell that Forrest wasn’t just angry over the ants, he was processing getting all his teeth at once (in the past two months since Charlie arrived), feeling ‘replaced’, and having to sleep in a different room from me. I know I’ve left him in at least one past life (which I identified in a regression with him when he was a few weeks old), so that could have been coming up.

I also think he was also mad at me over an incident last year*, where I fell asleep at a park (the only time that’s happened in public – sleep deprivation is tough), and he crawled off. By the time I woke, a few minutes later, he was hysterical because he had sat on an ant’s nest and they were all through his nappy. I was relieved, because that was better than him wandering onto the road or into the creek, but still felt horrendously guilty.

*Based on hundreds of experiences, I believe that we remember everything that happens to us, be that in the womb, as pre-verbal babies and so on. It’s all stored in our hearts. I often work with clients to access and integrate these memories through a simple inner child process or past life regressions.

As Forrest cried, I spoke to him softly, reassuring him that he would be okay and that I still loved him. I said that the ants didn’t mean to hurt him, they just wanted to find food. Part of me wanted him to shush, so the neighbours wouldn’t hear, but I kept reminding myself that ‘if you do the dishes well, you only do them once’.

The Outcome
After 15 minutes of passionate crying, Forrest started to inch towards me, and eventually, jumped into my lap for a cuddle. I could feel how relieved he was that I hadn’t run away from him physically or mentally this time. We felt closer. I knew I’d passed some kind of test. For the rest of the afternoon, he was extremely playful and didn’t say ‘No!’ more than once in four hours (which was a miracle). Instead, he kept saying ‘Wow!’

Wow! To the peanut butter sandwich I gave him.
Wow! To the pink-orange sunset.
Wow! To gorgeous Charlie in his zip up jumpsuit, see pic to the right (Forrest also leaned over to kiss Charlie on the heart, which I’ve never seen him do. And he tickled him, going ‘coochie coo’).

To embed the experience, I followed the Staylistening with Special Time, another technique from the book. I let him show me what he wanted to play with, mostly without trying to teach him anything. We had so much fun! He had a bath, and we put bubbles on our noses. I pretended to eat his Lego, and he chewed on a big block as a teether.

Forrest tried on my glasses and we laughed at mummy’s blindness. We pulled Charlie’s zip up and down for fun. Then we used Forrest’s toy pots to make a drum set on his highchair table, so he could bang them with chopsticks while watching child music prodigies on Youtube. Everyone got what they wanted, and I preserved my parenting relationship with Forrest while reducing the chance of ongoing anxiety attacks.

When I Googled the spiritual meaning of ants, I found this helpful page on Wildspeak, which suggests that ants appear when we need to ‘do what is right’, nurture our communities, work as a team and look at the future we are creating through small daily actions. Ants biting us, are a reminder to live in the now, a lesson my son will need to master to make the most of his serious and humanitarian 9 lifepath in numerology.

Conclusion
You can be right, or you can be happy. Kids act as loudspeakers for their parent’s hearts. When my babies grizzle, I immediately check if they are thirsty/ hungry/ tired/ need a cuddle etc. If those steps don’t calm them, I close my eyes and check in. Just the act of breathing into my toes, slowing down, and ‘being’ can settle them down, or at least give me five seconds to feel into the truth.

Techniques like Staylistening and Quality Time make all the difference when you need your kids to settle down without overruling their intuition. Essentially, you are ‘holding space’ for them to expand and return to consciousness. Kris and I constantly receive comments from parents like ‘your kids are so calm’, ‘I’ve never seen such a quiet baby’ and ‘you are so lucky – my children never slept or settled’. Perhaps part of this is genetics and fortune, but I reckon a good majority is also the result of hard work behind the scenes. You can inherit a nice car, but you still need to polish it 🙂

Until we give our minds and bodies a rest, our children will continually magnify our restlessness! Keeping yourself full is the surest way to a cheery child. Check out my latest meditation for Peaceful Sleep, released this week. It will help you  totally relax, no matter how anxious you’ve been.

Imagine the health of world, if we StayListened to all the people in our lives, who are trying to love us the best way they know how? And also tuned into the Planet and her needs? They say, ‘the next step is always illuminated.’ Perhaps, it’s time to turn the light of your attention on. Your loved ones, and children, are waiting for you.

Recommended Links (external sites)
Listen Parenting Book
What to Say During StayListening ‘ – I love ‘I won’t budge from your side. You are safe.’
5 Ways Staylistening is Different from ‘Cry It Out’
The Science Behind the Hand in Hand Parenting Tool of Staylistening
What it Means to Hold Space for People – Heather Plett
 ‘When people feel that they are held in a deeper way than they are used to, they feel safe enough to allow complex emotions to surface that might normally remain hidden.’
They Don’t Care How Much You Know Until They Know How Much You Care 

Thoughts on Discouragement – Parents and Disappointment
Yogababy Education

Further Posts
7 Discoveries About Babies That Blew My Mind – A Psychic’s Tale
You Can’t Not Belong – 4 Ways to Forgive Your Family (Especially Your Parents)
It’s Never Too Late to Have a Happy Child(hood) – Healing Your Inner Child
How to Deal with Criticism -3 Tips for Staying Zen  Your baby cries because they can’t articulate their feelings (or text in emoticons!) yet. It’s not a sign you’re a failure.
Conscious Parenting Resources

To be clear – I don’t do psychic readings or write articles to embarrass people. On the contrary, I share my knowledge to help others experience freedom from fear and self-love. Numerology is the language of the Universe, and when you understand it fluently, all kinds of magic will manifest in your daily life.

I sincerely believe that everyone has a right to know that they are a Soul in a body, and that they chose to come here to fulfil a specific purpose. By providing case studies like the one above, I hope to achieve my mission of ‘transforming the public’s perception of psychics, and their own intuition, from scepticism to trust’.

Want to learn numerology? Check out my 11:11 Patreon groupclasses and meditations.

Connect with us
Seeing repeating numbers or at a turning point? Book a reading series with me. Around your birthday is ideal, as that’s when you change personal years. For a one-off session, please see Kris Anderson, my psychic husband. We also read together for a 360 degree perspective you’ll love.

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