My Experience: Psychologist Dr. Neill Neill maintains an active psychology and life-coaching practice on Vancouver Island, BC, Canada. He focuses on self growth, healthy relationships and life enhancement after addictions. He is the author of Living with a Functioning Alcoholic - A Woman’s Survival Guide . Get his free report on "Personal Change." You will receive by email each new article he writes. Copyright © Neill Neill. All rights reserved.
Description:
Parents with young children are totally involved in caring for and protecting their kids. They are enmeshed with their young children. That deep level of codependency of parent and child ensures the survival of the children.

But change comes quickly. Your kids learn to do things for themselves, and then demand to do them. They develop their own personalities.

You celebrate each time your young children learn to do something independently, like tie their shoelaces, hammer a nail or write a story. Then they enter the teenage years, those few years of rapid physical and emotional transition from childhood to adulthood. They feel sexual urges. They feel very “adult.” They begin to flex the independence you so strongly encouraged up to now.

As the children in healthy families grow into their teens and become increasingly independent of their parents, the parents normally become less and less emotionally enmeshed in the lives of their offspring. The love, guidance and friendship continue, but the codependency drops away.

Some Families Get Stuck

With some families, however, the level of enmeshment does not diminish through the teen years and even early adult years. The two generations may remain so codependent that the relationship becomes an ongoing liability for both.

When their kids make some scary choices, their parents panic. Just when the kids begin to make faltering steps to handle adult issues, some parents in their fear become more restrictive and less trusting. They desperately try to regain control, just when they should be letting go.

Parents who can’t let go typically fluctuate among the unhealthy alternatives of disowning the kids, rescuing them, punishing them and bribing them. For the kids the typical result is choosing to leave home too early in a defiant attempt to take responsibility for themselves

"Our kids have just as much right to make poor choices as we did at that age."

Think back. Did you teach them to take responsibility from an early age? Yes. Did you hold them accountable to increasing degrees as they progressed through childhood? Yes. Did you love them and show it? Yes.

So what went wrong with your parenting? Probably very little!

Our kids have just as much right to make poor choices as we did at that age. If we taught them well, they know what to do. Whether or not they do it is their choice, just as we must choose all the way through adulthood. Most will make a few mistakes and learn from those mistakes, just as we did.

Trust

Trust is a key issue, because your teens need your trust in their transition to adulthood. If you are asking yourself how you went wrong, it is a sure sign you don’t trust yourself. Cut yourself some slack or you won’t be able to maintain what your kids need most in their transition. They need an ongoing, loving, respectful relationship with their parents, based on mutual trust.

Remember, your kids are hard-wired to learn, love and grow into productive adults, emotionally and intellectually independent of their parents. It’s their job to learn to be independent of their parents in every sense. And it’s your job as a parent to further loosen control and to facilitate and respect their choices.

So cut yourself some slack when you see your kids making some poor choices as they enter adulthood, and trust that you did a good job as a parent in raising them.

My Experience: Yoga teacher and Ayurvedic Massage Therapist. Working with women since 2003.
Description:
When you experience a difficulty in letting go of a habit, a material object or a person; it is important to ask yourself this question.

What am I holding on to here?

Most often the answer has nothing to do with the nasty habit, the man you cannot stop loving or the shoes that you cant give away!

Yogis believe that our minds have certain structural defects. The biggest being Avidya Or Wrong Knowledge, specifically in terms of taking the non self to be self, pain to be pleasure, the impure to be pure and the transient to be permanent. From this wrong knowledge arises the EGO / I, attachment (clinging or aversion) to our various pleasures and pains and the fear of change.

To give an example, it took me years to kick the habit of smoking. As a student on the path of yoga and as an educated person whose mum is a doctor, I rationally understood that smoking is BAD! However, try as I might I could not give it up. Finally after many attempts I began to question why I was so attached to smoking. My mouth felt like an ashtray, I no longer got any kind of kick out of it, then Why? I realized I was using it as a crutch – uncomfortable in a social situation; light up….bored, light up…. Feeling like too much of a good girl and wanting to rebel; light up!

Let go comes only with understanding. Real understanding can only come by experiencing things fully and not running away. It all comes down to how the habit, the person or the object contribute to the image of yourself in your defective mind! Since we all have defective minds, consequently it takes lifetimes of practicing the right and good things to gain small understanding.

My Experience: Sarah Maria, Body Image Expert
Description:
Author: Sarah Maria

Sarah Maria is a body-image expert who helps people learn how to love their bodies and love their lives. Her book, Love Your Body, Love Your Life, will be available in November '09. She combines ancient spiritual wisdom with modern transformational techniques to help people create a body and a life that they love. Her work has been endorsed by well-known authors and spiritual teachers, including Deepak Chopra and Marci Shimoff (featured teacher in The Secret), among others, as well as by numerous physicians and psychologists. Learn more about her and her work at www.breakfreebauty.com.



The more you want something, the more you need to let it go. This can seem counter-intuitive. I mean, it’s important to feel passionate about something, right?


Well, yes and no. Feeling passionate about something, wanting to make a difference, wanting to make an impact - these are all good things.


Often when we are passionate about something, however, we have a tendency to grasp or cling to a specific outcome. When we do this, our well-being is affected by whether or not we achieve the desired outcome.


When this happens, our well-being becomes dependent on a specific result. And when this happens, we lose site of our true nature, which is already complete, already whole, and already perfect.


Take, for example, the environment. Increasing numbers of people want to help reverse the catastrophic environmental damage, which is certainly very important, worthwhile, and valuable. Yet it is very easy to become dismayed and discouraged when things don’t seem to be improving, changing, or going the way you might want them to.


The environment is just one example - the same holds true for absolutely anything you desire in your life.


The problem is that when you are attached the results, your sense of well-being becomes compromised. When this happens, you are actually less effective and less able to create the outcomes you desire. Your possibilities are eclipsed by clinging and grasping after a result.


So no matter how much you care about something, practice letting it go. When you are able to let it go, if even just a little bit, you have much more freedom and ability to create the change you want in your life and in the world.


One of the things that makes it very difficult to let go is the feeling of pain. You might feel pain about the state of the environment, or pain about the loss of a loved one. You might have a broken heart because of the chaos in the world, the loss of your financial nest egg, the loss of a dream, or the loss of a loved one.


Whatever the case, in order to create the life you want, in order to make the impact you want, in order to become the person you want to be, you must heal the broken parts of your heart.


As you heal your heart from the disappointment, the grief, the loneliness, the pain, the frustration - whatever - you will discover that you can pursue your dreams with passion, but you have no need to cling and grasp after a particular outcome. You can set an intention, let it go, and live the life you know you are meant to live.


In the meantime, practice letting go and basking in the presence that you already are. From this place, everything will flow with more ease and less effort.