Although holistic parenting can take many routes and result in a wide variety of choices, there are some simple things every parent can to do to begin their journey. Here are six steps to discovering holistic parenting:

• Be Informed. Being informed in all of your parenting and health choices is a cornerstone of whole living. Investigate your options educate yourself on the benefits as well as the risks of your parenting, healthcare, and lifestyle choices.

• Cultivate Trust. Living holistically starts with a shift in your perspective, away from fear and uncertainty and toward trust in yourself, your body, and nature’s healing power. Cultivating this trust is challenging, but uncovering it is ultimately a source of empowerment.

• Tune Into Your Mother (or Father) Wisdom. Deep within yourself lies your inner wisdom and intuition, as well as your spiritual voice. What feels right to you may not be the most traveled path but often will best serve your family.

• Go Natural. The preponderance of chemicals in our food, homes, and environment is wreaking havoc on our health. We need to look for safe, non-toxic products to care for our homes, and to eliminate artificial ingredients, preservatives, and pesticides from our food.

• Live Lightly on the Earth. Living holistically means recognizing the interconnectedness of our choices. Tread lightly by supporting industries that nurture the earth (such as organic farming), incorporating green practices into your life (such as recycling), and giving back of yourself through volunteer work.

• Find Support. Creating and interacting with others who share similar philosophies is empowering and will help you to find the tools you need to grow a healthy family. What’s more, social support itself is health creating. Recent studies show that being socially connected to others can improve your physical health and is linked to lower mortality rates.

May your parenting journey be a healthy one!

Uncovering my abilities had much to do with sorting out the various sources of information to which I always had access. I learned to operate what I think of as my "inner sound board," a contraption full of knobs, dials and switches used to figure out what inner voices were saying what. Whether inner children with unprocessed emotional junk, the voices of my parents or other authority figures that I’d internalized somewhere along the way, Spirit Guides or the spirits of dead people, or my intuitive and psychic sense, the first step was sorting them out.

Each of us has intuition and psychic abilities. The route to developing them will differ for each of us, but follows a generalized script that includes learning to tell apart the various voices we carry in us all the time. Below are some thoughts on each and tips to learn to tell them apart.

Inner Children. Each time something frightening, unpleasant or traumatic happened to you when you were a child, you were imprinted by your strong desire to avoid repeating a similar situation in the future. Now, you’re likely carrying a host of these little inner kids who frequently advise you about how to avoid the kind of pain and unhappiness you experienced long ago. Each of those now helping you run your life needs to be heard, and you must take care of the need they had at the unhappy times when you were younger which, no matter what they say, always boils down to some combination of acceptance, love and safety. Offer them this now and they’ll be happy, and will begin to work with you instead of feeding you fear.

Parental/Authority Voices. We all internalize the ideas, opinions, strategies and fears of our parents and other authority figures. Whether we embrace or reject them, they’re a part of the foundation we carry into our later life. They’re gifts from those people (even if we don’t like them!), tools they thought would best serve us in our own lives. Our judgments about the right kinds of work, relationships and life path often stem from what we learned from our parents about the right ways to live and reasons for living. We need to decide if we want to hold onto and perpetuate them, or let them go.

Spirit Guides. Each of us has Spirit Guides available to support us in making choices that serve our highest good. What they offer is loving support for your ongoing development. If a voice you identify is judgmental or fearful, or in some other way not loving, it’s not from your Spirit Guides!

Deceased People. Those who are psychically open may attract the spirits of deceased persons. Their agendas differ. Some are entirely kind, some are not, and some are simply afraid of what’s happened to them (not all know they’re dead). If you experience this, you may have feelings, thoughts and fears you’re very sure do not belong to you. Say "All energies that do not belong to me I send back to Source!" and say "No, thank you!" to any energy that makes you uncomfortable in any way.

Intuition/Psychic Sense. We each have an inner knowing that can come through once we learn to sort out all the other kinds of voices. It’s just there, waiting for us. Learning to differentiate between all of these others leaves you better able to focus on and amplify your natural intuitive and psychic senses. Without the static and white noise of what isn’t really you, you’ll see that all the information you need is available to you at all times.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that our family fireworks occurred on Independence Day. It was the beginning of my son’s venture into adulthood.

When he left, I felt in my heart that it would be quite some time before I would see him again. If there was going to a battle for affection and allegiance between myself and his sweetheart,

I knew I didn’t stand a chance. In fact, I might have been concerned about his mental state if he had sided with me.
My son and I have certainly had our share of ups and downs over the years , and due to a divorce and a joint custody agreement with his father when he was 2 years old, I often went months at a time without seeing him. But when we were together, we generally got along well.

In fact, I always thought the two of us had a special, spiritual connection. I can remember a moment when he was about 3 years old. We were getting ready to leave a playground and I stopped to look at him through my car’s rearview mirror as he was sitting in the back seat. We just looked into each other’s eyes for several minutes. I could sense the closeness between us.

Over the years as my son was growing up, we were often able to read each other’s mind. We seemed to know exactly what the other person was going to say before either one of us ever uttered a word.

The bond between us has made this past year especially painful and disconcerting. It’s been difficult not to blame myself for our estrangement. If only I’d handled his girfriend’s accusations differently, maybe my son would still be in my life.

When I think about sharing my situation with others, I fear the unanimous reaction will be: What had I done that could make him so angry? In other words, what exactly did I do to deserve the silent treatment?

One of the things I have learned over the years is that my expectations in a given situation can bring me an enormous amount of sadness and confusion.

I have thoughts such as, When you have children, they are supposed to love you forever and never decide to stop speaking to you, because that would be wrong. So how does one justify such rejection? And is it really rejecton anyway? Or is my son’s decision not to speak to me merely his need to grow and become an adult, and it may in fact have little if anything to do with me personally?

I know I didn’t handle the fateful argument with my son to the best of my ability. It certainly wasn’t my higher self running the show that day. No, it was my ego. My big, fat ego. I still love my son very much and I realize now that his refusal to communicate with me is something that, for whatever reason, he needs to do for himself. He may have reasons that I’m not even aware of, even if it simply boils down to a power struggle or a need to spread his wings without what he may interpret as interference from his mother.

My higher, spiritual self realizes that my son needs to do his own thing and I need to do mine. If we are supposed to reunite at some point we will, not because I want it but because we both desire it for greater growth of our individual selves.

A couple of weeks ago I came home unexpectedly and saw my daughter standing outside talking to my son, who had stopped by to visit his sister, assuming I was not home. Without any hesitation, I walked outside to greet him. My knees were shaking and my voice was trembling. He said hello and cooly asked me how I was doing. We talked for only a few minutes and then he turned away and returned to his conversation with my daughter.

Later on that night when I returned home from work, my daughter told me that my son had called to say he felt bad for acting rude toward me. Could that be the light at the end of the tunnel I have been hoping for? Perhaps, but in the meantime I believe there are two things I must continue to do simultaneously: Let go and let him know that I love him. I’m confident that the universe, in all its wisdom, will take care of the rest.