My seven year old daughter climbed into bed furious because I wouldn't let her stay up to watch Hannah Montana. It was the night before school started after Christmas vacation and she was tired, over-stimulated, excited. I started reading to her, but she pulled Diary of a Wimpy Kid out of my hands and bashed me on the nose with it.   It hurt. A lot. I stormed out of the room to curse and cry, stormed back to yell at her, "How dare you hit me, you are so punished, go to sleep." I slammed the lights shut and added, in a deeply angry voice, " I love you."   My daughter's utterly sane response to this nonsense was to pull her covers over her head and scream at me to go away.   

         This seemed like pretty good advice.   I took a hot bath, pouring in too many expensive bath products. As I lay in the steaming waterI felt that   pleasurable, addictive combination of resentment and self-righteousness (you know what I mean) ,   which I grew by adding a list of all the things that had happened lately to prove how much the people in my life didn't support me. My feelings got heavier and the comfortable shadenfruede I had been feeling towards myself began to slip into misery and despair. I felt thoroughly, completely unloved.

            Then grace intervened. A psychic buzzer went off in my brain and a voice said, "List the good things that happened to you today." Too frequently I ignore this voice, but I've been practicing affirmations as my spiritual discipline lately, so I felt like I had to do what it said. Somewhat resentfully, I shifted my emotional attention to the positive. And as I reminded myself of a whole host of small events that added up to a day of self-caring and connection, and as the hot water relaxed my tension and the pain in my nose began to subside, I started to feel better. By the time I got out of the bath I felt whole, sane and balanced. My life is actually pretty good. I am supported and loved in many ways. I love my children.

            I went into my daughter's room. She was still fuming under the   covers.   As she and I enact the truth that the emotional apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, I was pretty sure what she was feeling: rage, resentment and the utter unfairness of Mommy. Underneath that, fear of her own power and the harm it can cause.   And underneath that, longing for love and reconnection.  

I thought about Eckhart Tolle's example of the duck who gets into a fight with another duck. First they squabble and attack, and when it is over they fly to separate corners of the pond. After they settle down they each give themselves a shake, as if to acknowledge and release any excess angry energy, and return back   into happy pond life, as if the fight had never been.    I wanted to give my daughter the chance to release her anger. I didn't want her going to sleep with a veneer of hard resentment lacquered onto her emotional body. Enough layers of resentment and 'life is unfair,' and it then becomes a familiar pattern which magnetizes and magnifies similar events and emotional responses, until, in this case, anger and resentment and fear of her own strength could become a familiar groove, an expected reality, in her life.

            Do you think I'm making too much of this one event? Maybe.   If I hadn't gone back in there she certainly might have woken up fine the next morning. But if it is true that we draw into our lives what we pay attention to and expect, then every single time we reproduce any emotional pattern we are directly impacting our lives in ways that have concrete, physical consequences. It may really be true, what, among others, Seth states in The Nature of Personal Reality and the theory of etheric bodies posits: emotions and thoughts carry electromagnetic frequencies that draw to us events, people and circumstances which carry that same vibration.   In this way, our deepest beliefs, reinforced over time through thought and habit, build up energetically to become quite literally physically present in our lives.  

            I lay down next to my daughter and put my arm around her. She shoved it off and scooted away from me.   Like all of us do, she hated me because I didn't love her the way she wanted to be loved, and because she knew she'd done something wrong to me. She was making that very human resolution that it is better to hate—or distrust, shut down, disconnect—than to be vulnerable.

I began to rub her head—trickery on my part, she's a massage junkie--and she let me.   I felt her hard, tight resolution to hate me begin to soften, and after a bit her little body leaned against mine. I told her the things mommies say.   I acknowledged where she was—pissed off—and pointed her to a bigger, positive reality behind it—we love each other, no matter what.   Mommy can handle your anger while you learn to manage it. When she fell asleep she did so snuggled tight in my arms.

(This doesn't mean, by the way,   that she's off the hook for hitting me.   There will be no Hannah Montana in our house for several days.   But there is a difference between a seven year old misusing her power and getting a consequence, and being told, with words or through emotions, that her power makes her wrong and unlovable).

              I'm still working out what I believe about this beliefs create our reality, you get what you think about philosophy of life. I've resisted and misunderstood it for a long time. But I'm beginning to see that, as with much of life, as with my daughter and I each believing that the other had done us wrong and for each of us that thought spiraling into something much heavier, what I think is true about something often has very little to do with its Reality, and where I resist the most tends to be where I have much room to grow. That night, I certainly watched the truth play out that by shifting the focus of my thoughts I shifted myself out of isolation, self-pity and feeling unloved to a powerful bonding moment with my daughter, and a recognition of the real connections and support that had been present throughout my day.  

              Children help in this because they are truly such little Mini-Me mirrors. Or, as Jon Kabot-Zinn says, children are Zen masters who parachute into our lives and show us just where our issues are, especially those we thought we figured out long ago. Of course, you don't need children to see where life mirrors back your deepest beliefs, positive and negative, and the power that happens when you just shift focus.   I'm sure you've got plenty of examples in your own life, if you want to look at it that way.