Seeking balance

“In the arms of a caring soul, a baby finds refuge, swaying softly in the rocking motion of love."

Every human is placed with an internal ever-vigilant alarm system that indicates to us every-time we are out of sync? So, what is this sync? It is a basic rhythm that all babies are born with. Rhythm is extremely important to a healthy body and a healthy mind. 

Why do we rock babies when they cry? We’re essentially helping them find their own rhythm that helps to calm their ownselves. This is their own balance that has been tipped by a distress such as hunger, thirst, cold or warmth, and after this distress is relieved, the baby is back to feeling stable.

Truth is balance is the core of life, in all our lives’ aspects, we are looking for balance to feel stabilized, balanced, and regulated. Learning healthy self-regulation begins very early in infancy. All life is rhythmic. These rhythms begin when the baby is in the womb, and the mother’s beating heart creates a rhythmic sound, pressure, vibrations, that are sensed by the developing fetus and provide constant rhythmic input to the organizing brain. When we rock the baby after birth, the rhythmic movement stimulates this memory of safety. The baby feels more in balance and calms down. When babies cry, they are either hungry, thirsty, tired, need diaper changing, need to be touched and the only way to get them back to balance is to give them the response that they need. That said, when these responses are not met, they get even more upset.

Regulation, relationship, reward

When children are raised in a nurturing, supportive, caring environment and everytime they cry, someone responds to their needs, they are being regulated. This means that these children grow with this love and attention and their “Tree of Regulation” grows, eventually their neural network helps them form healthy relationships. This brings us to the concept of foundational memories; these are made through the amalgamation of three basic concepts; little stress-response systems, neural networks involved in forming and maintaining relationships and finally the concept of “reward.” This is why we feel regulated and rewarded when we get signals of warmth and acceptance from another person. A person’s capacity to connect, to be regulating and remain regulated is the foundational glue that keeps families and communities together.

A child’s internal view of the world.

A consistent, nurturing caregiver builds an internal view that people are safe, predictable and caring. So the child starts to inculcate within her or himself the idea, that people are supportive and things will work out eventually. This is a good worldview for a child and is important to lay down a positive mindset for the growing child. This mindset helps the child to engage with teachers, coaches, classmates, or sport mates. All of these little experiences add  to the child’s little codebook of positive human experiences. If our world view is that people are good, we will project that interaction in our experiences and thereby elicit good behavior from them.

“Our internal view of the world becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, we project what we expect, and that helps elicit what we expect.”

Children who are raised by loving, nurturing, responsive parents or caregivers have a positive projection of the world around them while children who have overwhelmed, depressed and lonely parents have children who have a low self-esteem or low self-worth.

Create a Me- Time for mothers and fathers.

Knowing when to pull back and take a break is as important as it is to put effort in your child’s upbringing. It is very important to create a personal sacred space for your ownselves that you can harness whenever you need to. Taking care of a child is a full-time job and it is very important to take time out for your ownself, allowing yourself to simply be. It is usually when this time is inaccessible for caregivers, that they become moody, irritable, cranky and indecisive; all because their calm and peace is threatened or interrupted, not the best version they want to be of themselves. The quickest way could be to take a walk in nature, music, laughter, dancing, praying, painting, writing or reading; any of them could bring back the harnessing powers you need at the moment, but you need to turn to them before your stress balloon bursts.

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