Teenagers / Mentoring
Byron Katie’s guide for self-inquiry isn’t just important to strengthen your connection with your children but it can also help them build a better relationship with themselves. It’s amazing how much can change if you just invest in regularly taking a moment to meditate and write down your stressful thoughts and begin questioning them. You can find peace with your teenage children, and you can both find peace in yourselves. When you write down exactly what is causing tension in your relationship with your children and question these thoughts, you start seeing things differently. Eventually, you’ll reach a point of enlightenment where you realize that your happiness depends on you and not on them or their actions.
How The Work can help eliminate stressful thoughts about your relationship with teenagers
The Work’s practises are there to help you find peace in yourself just by looking closer at a specific situation. As you are doing the written meditation, you may just find that it’s not the situation but what you’re believing about the situation that’s causing all your stress. It may not be your teenagers causing you pain and tension but rather the thoughts you believe about your teenagers that are causing the stress. For example, you might think that your kids should show you respect and that makes you react negatively because it gives you negative feelings. This could make you angry or act out when they don’t show you this believed “respect”. The Work is a guide to help you question this belief by starting with the first question. The Work’s four questions will start by asking “Can you absolutely know it’s true that they should show respect?” This is not at all about whose right or wrong, in fact, thoughts and judgement about being wrong or right might just cause you even more suffering.
The Work nurtures compassion in your relationships with your teenagers
The purpose of the work is to confront these thoughts and break them down to realize how harmful they are and who you can become if you are free from them. This will come with a new air of calm and compassion about you that will quickly deal with the sense of frustration that you have.
Byron Katie’s The Work gives you the tools and guides to find your own peace that cannot be shaken by untrue thoughts and judgements on your teenagers. Anything that your kids say or do that makes you feel stressed or frustrated at any moment will become an opportunity to do The Work. Looking at it this way, gives you a healthier journey towards self-discovery and enhanced understanding for your children. The Work can help you find your peace every time thoughts and judgements of your children make you mad. Keep doing The Work every time you are faced with a stressful situation or thoughts, and you may find that anything your children do, or anything else in the world, will be less capable of taking away your peace.
How children and teenagers can do The Work
Students will face stressful challenges during the day-to-day grind of going to school. They can battle with thoughts and beliefs that cause anxiety, depression, and even destructive behaviour. This enlightening meditative inquiry is a way of identifying and questioning the thoughts that cause all of the anger, fear, depression, addiction and violence in the world. It’s designed to help even the youngest of participants experience the happiness of undoing unproductive thoughts and allowing their minds to return to a true, awakened creative and peaceful nature. Young people can do The Work every time they are faced by challenging experienced in today’s fast-paced world. It encourages young people to look within themselves to find peace and to not go looking for it in the wrong places. Everyone has capacity towards peace and wisdom, regardless of their age, and Byron Katie’s The Work shows this to be true.
“True freedom starts with an inquiry. Socrates said, ‘Unexamined life is not worth living’, and that's certainly my experience too.”
— Byron Katie
