Hunter Clarke-Fields on Mindful Parenting & Raising Good Humans

Debbie:

Hey Hunter, welcome back to the podcast.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

I am very happy to be here Debbie, thank you.

Debbie:

Of course. And I, you know, when I have repeat guests, I always go back and see what was going on when we last spoke. And I realized your episode with me aired on March 10th, 2020. Now we recorded it before. Yeah. Right. Very, it’s like pretty important moment in time. We recorded it prior to that, but So much has changed in these past couple of years, and we had no idea what was to come when we had that conversation. So I would love even just to start this, I’d like to just kind of hear from you what’s up in your world, like what has happened in your work and the way that you show up and support families in the past three years with what we’ve been through.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Gosh, I mean, it’s a lot. We talked then about my first book, Raising Good Humans. And I think that, I think in a lot of ways, in a weird way, the pandemic helped this book. Because I was like, I wrote a book. It’s amazing. Wow. That’s great. And then I was just amazed in 2021 when this book started doing really, really well. And I think that people were so desperate for help. with their kids home in this year, second year, all this like pandemic stuff that I think that maybe that it helped the book do really well. I don’t know. I also think some people in Audible, I thank you people in Audible for putting it on your front page for a little while. But yeah, in that time, I was working with some mindful parenting teacher trainers And it just felt like having these people that I worked with in the membership that I run, and it was such a grounding factor to just connect with people every week, to talk about what’s happening, to talk about how hard it was, and to have those sort of grounding elements of this. Just offering each other the compassion and the tools of self-compassion really, really seemed to help enormously in that time. Yeah, in that March of 2020, I was planning to, there was a live retreat that I was going to be doing on March 13th of 2020 that I was like, I’ll push forward for, you know, like five weeks. And then we ended up having to cancel it all together. We hadn’t done another one, but we are planning a new one. next year. But yeah, since then I’ve done a lot of a lot more speaking, I guess, like doing talks and things like that for various places and traveling to various places to do talks. And that’s been something that’s been new for me since then.

Debbie:

Yeah, that’s really cool. And I do want to say, so listeners, when Hunter was on the show and that fateful month in 2020, uh, we were talking about her book, which was new at the time. It’s called Raising Good Humans, a mindful guide to breaking the cycle of reactive parenting and raising kind, confident kids. And it’s such a good book and it really did kind of take off. Um, and that was really exciting to see. So I, I will, you know, I’ll have a link in the show notes pages. So listeners, if you haven’t heard that episode, definitely go back and listen to it. Maybe even just give us kind of the top line of that book though, just for the context for this conversation, because I know that your work has kind of continued to evolve out of that.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yeah, raising good humans is basically, it goes over the work that we do in mindful parenting. And basically it’s the idea that, you know, it kind of comes from this place of me struggling and having a really hard time when my daughters were little and just having frustration and my temper arising. And listening to all these wonderful parenting coaches have really good advice, really great things to say. really wonderful ways to respond to your kids that I just could not implement because I was like losing it. I was frustrated. It was really hard. And I realized that a lot of this parenting advice kind of assumed a baseline of like utter perfection on the side of the parent. No challenges, no personal feelings or things that might get in the way of you responding perfectly to your child. And so I realized there was all this work from the mindfulness world that needed to talk. to the parenting world and that I had been studying mindfulness for a long time since I was a teenager just to help me with my own intense feelings and mental challenges and waves and I realized that all this work in the mindfulness world really helps us to be so much less reactive, right? And of course, then we’re less reactive, we can use our whole brain and it’s… And interesting for, you know, talking of course to you here at Tilt about the idea of, you know, it’s about the idea of guiding attention and strengthening attention, your ability to direct your attention when it wanders, you know, it’s kind of like mindfulness in a lot of ways, like, you know, the antidote in some ways, you know, or one of the many, obviously, but like it’s about directing attention, but for parents, it’s about… helping us use our whole brain, helping us get to that grounded place, helping us to process our feelings, all of this inner work, helping us to understand when we’re triggered, when stuff from our childhood is coming up, all of this comes into, then when we do all that, then we can communicate much more skillfully. And so it includes raising good humans, includes how to be less reactive, because I’m very, very practical. I wanna know how to do it. and how then to talk to your kids so you don’t trigger more resistance.

Debbie:

Mm. Yeah, I love that. And I love that you kind of really targeted that assumed baseline of perfection, as you call it. I think that that’s something so many of us struggle with is this sense of what we’re going through is more extreme, it’s more challenging. And so we’re already feeling as if we’re maybe drowning in some ways or just really struggling to navigate things. And so it’s really hard to then step into a practice. there’s all these layers of, you know, you talked about being reactive, raising your voice, and just many of us just are showing up in ways that we may not be proud of, or aren’t our finest parenting moments.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yes, I can completely relate to that experience. Yes. Yeah. But I think that’s the thing is like those things, those that are not our finest parenting moments, those are the moments that are showing us what we value, I think, right? Like they’re really markers for our values because what feels crappy when we yell at our kids or raise our voice and we’re all… snippy and frustrated, right? Those point to, well, this doesn’t feel good because you value kind communication. You value respectful communication. You value, you may be taking responsibility for your own feelings, right? And doing some of the work to process your own feelings so you’re not laying it on your kids. And that’s, I think that’s okay. You know, we have to kind of, we have to mess up. We’re gonna mess up. It’s not possible not to mess up. It’s just, can we acknowledge that place of discomfort? Right? Can we say, this didn’t feel good. Can this be, what do I need to learn from this? Right? And then go from there rather than, you know, I never want to think about that moment. I’m just going to squash it down and push it away. And then we can’t learn from it. I mean, that’s the thing that’s incredible. It’s really hard to do, but it’s so important is to just say, okay, I’m going to be human. I’m going to mess up and I’m going to keep beginning anew again and again and again and again and again. And eventually what we practice grows stronger.

Debbie:

Yes. So what I love about what you just shared is that noticing when those things come up for us, we feel that shame or you know, we get we kind of have that feeling of discomfort because of something we did or said or how we’re reacting in a moment that is, that’s actually an invitation to lean in, it’s drawing our attention to something that we can learn from that we can grow from. So rather than pushing it away or feeling bad about it. if we turn towards it, then there’s a big opportunity there. Is that what you’re saying?

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yeah, yeah, it’s showing you what matters to you. And if this matters to you, if being, you know, with your kids or being, you know, being with your kids in such a way that you can communicate more from the heart and things like that, if that matters to you, and then you don’t do, you go sort of against that value and that hurts, that’s, it’s actually like kind of like, oh, okay, well, It’s an indicator of this beautiful value you have of heartfelt communication. And I think that’s a way to look at it. And so we learn best from our mistakes.

Debbie:

Yeah.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

And we have to give ourselves this soft landing. So in Raising Good Humans and in Mindful Parenting, we talk a lot about self-compassion and practicing self-compassion because that piece about… messing up. It just happens. It keeps happening. We keep being human. Sometimes we think, I mean, I’ve definitely been guilty of this. Sometimes I think, gosh, I’ve been meditating for so many years now. I’m going to just be like floating in a cloud and everything’s going to be great. It’s just not true. Life still happens. You still have all the anxieties. There’s still real challenges that happen. All of these things. You still get angry. All that stuff happens. But what these things do is when you’ve practiced accepting my mistakes, like I’ve practiced accepting my mistakes, like, okay, anger, there you are. Hello, anxiety.

There you are again. Hello, little friend. I see you there. Hello, frustration and sniffing at my kids. Gosh, there it is again. When you practice accepting that and you can allow it and then… And then you can allow yourself to be human. And I say this to myself, like, you know, I’ve written this like crazy book. I teach people to teach mindful parenting and I still make mistakes. And so I say to myself, Hunter, permission to be human, you know, permission to be human. And when we can give ourselves this permission to, to do what we’re going to do anyway, which is make some mistakes. The beauty of that is it ends up being like very, very practical because then we can just get. get up, we give ourselves that soft landing, we can get up again, we can recover more quickly, we turn towards, you know, we can practice what we actually want, how we want to be and how we want to live more quickly. We can, and that’s, and that repair, repair more quickly. And that’s really what it’s all about is beginning again.

Debbie:

I love that. And I love that you kind of spoke to your own humaneness because we know each other. We’ve known each other. Actually, I feel like we met in person at Zen Parenting, also in March, right, before the world shut down. But of course, so we’re friends. And I also follow you on social media. And your Instagram’s awesome, by the way. So listeners, definitely check out Hunter’s. Instagram feed where you share great tips and you just have such a presence. And I’m like, every time I see you doing it like a reel or something, I’m like, Oh my God, this woman just so has it together. She just exudes this like Zen, like calm. And it’s like goals for me. You know what I mean? Um, so I appreciate you sharing that. Um, it doesn’t mean that you’re not experiencing this stuff, but you, you just like. I love this language, permission to be human. Like I need to write that down in multiple places in my home, I think. Is that kind of really the key for you is just kind of like, oh, there you are and it’s okay.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Actually, you know, so I shared, I’ve been doing some more speaking and last weekend before recording this, I flew out to Laramie, Wyoming and I did a keynote talk and a workshop the next morning. It was great. It was wonderful. But on my way out to Laramie, it takes so long to get there. I was in the Denver airport for four hours. Anyway, I got super anxious on the way out and I was like, what am I doing? Why am I doing this thing? I ended up in the airport, I called my husband and I was like, I’m just feeling like, I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t know if I’m good enough to do this, all of those things. I had a little cry in the airport and then I was like, okay, all right, here it is. But I had the, like you said, I have those resources, right? So I took out my little notebook, I wrote down what I was feeling. I wrote it all out. And then that… that provided some relief. And then I put on a meditation, one specifically for anxiety that’s in the Insight Timer app. And then the combination of those two things really helped me and I just thought, oh, this was a wave and the wave has passed. And if I continue to try to like, just pretend the wave of anxiety wasn’t there and just keep going, it would like those feelings end up being like, I think my, I like to think of them, they’re like little toddlers who are like tugging your leg and they’re like, they want attention. And you’re just like, no, no. And they are just relentless, right? Like they do not go away until we process them, right? Until we like digest them. You know, we, and that is so important. So, so yeah, so I took that time to process and digest it and then it was okay. It was fine. And then I felt excited. And I felt like it was like one of the best. talks I had done and somehow I think that processing really, really helped me to then get back into what matters most for me, right, which is like connecting with people.

Debbie:

That’s great, thanks for sharing that. I’ve had similar moments, so I feel even closer to you now, knowing that you go through that same kind of pre-talk anxiety. I wanna talk a little bit about mindfulness, what it actually looks like, and then we’ll talk about your new book, and we will do that after a quick break. Sorry, before we even go back, I’ve had that call with my sister and I do the same. I just write it all down. It’s so funny what our brains do to us.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

I’m so glad I’m not the only one who’s crying in the airport.

Debbie:

You’re in good company. Okay. So before we kind of move on, you’ve used this word mindfulness, you’ve said mindful parenting, and again there may be listeners on, there may be people listening to this episode who aren’t even familiar with that concept or may have an idea of what being a mindful parent actually means. So would you mind just kind of, just so we’re on the same page, defining it for us?

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Sure. I mean, well, so yeah, mindfulness can have this sort of woo-woo idea. It can seem like a really pie in the sky idea, especially if you’re struggling with attention and frustration and yelling and all of those things. It sounds like, sure, right? We think it means, sometimes we think it means it’s like being calm all the time or sometimes we think it means just not having any distracting thoughts. And that’s… None of that is true. So mindfulness, I think of it as like a brain hack from thousands of years ago where people were like, oh, if I stop going forward and doing, going forward on autopilot all the time, right? Which is kind of like the way we normally are, right? We’re just moving forward on autopilot and we’re thinking of the next thing and the next thing and whatnot. If I just stop doing and I practice just being. If I practice putting my attention into the present moment, whether it’s with putting my attention to my child who’s right here or walking or doing the dishes or sitting down and breathing, then we grow the sense of clarity and groundedness in all these different areas in our lives. So mindfulness is… intentionally putting your attention into the present moment with, this is very important, with an attitude of kindness and curiosity, right? So the opposite of non-judgment curiosity. And so this is different from the way we normally are thinking because our minds are kind of naturally making judgments and often in the future or the past are not where our bodies are. And What happens when we practice this is that for, as we practice this, we notice how cuckoo bananas distracted our brains are, first of all. And we think, boy, I can’t do this meditation thing, especially if you think the idea is to stop your thoughts, which it’s not. But it’s, we notice that our, they even call it monkey mind, right? That our minds are like monkeys jumping all around, all over the place. But as we practice, each time we notice our mind wandering, bringing it back to something in the present moment, whether it’s the breath or sounds or our child, whatever it is, that we build the ability to be more present. And that has all these incredible benefits. So there are many well-regarded research facilities that have shown that it reduces anxiety, reduces depression, and increases health outcomes. all of these things, but importantly for parents, it helps us to be less reactive. So what I think of is it helps us to, you know, when we’re with our kids, sometimes we just react, right? We’re just saying something, it’s maybe something that is coming out of our parents’ mouth. We just react. We’re not necessarily pausing to kind of think about how we want to respond. And mindfulness is like a… practice that can really help us build that mental pause muscle. It’s that space between stimulus and response where you get to choose how you want to respond. And so if we are changing the way we communicate with our kids from the way our parents communicated with us, maybe we’re trying to stop using threats and yelling and punishments and things like that, that was totally my go- by the way, is threats. That’s the thing that pops into my mind first. If we’re trying to change that, we need to build that muscle of pause and then, okay, I see that threat. I hear that threat in my head, but I’m going to actually choose a better response. And so this is one of the big, big benefits I think of it for mindfulness for parents. and why it’s such a very, very practical tool because also it has basically zero side effects. It’s available to anybody. It can be done in tiny doses.

It’s just uncomfortable. It’s just not, when you sit, maybe if you’ve tried it, you sit still and you notice your mind is like a crazy monkey jumping around, that’s not comfortable. We want to like get up and do this. We have this, I gotta get out of here feeling sometimes if we sit still, especially if we’re like, you know, a parent of an ADHD kid who may be ADHD themselves, right? We get that feeling. The weird thing is that over time, that feeling of like, I gotta get out of here, lessons and dissipates. And actually that sitting through the discomfort of that kind of feeling is a benefit in and of itself. And that may sound like not so exciting to you, to your listener, but Think about this, like if your kid is going through something that’s really hard or you have a tantrum or frustration or maybe you have a teenager, they’re going through something really hard, it can be hard to stay with somebody else when they’re going through that stuff. But if you have a practice where you know that I can sit for three minutes, five minutes in a little bit of discomfort and actually it has benefits and actually I’m okay, I’m not going to die from this. It allows you to then sit in those challenging moments with your kids. But I think more than that, so more than that is that it also allows us to be there in the really great moments, in the moments when we want to love our kids, How many times do we get to like a beautiful vacation and where you have nothing to do, we have all the time we wanna connect with our kids and we can’t, because our brains are going million miles in a million other directions. The only place we can love our kids is in the present. We can’t love them in the future. We can’t love them in the past. And that love itself can be its own discomfort. It’s really interesting. But yeah, it’s about being present. being able to make conscious choices, being present for the challenges and for the beauty.

Debbie:

That’s so beautiful. And I feel like I’ve upleveled myself a little bit more of my understanding of this. I mean, I’ve read your books. We’ve talked. I know a lot about this intellectually or cognitively, but the kind of embodied experience is really still hard for me. one of I have a list of questions as I always do when I have an interview and one of my questions simply says, I have failed at meditation. Is that okay? Because, and so just hearing you even explain three to five minutes, like, feels even better for me. I just full disclosure, you know, I run like I am always busy and I’m like, that’s my meditation because I I always have to be doing a million things. And that is how I kind of self-regulate because I don’t wanna be sitting still. I don’t want that quiet time. And so I kind of challenged myself to try to do like a 21 day program on, I think it was the Calm app, right? To get into, I’m like, all right, I really just need a deeper well of resources here. I think I started it two months ago and I’ve done like 13 days of it. And those meditations are like, 12 to 15 minutes and it’s almost unbearable for me sometimes. I can feel better afterwards, but getting myself to do that is really hard. So that might be TMI. But I say that because I want to know is, is being mindful? Is it just meditation? You know, like, are there different ways that this can look if there are people listening like me who feel that kind of traditional meditation approach isn’t available to us, for whatever reason.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yeah, no, and it’s not just sitting meditation, although I would say sitting meditation is kind of the gold standard, like let’s practice to stop. And probably it’s something we’re developing right now. So probably by the time this is out, we’re actually going to have like a Getting Started with Mindfulness mini course on the Mindful Mama Mentor website. And it will have three minute 12 minutes can be an enormous amount of time when you’re first starting. And that’s okay. That’s just how human brains work. And it can be really uncomfortable, but three minutes actually can be beneficial. And there are a bunch of other ways to practice. It took me, like I was reading about mindfulness for maybe 10 years before I actually got to finally sitting down and meditating. And then I finally was able to sit down and meditate. And after a couple of months, I really thought, I was like, I’m not doing anything but sitting here thinking the whole time, this is just not working for me. And but I realized then that I had when I looked at the rest of my life, that there was a big change and that I wasn’t falling into sort of these pits of depression, feeling unable to handle life, panic attacks, things like that. Like I was not I had two months of not. falling into those while I had been meditating, I was like, wow, that’s a really, really big change for me, you know, because for 27 years of my life until then, that’s that was pretty regular for me.

So you can feel like you’re failing in the practice and it can be actually having an effect on the rest of your life and there are brain scans showing how it changes the brain and things like that. But you can also do things like Another practice that I think is really helpful and a really good starter practice is mindful walking. So, when my kids were little, they used to go to this Montessori school that’s just like basically a block from my house. And they only went for three hours in the morning. It was such a short amount of time that I would literally run home to get all the things done that I wanted to get done. And then, After a little while, I realized like I was just like it was making me so anxious, like trying to squeeze all this stuff in. So I thought, okay, I gotta practice what I preach here and let me just slow down and practice some mindful walking for this, you know, this short walk home. And so I did, I started just walking slowly, feeling my breath, feeling my feet on the earth, noticing what’s around me. Just really just practicing to be in the. in the present moment with what was there. And yes, it did take longer to get home. But surprisingly, I ended up getting more done, feeling more relaxed. It really, really improved my days because I wasn’t hurrying because hurry actually triggers that fight, flight or freeze stress response. Anytime your nervous system notices that you’re hurrying, you’re in a stress response because our ancient ancestors, if they ever had to hurry. was trouble, right? Because you just didn’t have to hurry if you were a hunter-gatherer with no watch. Anyway, but mindful walking, you can just take, if you drop your kids off at a place, you could practice walking slowly and breathing from the car to the entrance.

You could practice walking slowly and breathing up and down your street. And there’s a really lovely practice from Thich Nhat Hanh. And I like doing this when you’re walking, you breathe in and you say, I have arrived. And you breathe out and you say, I’m home. I’ve arrived. I’m home. And you can follow it within the here and in the now if you want. But it’s just like a little reminder to, and I find those sometimes more helpful than just sensations and things like that. This are some little words in my head to kind of guide my thinking to like, yes, I am, I’m going to actually be here. So that’s a lovely way to practice.

Debbie:

Hmm. I love that. I am an avid walker as well. But as a New Yorker, walking is like a sport. And so I’m like, Oh, I got this mile down to 15:15 or something. And I’m like, Yeah, so I, this is some, this is something I, I will play with because I, I like this idea of mindful walking seems doable.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

I have an idea for you. Go do all your normal New York walk, and then just the last block. Just pick the last block, just pick one full block, and just make that block a slow, mindful block. And just do one block.

Debbie:

Okay, I can do that. I will do that. It is totally doable. Thank you for that. I want to talk about your new book. So you have a new book that has come out. It is called Raising Good Humans Every Day, 50 Simple Ways to Press Pause, Stay Present, and Connect with Your Kids. So can you tell us about how this book came about and how it’s different from Raising Good Humans?

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Sure. Yeah, I wanted to make this as easily digestible as possible. So I’ve been doing the Mindful Parenting, formerly named the Mindful Mama podcast for 10 years now. And I’ve had so much information on so many different areas of parenting from so many incredible guests that I wanted to expand on raising good humans. And I love the idea of… something that you can read a chapter in three or four pages. And so I want, Raising Good Humans really focuses on how to take care of our triggers and mindfulness, as well as communication, right? Which I feel like are the most essential things. And I touch on these in Raising Good Humans every day, but I also get to, with the format of the 50 short chapters, expand into our home schedules, our environments, and and things like that, which I really, really enjoy. And just kind of breaking everything down into tiny bite-sized pieces, like helping us, there’s a chapter, be a calm mountain, and talk about a practice to help you like embody the sense of I’m calm and steady like a mountain. So it’s about taking all these like sort of bite-sized bits. and you can open it anywhere and find some practical resources for whatever your challenge is.

Debbie:

Yeah, I mean, personally, I love the format of it. I used to write books for teens, and one of the things that I love about writing for teens, and I think I still, even for adults, write in this way. I want it to be really accessible. I want it to feel not super text heavy that I kind of lose the plot because of my own monkey brain. And so this feels like, yeah, you can dive in. You can learn a concept. and then you have an action step for each one. So here’s how you actually implement it in your life. So I love the format. Was it fun to write? Like what was the process like for you in getting this out?

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yeah, it was fun to write. It was fun to write this. More fun than writing Amazing Good Humans, although that’s fine. And I actually got to read it myself, which was kind of fun too, if you’re interested in the audiobook. But yeah, I’m really interested in very, very practical pieces, you know, where if you could, you know, there’s like how to be less busy, you know, what, how, you know, how to create helpful kids and things like that. There’s all kinds of… little pieces like that. So yeah, I really had a good time. I think it was so exciting that I was like, oh, I guess I actually am a writer. I’ve written this book. People around the world like this book. I guess I’m a writer. I can write another book. And I wrote this book. So it was an exciting endeavor to do this.

Debbie:

You are a writer and I will say that is something my husband still like jokes with me. Like I’ve written a number of books, many of which were for teens, some blues clues books. Like I have a lot of books on my bookshelf with my name on them and I still will say to my husband, yeah, but I’m not a real writer. He’s like, okay, how many books do you need to write until you acknowledge that you are a writer? Anyway, this is another conversation. SoI won’t go down this rabbit hole, but anyway, you are a writer. So yes. And I was wondering if you could share even a couple like tips from this. So if we look at kids who are going through a hard time while we’re going through a hard time, do you have a strategy or two that you could share with us for how parents can in that moment show more compassion for a child, especially if we’re getting triggered ourselves and we’re just having a hard time wrapping around why they were having a hard time.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yeah, I mean, I think that those are the toughest moments, right? When everybody’s upset and we’re upset because they’re upset and it’s just like the chaos seems to multiply. And those are the hardest times. In those times, I think that sometimes our brain wants to blame others. Sometimes we want to fix the problem. so we can just make it go away. All of these things can be things that we try to do, but we can’t be effective in those moments when we’re activated, when our stress response is activated because we don’t have access to our whole brain. Just as when our kid is stressed out, they don’t have access to their whole brain. Their nervous system is cutting off access to the prefrontal cortex and the same is happening for us. We have… flipped our lids, our dance eagle lids, right? And we’re not talking to the slower parts of the brain, which are really important, right? Responsible for impulse control, verbal ability, problem solving. These are the parts of the brain we need to make good decisions. So in those moments where our kid’s upset, when we’re upset, we need to take care of ourselves. It sounds like… you know, we’re in a moment, right, where we really want to take care of our kids. To take care of our kid is to take care of ourselves because we’re not going to give them anything unless we ourselves are somewhat grounded, right? So we want to, we want to calm that stress response. And, you know, there are ways to do this. We just, the challenge is recognizing, oh, this is the hardest part, right? So I talk about this, like how to stop yelling. And I talk about the three Rs, recognize that you’ve been triggered, remove yourself if you need to, this is the optional step, and then use your resources. But the first and the hardest step is to recognize and just to say, this is a lot for me right now. I need a break, I need to take a minute. That’s really hard to say. I’m feeling frustrated or I’m feeling a lot, I’m feeling this, you’re feeling a lot, I’m feeling a lot just to recognize what’s happening and say, that is like, this is a bell of mindfulness. This is a bell of waking us up to, oh, I’m in a dysregulated state and I need to regulate myself if I’m going to be any help. So that’s the hardest part to do that, is to recognize that we’re triggered. But we can practice that. That can be done.

We can visualize it, we can practice it. And then once we’ve recognized it, you might need to remove yourself, you might need a break and then either way we’re going to use some of those resources to calm the stress response to help us become more regulated. We can use resources, body and mind are one. We can use resources like the breath. It’s cliche because it works. exhale longer than we inhale. It sort of it’s kind of like puts the body back into that rest and relax response so we can breathe in for four, breathe out for six. and do that maybe four to six times. We can put a hand on our heart, have that soothing touch. We can tell ourselves, this is not an emergency. This is not an emergency, right? Or I am helping my child. I’m helping my child. Or even like, I’m gonna be a calm mountain. I’m gonna be a calm mountain. Or breathing in, I’m like a mountain breathing out. can feel calm, right? So we’re using the body, like using the breath, and then we’re using the mind, we’re using them in conjunction to resource to calm down. So those are just two of the resources that are in this book, but it’s really about recognizing. And then once you recognize that you’re totally dysregulated, that’s when you can say, okay, what are my resources?

Debbie:

Hmm, that’s great. That feels doable. I think the breathing thing I always forget in the moment what I’m supposed to be doing, like I know that the breath can get your kind of autonomic nervous system back on track and can really calm down that anxious response. But I, I’m like, do I have to breathe it in hold it for a certain amount of time, then I get breathless, then I want to exhale really quickly, you know, I start to kind of get in my head about this process. So I appreciate you walking through that. And I love the visual.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Just a longer exhale. I know, because there are so many kinds of breathing. Just a longer exhale. Just pick a number that’s longer than the number of your inhale.

Debbie:

Yeah, simple. Okay, I can do that. And the visual of the calm mountain also is very like, yeah, that’s powerful. It’s really powerful. Um, I want to just touch upon I mean, we could there’s 50. So again, go to hunters Instagram, because you’ve been walking through, you know, you’ve been doing reels for all your chapters. But one of the ones that jumped out at me is how to stop seeing yesterday’s child. I think that is so relevant for this community in particular because Um, we may be really involved and aware of and invested in challenges and, and advocacy and kind of really, um, have this very clear idea of who we think our child is. And it can be really hard to shift that, I think. Um, and so we might go into situations with yesterday’s kid in mind. So can you just talk a little bit about why it’s so important that we. Don’t do that.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Yeah, so yeah, our brain is always predicting the future, right? It’s like this in this dark cave in our heads, always trying to predict the future and keep us safe, depending on what it knows from the past. So it makes a lot of sense that we are, you know, we’re maybe labeling our kids or we’re making assumptions about them and things like that. And, and that can be useful, of course, at times, right? We don’t want to be rethinking why we brush our teeth every day. We want to just. Brush our teeth. But with our kids, we don’t want to pigeonhole them, right? Because our expectations for them can be self-fulfilling prophecies. We can treat them a certain way without giving them the opportunity to grow in depth or whatever changes they’re making. And our kids are like a river you never step into twice, right? And they are growing and changing so, so fast. And it’s the same with us, of course, too, but it happens mercilessly. But with our kids, we can easily say like, you know, he’s the sporty one, she’s the hyperactive one, whatever, right? Like we can, you know, they always do this, they never do this kind of thing. And I think it really gives them an opportunity to grow when we can say, huh. I wonder who you are today. I wonder, and this is this idea of beginner’s mind and this is the idea of openness rather than judgment. And just imagine if we could look at our kids as a stranger looks at our kids or look at our kids with fresh eyes and just be open to what they have to say and what they notice. and what they’re interested in, and it’s gonna be different. It’s gonna be changing all the time. And this is really hard. So I have a kid, my teenage daughter is struggling with a chronic pain issue, and has been for a couple of years now. And it’s been really hard to… in this way like except where she is now compared to where she was. And that’s been really hard for me. But I think this practice of saying of being open to who they are, it helps us to really listen, you know, and to listen and to question our own assumptions. And I think that our kids really need that from us, right? Because they just want to be seen and heard. They want us to accept them for who they are right here, right now, today. And that’s like the most beautiful way we can show unconditional love, right? So it’s this idea of, let me start to question my own assumptions. Let me push back against them. Let me be open to what is really here.

Debbie:

Again, we don’t have time to go through all 50 of these. I just wanted to share a couple of them because they you really cover so much ground in here. You have a chapter, my parents voice is coming out of my mouth. How do I make them stop? How to talk to older kids? You do have one called be a calm mountain. you have one, what can I do when kids fight, which I think is just such a tricky situation, especially in households where there’s one or more neurodivergent siblings. How can I create helpful kids take in the good permission to get help? Like it’s just, it’s, um, it’s just almost like the handbook that we need to navigate so many different types of situations. And again, because it is digestible and you can flip it open and get what you need in that moment, it’s really practical and useful. So, um, I’m really happy and grateful that you got this book out into the world. I’m happy that we could talk about it today. Is there anything that we didn’t touch upon? We covered a lot of ground, so thank you for going all over the place with me and my brain. Is there anything we didn’t touch upon or something that you would want my listeners to make sure they take away from this conversation?

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

I think that what I often like to leave people with is the fact that we do need to give ourselves permission to be human. I like to underscore that because it’s so true that we always need permission to be human. But also I just want to remind people that our brains are plastic. They’re constantly growing and changing depending on what we do. And what we practice grows stronger. So whatever you want to practice, you can grow that stronger. Sometimes I think it’s so funny when people are like, oh Hunter, like your voice is so calm and you know, just calm me down when I talk to you. And I’m always like, wow, that’s so funny. Cause like, that’s just like not how I was from, like I just, but I needed to practice some calm in my life. And apparently it grew a lot stronger. It’s just funny that I think of that. think of myself that way because it’s not how I thought of myself for most of my life, right? But yeah, what we practice grows stronger. So don’t give up on yourself and your ability to show up in the way you want to show up. Just practice.

Debbie:

That’s great. What a wonderful note to end this on. And I think that you should, if you haven’t already, start a line of t-shirts with permission to be human on the front. I would totally buy that.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

That’ll be the next bit of t-shirts we put out. We just found a merchandise place. So we’re putting out new lines of t-shirts. So I will do that. I will do that soon.

Debbie:

I would wear that shirt. I love it. I would need that. I like that reminder, for sure. Okay, so listeners, I will have links to my last conversation with Hunter, both of Hunter’s books, all the resources that we talked about today, because we did actually, I have a ton of notes on my page. So anything that kind of came up in conversation, go to the show notes page, and you can access that as well. And is there a favorite place that you want listeners to check out your work?

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Sure. Everything is at mindfulmammamentor.com. You can find the mindful parenting podcast there. And if you have anything you want to say to me on social media, I’m at @mindfulmammamentor.

Debbie:

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for this conversation. We went way over time and I apologize and am grateful for that. So thank you for going into all of this today and for what you do in the world.

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

Thank you, Debbie. And thank you. I appreciate your friendship and I appreciate what you do. And I appreciate you have such a grounding presence too. Do you know that? Yes. Yes, you do.

Debbie:

I did not know that. 

Hunter Clarke-Fields:

You are just like a vision of stability, at least for me in my life. And I’m like, Debbie can do it. I can do it. So thank you.

Debbie:

Oh, that is so sweet, thank you.