Aware Parenting Stories with Joss Goulden

In this episode I have a wonderful conversation with Bernadette Lack from Core Floor and Restore. B is a midwife, core and pelvic floor specialist, educator and author. She is the creator and founder of Core and Floor Restore, an online pregnancy, birth and postpartum hub, co-owner of Motheration with Lael Stone and co-host of The Great Birth Rebellion Podcast. She loves all things from pregnancy to parenting but mostly she loves her husband and two boys. In the episode, B shares how she came to Aware Parenting and how it supported big shifts in her relationships with her children, herself, her partner and her family. She shares how she came to understand the need for her to explore her own pain and imprints in order to be able to practise this with her children. We talk about why telling the stories of our births is so important and how she supports parents with that process. B shares about how to heal our bodies after birth, how to support the pelvic floor in a holistic way. We talk about how to support mothers to reconnect with their power and intuitive wisdom. We do touch briefly on pregnancy loss and death of babies in this conversation so I invite you to check in with yourself to see if you want to listen and we are sending love to anyone who has experienced the loss of a baby or child. To learn more about B, please visit www.coreandfloor.com.au and www.motheration.au with Lael Stone, and follow her on Instagram at coreandfloorrestore

In this episode I have a wonderful conversation with Shelly Robinson . Shelly is both a certified conscious parenting coach and certified family wellness coach who helps parents worldwide break generational cycles to fill their homes with more compassion, calm, and joy. She is the founder of Raising Yourself and the creator of the Connected Kid Toolkit. When she’s not cheering on parents to become more deeply connected with their kids, you can find Shelly in the kitchen baking with her two children, sneaking in a game of ping pong with her hubs, or releasing stress at her weekly boxing class. Shelley’s beautiful approach is not Aware Parenting but it aligns closely. In this episode, Shelly shares the profound realisation she had early in parenting, that she was raising herself alongside raising her children. She talks about how we can bring curiosity when we have big reactions to our children’s behaviour, in order to not be passing so much of our pain down to the next generation. She shares her question “I wonder what my anger has to tell me” that she uses to dive deeper into her inner child work and then finding ways to give to yourself now what you didn’t receive in childhood. We talk about repair, avoiding punishments, offering unconditional love and responding to family who view child-raising very differently to us. If you want to learn more about Shelly, please visit her website at shellyrobinson.com and download her free guide entitled “The Ultimate Guide to Less Yelling and More Compassion.” She is on Instagram and Facebook at Raising Yourself.

In this episode, I have another great conversation with Jai Singh. Jai joined us in episode 61 and here we have a second conversation about conscious fatherhood. Jai is a men's coach who works with fathers on their relationship with themselves, their partners, their kids and their sense of purpose in life. His work is inspired by his own humbling and growth-inspiring experience with marriage and fatherhood, and from seeing how deeply but silently most men struggle through the journey of fatherhood. He began offering coaching in 2016 and started running men's groups specifically for fathers in 2019. He is based in Richmond, Virginia in the U.S. and runs online and in-person men's programs. In this episode, we talk about how to support fathers to bring more self-connection to their parenting journey, whilst they navigate the stresses and challenges of parenting without the support that we evolved to rely on. He shares how fathers can bring more awareness of the full range of their emotional experience in order to be able to identify and meet their needs more, so they have more capacity for the emotional storms of parenting. We talk about the need for support for us all on the parenting journey and how to support men to feel safe to be vulnerable. To find out more about Jai’s work, please visit https://www.awakened-masculine.com/ and follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.awakened.masculine/.

This episode is another in the series of conversations with my wonderful friend and colleague Danni Willow. This episode is in response to a question from a listener about Tantrums. We explore why children have tantrums and describe the compassionate, trusting and loving approach to tantrums in Aware Parenting. We describe what is going on physiologically and emotionally when our children have tantrums. We share how we can learn to understand this and to support ourselves to process what comes up for us when our children have tantrums, and when we do too! We talk about how to support our children at the time of the tantrum, and more generally to make tantrums less necessary for our children. If you want to know more about Danni, please follow her on social media at Danni Willow The Way of the Woman, or visit her website www.thewayofthewoman.com.au. If you would like to learn more from me please use this link to sign up for my mailing list https://awareparenting.us14.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=b0f3fda38d97c32be4d00a4aa&id=0c0521fedd

In this episode I have a very touching conversation with Rafa Guadalupe. Rafa is an Aware Parenting Instructor based in Brisbane, Australia. Originally from Brazil, Rafa relocated to Australia in 2016. She is a Food Engineer and has worked for more than a decade in big corporations around the world. As a mother of two young children, she's very familiar with the challenges of juggling parenthood with a career. In 2022, she founded 'The Conscious Hive' — a platform dedicated to assisting working parents in achieving a harmonious balance in their lives through the principles of Aware Parenting. In this episode, Rafa shares with great vulnerability the challenge of her start to parenthood with her son born 10 weeks premature and how that completely changed her life. She describes how her baby was supported with close attachment and connection to overcome the challenges of his first weeks and months of life. She shares how powerful aware parenting has been in supporting her to balance her work and home life and the juggle of modern parenting. She shares how small changes bringing aware parenting into the homes of busy parents can make a big difference to our relationships with our children and to their behaviour. She shares her passion for bringing the Aware Parenting message to mainstream parents and the power of prioritising connection. If you want to learn more about Rafa’s work, please follow her on social media on Facebook at Rafa Guadalupe and Instagram at theconscious.hive. Her new website is coming soon.

I so enjoyed this episode, which is a conversation with Jai Singh. If you are a father or you have a father in your family, I highly recommend listening. Jai is a men's coach who works with fathers on their relationship with themselves, their partners, their kids and their sense of purpose in life. His work is inspired by his own humbling and growth-inspiring experience with marriage and fatherhood, and from seeing how deeply but silently most men struggle through the journey of fatherhood. He began offering coaching in 2016 and started running men's groups specifically for fathers in 2019. He is based in Richmond, Virginia in the U.S. and runs online and in-person men's programs. In this episode, Jai shares some of the challenges of fatherhood and how mothers can best support their partners to come on board with conscious parenting. We discuss how parenthood is an incredible opportunity for growth and healing and the impact of our childhoods on how we respond to our children. He shares strategies that he finds helpful when he is activated by his children’s behaviour. We talk about self-compassion for fathers and how we navigate the many messy moments of parenting and use our mistakes as a path to where we want to go and a sign that we need to take care of ourselves. Jai shares some strategies for nurturing our relationship with our partner or co-parent and how we learn to listen deeply and profoundly. We talk about how to move away from harsh and authoritarian styles of parenting to more conscious, aware approaches that focus on relationships and connection. To find out more about Jai’s work, please visit https://www.awakened-masculine.com/ and follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/the.awakened.masculine/. Jai has generously offered listeners the opportunity of a free to explore working together 1:1. Please use this link to book in your Free Call: https://www.awakened-masculine.com/call

This episode is a conversation with Dr Suzanne Zeedyk. Suzanne is a Developmental Psychologist and Research Scientist with an honorary post at the Univeristy of Dundee, Scotland. She is fascinated by baby’s innate capacity to communicate and is passionate about sharing the Science of Connection. She is the founder of Connected Baby, an organisation that shares the latest discoveries on infant communicative capacities, brain development and the parent-infant relationship with the wider public. Her goal is to increase awareness of the decisions we take about caring for children, because they are integrally connected to our vision of the kind of society we wish to build. Please note that this conversation is not specifically about Aware Parenting. In this episode, Suzanne shares her expertise about babies and the gap between what science now understands about the capacities and needs of babies and what is understood about that in our wider culture. She shares that babies are born already able to recognise the voices, the laughter and the songs of people who have been around them in utero. She shares that the way babies are treated in the early years has an impact on their biology. And she reassures listeners by explaining the positive impact on attachment of the rupture–repair process - that repair matters more than rupture. We discuss the need parents have for support and information if we are going to be able to meet our baby’s needs. She reassures parents that us being imperfect is exactly what our babies need and we discuss the impact of the wider economic and social context in which we are trying to raise our families. To find out more about Suzanne’s work, please visit www.connectedbaby.net, read her book Sabre Tooth Tigers and Teddy Bears, watch her film The Connected Baby and her many videos on YouTube. You can follow her on Facebook and Twitter @drsuzannezeedyk

This episode is a deep conversation with Dr Sophie Brock. Sophie is a Motherhood Studies Sociologist and Mother living in Sydney, Australia. She provides analysis of Motherhood in our culture, exploring the ways individual experiences of Mothers are shaped by broader social constructs. Sophie’s work contributes to changing the cultural conversation on Motherhood and the individual experiences of Mothers, to create a world where Mothers feel empowered, supported, and valued. Sophie’s offerings include self-study courses for Mothers and mother-supporting practitioners, mentoring for mother-supporting professionals, The Motherhood Studies Practitioner Certification online training, and her podcast The Good Enough Mother. In this episode, Sophie translates some complex theoretical ideas into accessible information and provides resources and ideas for mothers to understand these concepts, to explore them for their own unique lives and to bring compassion to themselves in the journey to “good enoughness”. She describes how our culture shapes and impacts us as mothers and how we can also shape and impact that world. She describes the concept of patriarchal motherhood and the myth of the perfect mother and how this impacts our experience of motherhood. We talk about what it means to parent our children against patriarchal norms and she shares some reflection exercises that we can use to start to gently explore, unpack and challenge this for ourselves. If you want to learn more about Sophie’s work please visit https://drsophiebrock.com/ and follow her @drsophiebrock on Instagram and Facebook or email info@drsophiebrock.com. If you want to learn more about the Exploring Aware Parenting Community with Danni Willow, please visit my website www.awareparenting.com.au/community/

This episode is a powerful conversation with Marion Rose about her new extraordinary book The Emotional Life of Babies, which has just been released. Marion is a level 2 Aware Parenting Instructor and the regional coordinator for Australia and New Zealand and has a background in developmental psychology, pre and perinatal and post-natal psychology. She is an author and speaker and offers courses, workshops and mentoring for parents. In this episode, Marion, shares so generously from this incredibly beautiful book. She shares the wisdom of babies, how to distinguish between needs feelings and healing feelings and what to observe in our babies in order to get clarity about what they need. We talk about the support that parents need in order to offer loving listening in arms. She clearly describes the difference between mild dissociation and relaxation, how babies heal and how to offer the balance of attention. She shares information and compassion in relation to sleep, listening to feelings, attachment play and the effect on our babies and ourselves and our culture of receiving loving listening. I highly recommend this book for all parents and for anyone who wants to understand their own experience of being a baby. To buy this book, please visit Australia: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V US: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V Germany: https://www.amazon.de/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V France: https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V Italy: https://www.amazon.it/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V Canada: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0CJ4DLB4V Marion is on Instagram at _marion_rose_ and on Facebook at Marion Rose PhD. If you want to know more about the Exploring Aware Parenting Community, please visit www.awareparenting.com.au/community/

In this episode I have the pleasure of speaking with Eliza Parker. Eliza’s work helping babies sleep, move, and feel better revolves around her respect for babies and toddlers as whole people who enter the world aware, desiring to communicate and learn, and with the ability to process and self-heal within relationship. Her Conscious Baby practice employs unique approaches to non-cry-it-out sleep, baby-led milestone development, healing birth trauma, and parental attunement to non-verbal cues and crying. She is a certified Aware Parenting Instructor, Infant Developmental Movement Educator, Body-Mind Centering®Practitioner, and trained Feldenkrais® practitioner. Her life-changing perspectives and respectful solutions toward common parenting challenges transcend “typical” parenting advice. In this episode, Eliza shares how she discovered Aware Parenting and what she most loves about this approach. We talk about the need to treat babies as people and to recognise that they are born with awareness, consciousness, and understanding emotion, as well as how to heal from stress and trauma and how to communicate with us. We discuss how to learn to tune in to the communication of babies and young children’s behaviour and to understand the meaning of their crying. Eliza describes how this often reflects their birth stories and how we can support babies to sleep by allowing them to release and heal the stress of their early experiences. We talk about how to offer the balance of attention to support healing of stress and trauma. If you would like to learn more about Eliza’s work, please visit www.consciousbaby.com or follow her on Facebook and Instagram at Consious baby with Eliza Parker. If you want to learn more about my Exploring Aware Parenting Community with Danni Willow, please visit my website www.awareparenting.com.au/community/. If you want to hear more from me, please Sign up for my mailing list here .