How to Become a Better ParentDr. Shefali on Impact Theory

Tom: Hey everybody. Welcome to Impact Theory. You are here my friends, because you believe
that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not
the same as actually doing something with it. So, our goal with this show and company is
to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams.

All right, today's guest is a clinical psychologist,
and acclaimed author on the topic of parenting, who's not only on Oprah's SuperSoul 100 list,
but Oprah said, brace yourself, that in the 30 [00:00:30] years she's been doing interviews,
this woman is the best she's ever seen. Not bad. Born in India, but trained in the West, her
work focuses on the integration of the Eastern philosophy and mindfulness into the realm
of growth, expansion, and transformation, bringing some much needed pizazz to the somewhat
homogenous world of self-improvement. Her views on parenting aren't just unconventional,
they're downright controversial.

Her ideas are so fresh that they cut through
the clutter of the books designed to tell you how to fix your child, and instead ask
you to [00:01:00] fix yourself first. Her approach to what she calls conscious parenting
has attracted global attention, and the Dalai Lama himself wrote the preface to her first
book, praising her ability to bring compassion to the masses. She has certainly gotten good at reaching
the masses. She's been asked to speak all over the world
at high profile events like Wisdom 2.0, TEDx, Kellogg Business School, The Dalai Lama Center
for Peace and Education, and a gaggle of others.

You've got to see these things. People practically throw their backs out jumping
to their [00:01:30] feet at the end of her talks. She is amazing at conveying complex new ideas. As such, she also has a thriving private practice
where she helps individuals, couples, and families with the process of finding their
truest selves.

According to her, she's always known she'd
make a career out of helping people heal, and I can't imagine a profession much more
noble than that. So please, help me in welcoming the best selling
author whose latest book The Awakened Family is truly a revolution in parenting, the woman
Oprah called revolutionary [00:02:00] and life changing, the astounding Dr. Shefali. Welcome.

Dr. Shefali: Thank you. Tom: Absolutely. It is a pleasure.

I'm glad that you're here. So, it's funny. Doing that intro, I know your feelings on
leading people, especially kids, to believe that they have potential and that they have
to do something with it. So as I'm reading I'm like, "Oh, she's really
going to have a field day with this one." Define for us what conscious parenting is.

I think that will give us the framework to
really dive in. Dr. Shefali: [00:02:30] Sure. Consciousness first needs to be understood
as a commitment to unearthing the emotional and conditioned legacies of your mind.

We've all inherited so much baggage from culture
and from unconscious parents and their ancestors. As a result, we grow into these legacies without
ever questioning [00:03:00] how do they work for me? Who am I in all of this? What is my truth in all of this? We live off prescriptive checklist and believe
that if we don't follow that checklist, then we are somehow lesser than. When we do this with a child who has come
into this world with a throbbing spirit desirous of kind of figuring it out, and we've kind
of already ruined that chance by here's a checklist. This is what I believe is success and failure
and beauty and achievement.

[00:03:30] Now follow my way or you're already
an outcast in my eyes. The process of consciousness in parenting
mandates that the parent not hand over that prescription. In order for the parent to not hand that over
means that they have had to come to let go of that prescription themselves. They've had to somehow deconstruct their own
emotional legacies and find their own truth so that they can then unleash it in their
child.

Tom: It really is [00:04:00] neat the way
that your book focuses so much on the parent, and not on the kid. As somebody who doesn't have kids, I haven't
read a lot of parenting books, but certainly I've encountered enough of this to realize
normally it's tactics, tools, techniques to really help your kid manifest their potential
or get into the best school or whatever that book is aimed at. Dr. Shefali: Right.

Tom: When did you start thinking about the
fact that this is really a problem aimed at the parents, that it's a cycle, that it's
literally [00:04:30] just generation after generation that's being passed down? What was that moment for you? Dr. Shefali: Yeah. It was quite epiphanic, because I did not
want to see this. This is not a convenient truth to tell the
parent that they have to fix themselves.

I mean, the last thing a parent because we're
very defensive and we always believe we're right, and this is our one chance to show
the world that we got this right, we're good enough, our children. Now being told that it is not the child and
it's all you, and that's something you need to look at is threatening [00:05:00] for the
parent, is threatening for anyone. No one wants to look in the mirror, correct? So now to be asked to look in the mirror in
the most intimate, profound experience relationship of your life is deeply ominous for a parent. It takes a lot of courage.

When I came upon it is as a therapist working
with family after family and observing that here were parents who had completed the checklist. They had financial success. They had emotional longevity in long-term
relationships. They had arrived, and yet there was [00:05:30]
a deep dysfunction or deep disconnection between themselves and their children.

That led me to be curious, well what is it? If it isn't what we think it is, success,
money, marriage, stability, maturity, then what is it? I began to see that it's this thing that I
call consciousness, which is really the parent's inability to realize that there's this thing
called conditioning that obscures the ability to see the child for who it is, so because
we've [00:06:00] been conditioned, we don't even know we're so conditioned. Tom: With like cultural norms and stuff on
what we should want? Dr. Shefali: With everything. We're conditioned by our own childhood, by
the unconsciousness of our parents, we're conditioned by culture in terms of norms,
what is right, what's acceptable.

Tom: When you say the unconsciousness of our
parents, you mean that they've just handed over what they were handed. Dr. Shefali: All this stuff. They've not been aware, they've not been attuned,
they've not been aligned.

They've just been doing what they were told
was the right way to live. What this does, this immediate placement of
a way [00:06:30] to be obscures the ability for the child to develop their way, right? They never get to figure out who it is they
are. They never hear the soul calling from within. They never hear the beat of their own essence.

They just come to be herded into cattle, right? Tom: Yeah. Dr. Shefali: This is where there's a disconnect
because the child is like, "Hey, see me." All they see reflected back is the parent's
ideation of what they should be, and then abyss between who the child believes they
are [00:07:00] and who they feel they should be grows wider. You have in adulthood you see all grown up
children walking around lost and aimless, finding who it is they are.

Why is it that you're doing this show? To help children, grown children, recover
what they once had, and that's a tragedy, right? Because they had it, we all had it once, so
what happens? What happens is that the parent because of
their unconsciousness and their being completely overwhelmed by conditioning, [00:07:30] plucks
the child's essence out and shove all these unconscious garbage in, which has never been
deconstructed, and they tell the child how to be. Then the child has to go through all their
life and then one day have an epiphany or be vomiting on a bathroom floor overdosed
that they begin to say, "Now I need to find who it is I am." Tom: Right. Dr. Shefali: That's this endless cycle.

We're all on it. We all are reading my books and watching your
shows, to recover from the parenting we received. Tom: That's really, [00:08:00] really interesting. I'll walk you through my transition reading
your book, I think it will be very familiar to you.

Dr. Shefali: Okay. Tom: The team brought you to my attention
and said, "I think you're really going to be blown away." I see it and I'm like oh man, she's amazing. You're so good at your talks.

Oh my God, you are amazing. So immediately yeah, absolutely bring her
on. Then I go into the real research where I dive
in, I'm reading the books, like really going in and I start hearing some of your real philosophies
[00:08:30] about parenting and I was like, "Whoa." I was shocked, I'll be honest. I was like, wow man.

The wonderful part is we're going to play
a game sort of here in a minute because I'm so fascinated by how consistent you are with
your answers. When you really start that deconstruction
process of okay you don't get to pour yourself into your child, your child is not owned by
you, what does that really look like as a parent? I was going through that like in real time
like [00:09:00] wait, if I had a kid I wouldn't be able to tell them what to do? I wouldn't be able to take ownership and guide
them and ... That was really fascinating. Dr.

Shefali: It's tricky. Tom: How do you help parents through that
when ... Well, first what is it that makes them cling so hard, and then how do you help
them through it? Dr. Shefali: It's really tricky from green
beans to having sex too young, it's knowing where that line is.

Tom: It's a good spectrum. Dr. Shefali: It is the same thing though. It's what's your stance as a parent.

Can I shove those green [00:09:30] beans down? Can I stop my kid from having sex? What is my jurisdiction? What is that sovereign line? It's really tough. The beauty of life though is that there is
no line in stone. Most of it is in sand, and it's uncomfortable. Life is this eternal dance between the knowing
and the not knowing, between the possessing and complete non-possession, between the doing
and the non-doing.

Isn't life constantly the art of this? No more do you see it played out [00:10:00]
than in the parent/child relationship. The child is asking you, "Guide me, control
me. I don't know how to do it." You're like, "Yeah, I'll do it. I'll help you.

I'll show you," but then you suddenly reach
a line where the child can't do it and can't do it your way. So now you have to back off, then you go in,
and then you have to back off. You have be the everything. You have to provide, care for, and give everything,
but you can't really own them.

It's this constant dance between stepping
into the doing and the ego of it, and your role as [00:10:30] a parent, to stepping completely
out of it, to understanding that your children are here ultimately to be their own sovereign
beings. So you can try and pretend and identify with
the role, but ultimately, they're their own person. So you ah and then you back off, right? You go close, and then you have to back off. If you don't and you ramrod into your child
because you don't see the line, no parent sees the line.

You missed the line. The line was like way back. You should have stopped way back, three years
ago, but you kept going. Then the kid will create something to push
you away.

They'll either slam [00:11:00] the door. They'll create the defense. They'll move to China. They'll do something to go okay, back off
now.

I need to find who it is I am, or they will
wallow in an addiction because they don't know where to go, because you don't know your
boundary as a parent. Tom: When you're working with these families
and they're coming and they're struggling, is there a system that you go through to break
it down to help them identify that? Because one thing I think about when I look
at it is [00:11:30] kids' brains just aren't developed. I was imagining you doing a parent and child
session, and the parent has all these rules and they've overstepped their bounds, but
the child literally has an underdeveloped brain. How risky, to use my words, is it to so fully
empower somebody whose brain hasn't finished developing to really take autonomy? Dr.

Shefali: Right, right, right. Conscious parenting is about being attuned
to [00:12:00] who your child is at the stage they're in. It does require knowing some psychology and
it does require knowing developmentally where your child is. I always say parents become parents, they
don't take a single psychology course.

They don't understand development. How is that possible? There needs to be some license, don't you
think? Like something, some qualifying exam, horniness
cannot be the only, like, "I was in love," no, that can't be a qualifier for raising
a child. You have to understand that I'm a psychologist
[00:12:30] so I understand, right? Being attuned to who your child is at their
stage of development, understanding their brain, and then giving the input that's needed,
of course, right? You do have a bedtime. You do aim for a bedtime, but you don't aim
for a bedtime that's 7:34.

You aim for a bedtime that's between 7:30
and 9:00 because you understand you're dealing with a child. Tom: So that they have the choice. Dr. Shefali: No, that they have the choice.

You're working with someone who is infinitely
malleable. You're not working with a soldier [00:13:00]
or a puppet, but on the other hand, you do have to have a bedtime. So you understand what I'm saying? It's playing the dance of both. You create an inbuilt structure in your life,
but you also don't go crazy and drive your kid nuts because now it's 8:05 and bedtime
was supposed to be 7:30, right? You do it with the art of balancing the doing
with the being.

Ultimately being as in connecting to the child
must triumph. All too often you'll see parenting is all
about the doing, all about the commands, and the controls and the directives, [00:13:30]
because we feel comfortable in the knowing. But really the precious jewel of having children
is to understand that they come here to teach you how to be, especially young children,
they come here to teach you how to be in the present moment. They ask you to shed your ideas of worth and
identity and success.

They ask you to recognize, can you accept
me for who it is I am? You will see, most parents do not accept their
children for who it is they are, because they're not good enough or great enough or fabulous
enough, [00:14:00] or not some accolade enough, not a degree enough. Then I show parents that the reason they can't
do this, accept their child unequivocally for who it is they are is because they haven't
accepted themselves for who it is they are. Tom: How much pushback do you get on this? Dr. Shefali: A lot.

Tom: Yeah. Dr. Shefali: A lot. People walk out of the room.

Tom: I am not surprised at all. Dr. Shefali: Yeah. Tom: For anybody thinking about stopping this,
I will tell you it only gets better.

This stuff really adds up and there's a consistency
to it. While you were talking, I was thinking [00:14:30]
about, I really hope you've seen this, The Sound of Music. Dr. Shefali: Yes.

Tom: You've seen it? Dr. Shefali: Of course. Tom: Okay. When my wife and I were considering having
kids, we've decided not to, so don't worry, I was so enamored by him blowing the whistle
and the kids lining up.

I was like oh my gosh, I'm going to do that. That was like my fantasy. Dr. Shefali: Like seven children.

Tom: Then yeah when I read your book I was
like, oof, that would have been a mistake. Dr. Shefali: The seven would have been a problem
too. Tom: Yeah.

We can start with that. Does that movie ... In my mind listening to
you talk, that movie [00:15:00] encapsulates the transition somewhat from going from sort
of the extreme end of imposing your will to then bringing somebody in who really tries
to discover who the children are. In that discovery, you really see the kids
blossom.

Dr. Shefali: Yeah. What a great metaphor. Yeah, I've never used it, now I will.

Tom: Nice. Dr. Shefali: Yes, so you have this very left
brain thinking, doing, military sticker persona of the patriarch who rigidifies everything
and believes that children [00:15:30] are to be seen, not heard and they're puppets
really, minions to his directives, right? But they're really lifeless and they're scared
of him and they're not exposing who it is they are. They're pretending.

They've created a false sense of self. They're all standing to attention. They're just obedient because they're in fear. That's the predominant traditional parenting
paradigm, control-based, hierarchical, dogmatic, and dominant.

Then this woman comes in and she's creative
and she speaks from the soul and she speaks their language. [00:16:00] They suddenly begin to peel away
all their defenses to emerge into who it is they are and they begin to fall in love, the
16-year-old. The children begin to be mischievous and they
begin to touch what the essence is. So, which one do you want? Do you want the robot and the puppet, but
you'll have silence, or do you want life and creativity, but you'll have chaos? Tom: Yeah.

It's amazing. Reading your book, the thing that I think
blew me away the most, A, was how deep ... As somebody who doesn't have kids I just began
to see how much this [00:16:30] impacts my own life, and how I can internalize the lessons
and really felt like it applied to virtually everything. You're asking the parents to do the work anyway,
right? Dr.

Shefali: Right. Tom: It's really deconstructing what has been
given to me, what is true to me, what's the truest version of myself. In fact, I'll ask that question for where
I was going, how do you identify or cultivate or whatever that word is, the truest version
of yourself? Dr. Shefali: Sure.

Just to piggyback on what you just said, [00:17:00]
my work seems to be about the parent/child relationship, but it's really about healing
the child within the parent, and in that respect, it's for every human being. Tom: I will agree with that. Dr. Shefali: Because every human being is
a child.

It's under the umbrella and the guise of the
parent wanting to pick up the book because it's about the child, but when they pick it
up and they realize this is about how they have to yet confront who it is they truly
are. So to your question, how do you develop the
truer self, well most of us have been divorced from [00:17:30] it. This is just the tragic truth for the reasons
I said, we've been given a prescription. We've been raised through a conditioned lens,
not a lens that truly honors who it is we are.

In order to now recover that, we have to peel
back the layers. We have to undo all that has been done to
us. We have re-question all that we should have
never been given answers to, and we should have been allowed to discover on our own,
such as who is God? What is God? What is religion? What is beauty? What is achievement? What is success? What is truth? Those questions, [00:18:00] those big life
questions should have been led to us, not given to us. We should have been led to discover them.

Tom: That's interesting. Dr. Shefali: They should not have been given
to us packaged, because maybe they don't work for us. It is through the discovery of those answers
that we discover who it is we are, and we discover our relationship with the universe.

We are robbing our children of this valuable
process by handing them this list. All we need to do really is just to guide
them. The most essential thing we need to do is
discover those answers for ourselves, [00:18:30] and value the sovereign right to muddle and
fumble and stumble and mess up, because when we value it and see how much it's given us,
we let our children suffer. We let our children fumble, because we know
where it's going to take them because we saw where it took us.

Tom: That was one of the things that really
made me fall in love with what you were saying is that notion that I get it, I get you want
to protect your kids from pain, but look at your own life and the strength that you've
developed and the clarity that you gained from the times that you fell down, from the
times [00:19:00] that you struggled. I thought wow, by the way this is the reason
I don't have kids. I'm afraid I don't have the ability to watch
them suffer. Dr.

Shefali: I hear you. Tom: That was the final thing where I was
like uh. Dr. Shefali: This is the greatest lesson for
parents to realize the power of pain, and our desire to fix it for our children and
to control it, because we're trying to mitigate and control it for ourselves, but we've never
been able to.

This is the universe's biggest lesson. You have to surrender. Life is pain. Life is unpredictable, [00:19:30] it's a cold
wall, it's a crapshoot, it's some adventure.

If you don't live it waking up every day saying,
"Maybe this is the day I will fully give it all up and change and start anew." We're so afraid to molt the skin. We're so afraid, so we'd much rather live
in the conformity of stagnancy. As long as we remain the same, it's much easier. But life is not that.

Our children come kind of ready to be that
ever morphing. You look at a child crying [00:20:00] biggest
tears one moment, and then gleefully excited the next. They have the capacity to morph. We rob them of this capacity.

We stagnate. We rigidify them. We need to learn from them. They live in every moment present and whatever
the present moment asks, they engage, and then they move to the next moment ready again,
new, beginner's mind.

All spiritual lessons of the mystics are ever
present in this potential of this moment, and our children show us that. We're just afraid. Pain [00:20:30] is the greatest teacher. It doesn't mean you self-flagellate and self-inflict.

It just means you don't hold yourself back
in the fear of it. You just live fully. The ultimate fear is that of death. That's what we're worrying of, but so what? Homelessness, jail, or death I tell my parents,
those are the three fears that your kid will be homeless, end up in jail, and die? Now, let's deconstruct those.

Tom: I heard that first in a talk that you
gave and I was like literally in [00:21:00] my mind oh like she's going to be okay with
this kid being homeless? Then you were like, "What's so bad about being
homeless?" What? It was fascinating. Dr. Shefali: If that is their destiny, you
are not going to take them there. You're not going to stop them either.

Tom: How do you steer them though? Because any parent like that's where, when
they don't see that you have guidelines that you have bedtime but it's flexible, all the
things you went over before, but when they don't see that and they hear it sounds flippant,
right? I know that [00:21:30] it's not having been
deep enough in your world. Dr. Shefali: It sounds flip, because people
come from the mind. They don't even understand what I'm talking
about till they begin to live it.

It sounds horrific. It's a horror show for somebody who's rule-bound,
who's that guy in Sound of Music. He was horrified by her. She had to work so hard breaking down his
defenses because he lives in fear, his paradigm is fear, his life is based on fear.

For that parent, this is a horror show, but
they are the one crippled in fear, not me. When I show [00:22:00] them that they're living
in their mind, they're not here in the present moment, when you live in the present moment
more and more, not everyone can live it 100%, then you are deeply attuned to what it is
your child needs, therefore, you will have guidelines. But the guidelines are not coming from someone
else's rigid definitions. They're coming from, they're emanating from
the moment.

If you're deeply present to your child, you
will know when your child needs to sleep, you will know your child doesn't like green
beans. Don't push them, but give them something else. Tom: What do you do though if the kid, you
know they need sleep, like you can see everything about it, they just need sleep. Dr.

Shefali: But they do need sleep, the child
will [00:22:30] sleep. There's no child who will not sleep, right? There is no child who will not sleep, you
just- Tom: What about the kid who is like fussy
and crying and the parent is like they just need a nap but they refuse? Dr. Shefali: Right, but there's a way. So you're going to give me extreme examples
like they're there and then they're there like you've presented to me, that's what parents
do.

But there's a way to work with the kid. You know they need a nap, but you know they're
not ready, so you want to get them here but you can't yank them by the collar and bludgeon
them to that, right? You have to find a way to go, you want to,
[00:23:00] trust me you want to. You want to, ask any parent, I want to go
to sleep. That book, why do you think that book does
so well, right? Tom: Right.

Dr. Shefali: It's because the worst thing
is after 9:00 at night, you can't deal with a crying child after 9:00 at night, right? It's the child's fault really, after 9:00
it's the child's fault. I would even say. I'm like who stays awake after 9:00, like
that's my time.

That's why you begin working on them from
5:00 in the evening, you can see your glass of wine at 9:00 and you have to start at [00:23:30]
5:00. You wear them down slowly. There's a way you work it through. What I'm saying is that these are not minions.

You have to come alive to the impossibility
of getting these beings to get on track. It's an impossibility. The way to do it is not through control. The way to doing it is to enter the present
moment, deeply connect, and through that connection, the child will move.

They do move. Children do want to be connected and rested
and well fed. They [00:24:00] are just children. Now deal with them.

Tom: Right. Talk to me, when you say be in the present
moment, is that be aware of what's really going on? Don't be bringing the past? You talked about kids and parents living in
different timezones, is that that concept or is it something else entirely? Dr. Shefali: It's an uber spiritual concept
of learning to be here. You want your child asleep, but they're fussy
so you can keep battling it or you can accept the as-isness of it [00:24:30] and now work
with what you have.

It's the parent who cannot accept the isness
of the now, so your child is throwing a raving tantrum, but you're imagining a quiet night
and the discrepancy, that's why I say the clash of the timezones or the clash of the
fantasy versus the reality. The parent who is stuck in the past or the
future or the fantasy, simply will want to yell, control, and lock that kid up, because
they are the enemy who is ruining my moment. Versus, understanding [00:25:00] this is the
isness of your child, now enter that moment. It doesn't mean accept or indulge, accept
that it is here, it's not that, it's this, now work with what you have.

Tom: Right. Dr. Shefali: Half of the battle is that because
we don't want to accept our child is not our fantasy. Tom: Wow.

Dr. Shefali: This is half the battle. The main battle is my child is not who I thought
my child would be, either not a super soccer player or a fantastic pianist or obedient
genuflecting little servant. Tom: You said [00:25:30] something in the
book and I want to go over the myths because I think they stopped me dead in my tracks
because they're so raw.

But you said something in the book where it
was like the father was like a really high achiever and you basically said you actually
don't accept your child as average. Like they're average, you have a problem with
that. Dr. Shefali: Right.

Tom: That would be hard to take. Dr. Shefali: For overly successful, ambitious,
perfectionistic anal men [00:26:00] and women. Tom: That was good.

Dr. Shefali: It would be very hard. Tom: The problem really is he wanted to believe
that he did love and accept his child as average. Dr.

Shefali: Right. Tom: If I remember right, he like sort of
really pushes back against you and like don't be so absurd. Of course, I do. Dr.

Shefali: Yes. Tom: Do people come around and finally realize
whoa, I don't and then oh, I don't want to lose this, and the guilt once they realize
like the epiphany is like a floodgate of guilt, right? Dr. Shefali: Yes. Tom: It's like [00:26:30] you know if I allow
myself to have the epiphany, I have to feel however old my kid is now, I have to feel
badly about that.

Dr. Shefali: Yes. Tom: How do you help people? Do they have the epiphany, and then how do
you help them through the flood of guilt? Dr. Shefali: Yeah.

The epiphany yes, is married to guilt. I often say when I do workshops, "If you're
going to leave here without guilt, you haven't learned anything." Some amount of guilt is good. I'm not talking about, again, self-abnegation
and shame. I'm talking about a healthy dose of oh my
[00:27:00] God, I didn't know this.

Then quickly to transform into action, and
the action being transformation. Not wallowing in the guilt now and not being
in bed for the next three months. Most parents who were raised on a diet of
overachievement on doing, on mind base, which is the whole of the world now, but especially
the Western world, but catching up greatly in the East, have a very hard time understanding
that their drive is not organic necessarily, [00:27:30] but coming out of their inadequacy,
their fear, their lack. They've just been indoctrinated to compensate
for this, and they've never fully healed from their encountering their ordinariness.

When I say that that's what's driving you
and then they get in touch with their little boy or little girl who truly felt ordinary
and not good enough in that ordinariness, that's when the epiphany occurs. Then I make them see how it's now being projected
onto the child. Don't do this to your child. Your child is [00:28:00] okay and whole in
their ordinariness.

The child doesn't need more to feel more of
themselves. They didn't come with this egoic desire to
attach to PhDs or labels or judgments or wealth to feel themselves. Children feel themselves just by who it is
they are. They are the simplest access to wholeness.

We rob them of this. Yes, the epiphany takes a while to come around,
when it does then comes guilt, then comes transformation. Tom: That's a [00:28:30] pretty incredible
process I would imagine. Dr.

Shefali: It's a process. Tom: How much of this did you have nailed
down before you had your daughter, and how much of it has changed now that you've spent
more than a decade being a parent? Dr. Shefali: I thought I had it all nailed
down. I thought I'd deconstructed my ego because
I had been meditating and studying Eastern philosophy for 12 years before I had my child.

There's something about having your own is
a special kind of mess up. You see [00:29:00] it in a special way. You can see someone else's mess up and you
can commentate, but when you see it in yourself and I was horrified. I saw my own shadow not yet healed.

I saw my ego and my desire and my fear, all
fear comes about that you thought you had conquered but here it is, and now you're obsessed
with your child doing well and your child turning out okay. The only drive from the moment they're born
is to get them to a good school, and then just get them out of the house, okay. [00:29:30] It's perverse. Every day it's just go to sleep, and then
go to college, who are you going to marry and how much money are you going to make when
you're 30? But then we're missing the whole process of
it, so I had not gotten it figured out.

When I saw my own raging ego, which I still
see on a daily basis and my own fear, it's all fear-based. I see parents plagued by fear and we're not
enjoying the parenting process, so I help mitigate those fears and liberate them from
their fears. Tom: [00:30:00] One thing that, and I'll pitch
this to the people watching at home, one thing you guys will see as you dive into her world
is she's always honest. You're always honest about like your own foibles
and the difficulties in your relationship and you'll use your daughter as examples a
lot, which makes it so accessible, which is really awesome.

Then it also brings around to the reminder
of who's doing the work, which ultimately is me, right? Dr. Shefali: Right. Tom: [00:30:30] What are techniques that any
of us can use to figure that out, to get in touch, to if we're going to ... Because you've
been so successful, I know you've worked very hard to get where you're at, and as somebody
who I won't say also, because maybe it's very different for us both, but I'm very ambitious.

At times in my life the process was ugly,
there's no question, but then at times it's been really beautiful and really fun. How do you reconcile [00:31:00] those things,
which if you were to describe on paper, wouldn't necessarily sound being in touch with the
true self? How do you deconstruct that and make sure
you're on a good path I guess? Dr. Shefali: Well, it's my commitment to this
work. I'm not doing this for the ego or the achievement.

It comes, it's great, but I'm not fixated
on it. My ultimate point of it all is to be authentic
and to [00:31:30] uncover and deconstruct my own mind's toxicities so I can liberate
myself, because if I liberate, then only I. Have a hope to help liberate someone else. Tom: Do you have a process for that? If it is meditation, like what form of meditation
do you use? Dr.

Shefali: It's largely meditative, but
not just checking out of intellect, using the intellect to discern, using wisdom, and
the meditative process. So constantly deconstructing what I'm going
[00:32:00] through. If I'm triggered, I deconstruct. So active deconstruction, but meditation really.

It's Vipassana Meditation that I do. It's insight meditation. Tom: Insight. Dr.

Shefali: Insight. Tom: Okay. Dr. Shefali: It's insight into your true nature.

Tom: Are you trying to create a quiet mental
space to be able to hear intuitive thoughts? Dr. Shefali: Yeah. It's really the most basic way of meditating. It's just bare bones, it's hardcore.

It's just you sit, you follow your breath,
you follow your breath, and you follow your breath. There's a science behind [00:32:30] it. Through the witnessing of your breath in the
present moment, in the present moment, in the present moment, you learn to detach from
your thoughts and you realize the impermanent nature of reality, because you realize your
thoughts are impermanent, and the now is impermanent. So you begin to live in the impermanence of
the now fully.

You realize the emptiness of the now, but
you begin to live in the now even more fully. Tom: Do you [00:33:00] follow your thoughts
as they come, or are you trying to quiet them? Dr. Shefali: No, you don't do anything. You just stay on your breath.

You only focus on your breath, and you're
never judgmental, you're never trying, you're never striving, you're just watching everything. You develop the witnessing eye. You get in touch with your essence behind
the field of awareness behind the doing self. Tom: I got into meditation about three years
ago.

I don't know that it has a name. [00:33:30] I call it just breathe meditation. Dr. Shefali: That's great.

Tom: I just do what you're saying follow the
breath. I think of it as trying to maximize the inherent
pleasure of each part of the breath cycle, which allows me to really focus on the breath,
which allows me then because of the sort of biomechanism at play to get out of the sympathetic
nervous system into the parasympathetic, I'm calming my heart rate. I'm slowing my breathing. I can really feel that sort of deep diaphragm
breath calm that you get when you do it, which is [00:34:00] very, very effective for me.

I bring that up because the way that that's
been leverageable in my life is in the business scenario when anxiety is spiking. If I'm about to give a talk or something,
every time I give a talk, right before I go on stage I meditate. That has been really helpful for me. Is that how you use it, where it's like as
in you're in a moment where the stress is, you're arguing with your daughter, [00:34:30]
let's say.

Dr. Shefali: Right. Tom: How does that training of being in the
impermanent now, how does that manifest really in the moment? Dr. Shefali: In the now, you've trained yourself
to pause, to go inward, to detach, to step back, to create a space.

Just that, immediately stops the blind reactivity
that children bring out in you or you allow them to bring out in you. The more the gap, the more the space, the
more the creativity, the more the [00:35:00] compassion, the more the connection, right? Tom: That's really interesting. Dr. Shefali: You're not just being led by
the past, led by the shoulds of life, led by their tantrum, led by someone else's unconscious.

You're able to discern, okay that person is
in their ego right now. I don't need to play. Tom: That makes a lot of sense. All right, I love your parenting myths.

I rarely take chunks out of something, but
these were too good and I was like, "If I. Forget, I will be so upset." All [00:35:30] right, first I'm just going
to read through them all, because I think people are going to be a little bit shocked,
and then I want to go a little bit deeper into some of them. Remember, these are myths. She's saying these are not how it should be.

Parenting myth number one, parenting is about
the child. That was very surprising. Parenting myth number two, a successful child
is ahead of the curve. That's a myth.

Number three, there are good children and
bad children. Number four, good parents are naturals. Number five, a good parent is a loving one. [00:36:00] That one I literally reread twice.

I was like, "Wait a second." So myth, it is a myth that a good parent is
a loving one. Definitely want to talk about that. Six, parenting is about raising a happy child,
equally shocking. Seven, parents need to be in control.

All right, let's start with five because that
was the one that was just like a showstopper for me, so a good parent is a loving one. Why is that a myth? Dr. Shefali: Because no one really loves,
no one really truly loves anyone. Tom: [00:36:30] Wow.

Dr. Shefali: Everyone loves conditionally,
and the conditions are need me, can I need you, can I depend on you, depend on me, give
me worth, don't let me go, make me happy, satisfy me. It's all about me. To truly love someone takes faculties that
we haven't developed yet, and least of all the parent.

Most love is conditioned, control-based, and
fear-based. It's all about the self. To love another, [00:37:00] it takes evolution
of unparalleled proportion. I can't honestly say I highest love my daughter.

I try, most times I'm conditionally loving
her and she knows it, and she detests it and she pushes back. She goes, "You're not seeing me. This is not about me. This is about me." Then I love her less.

Tom: I love that you bring such a sense of
humor to this stuff. [00:37:30] What do people do with that realization? I think that's a hard one for people. Dr. Shefali: It is hard, but it really bursts
the bullshit, you know.

Don't pretend you're loving your kid. You're loving yourself. Just say it. It's all you.

The parenting is all about you. It's about your ego, your need, your desires,
it's all your show. That guy with the seven kids The Sound of
Music, it was his little movie. It was his show, his movie.

We pretend we love our children, and in the
name of love is all the tragedy in the world. All the double [00:38:00] suicides and murders
and these are all in the name of love, but love is attachment. That's attachment. It's not love.

All of us are attachment-based lovers, not
high lovers. Tom: What would you put ... Maybe I can't
imagine, I really think you agree with this I could be crazy, but what would you put around
that beautiful connection that you have with your daughter? Dr. Shefali: In those moments when I'm out
of my own ego? Tom: Yeah.

Dr. Shefali: Once in a year, [00:38:30] then
it's high love, I can touch high love. I touch it when-
Tom: Are there shades in between? Dr. Shefali: No, I think high love is high
love.

It's when you have released your ego. You have released the imperative of the child
following your way. There's no you in the we. It's truly loving the other for who it is
they are, with no you in the picture.

They don't have to love you back, they don't
have to need you, they don't have to agree with you, they don't have to adhere to you,
now try loving your child or another. Tom: Yeah. [00:39:00] This is just interesting. It's sort of tangential to this, but if I
came to you and I said, "I'm not sure if I.

Should have kids," how do you help people
think through that? Dr. Shefali: I'll applaud you. Tom: For not having kids. Dr.

Shefali: Yes, for thinking about it, for
taking it seriously, for stopping and pausing and going, "Am I conscious enough to do this?" You think all of us should have had kids? I shouldn't have had a kid when I had a kid. I shouldn't. I was not conscious. I was just checking [00:39:30] off my list.

I was using my future kid. I imagined her, her name, wanted a her, not
a ... I mean, it was all predestined already. She had no shot to be her own human being.

If a pre-parent comes to me and says, "I'm
thinking ..." I'm like, "Oh, this is genius. Let's stop. Let's really take a pause a couple of decades. Don't rush.

Don't rush. Why are you having a kid?" I would seriously question because why are
we having kids really? [00:40:00] We're only having children mostly
to fulfill our egoic need to feel complete, to live a fulfilled life for ourselves. When you become conscious, the most conscious
parent is a non-parent. Tom: Wow.

Dr. Shefali: You're a conscious parent. Tom: Or at least recognizing enough that that
would be a train wreck. Dr.

Shefali: You haven't messed any kid up
yet, right? All the parents in this room, we've already
messed our kids up, and that's okay too. If we understand it's for the [00:40:30] service
of evolution, don't just keep messing up because you're the parent and you have a right. You have no unmitigated right. Your rights need to be taken away.

You need to be on a path of awakening to what
you're putting onto your kid. If you're teaching them fear, teaching them
hatred, teaching them racism, bigotry, xenophobia, that is a sin. It's a crime, right, because now you're perpetuating
what we have in this world. You're contributing to violence.

You don't realize it, but you just did. [00:41:00] Just by telling your kid your religion
is better than another religion, now you've contributed to separatist thinking and violence. You have to be that careful. Your child's psyche is in your hands.

Tom: I think it was Plato or Aristotle, I
usually give the credit to Plato, one of these days I will actually look this up. They said, "The only impossible job is raising
a child." That was the quote that really began my thought
process of I think I'm good, but I don't think I'm that good. I don't think I can avoid what I [00:41:30]
always saw as the butterfly effect of, it's something that I say married to something
that a kid at school says, married to being embarrassed one day because something happens
and it spirals out of control. Dr.

Shefali: You were conscious of your limitations
and the grandiosity that most parents have that don't make them think of their limitations. You don't have that. We have a grandiosity. It's narcissistic to think that we can raise
another being when we haven't raised ourselves.

We haven't done any work on ourselves. [00:42:00] I tell parents if you did not go
into the jungles and live one year in solitude contemplating who it is you are, you have
no business bringing a kid into the world. I didn't do that either, but have been doing
since because I see the irreparable damage I've been causing by my unconsciousness. Tom: One of the other myths is six, parenting
is about raising a happy child.

That's a myth. I have a firm belief, which I'm very open
by the way to being changed. I was changed [00:42:30] by researching, I'll
be very honest, and one of the things that I still hold onto is that the game you're
playing it's not success, it's not money, it's neurochemistry. That there is a state of even deep fulfillment
I think is transient, it doesn't just once you have it, you have it forever.

I think that there are times like you called
it high love, so like high love, there are times that you touch it and it's overwhelmingly
beautiful. In those moments you know I'm on a good path. In Greek, [00:43:00] they say, [se kal drmo
00:43:00]. Dr.

Shefali: Right. Tom: It's like I'm on a good path, and I get
that sometimes with fulfillment where I'm like okay, I have fallen on my face more than
I care to admit emotionally, with thinking I was chasing the right thing, only to find
out I'm totally miserable so this can't be right. Then there are times where I've corrected
course and really gone through fairly significant periods of man, I feel fulfillment. That has become like [00:43:30] my North star
when I talk to people.

I'm like look, the game you're playing is
brain chemistry. You want to feel a deep and as lasting as
possible sense of fulfillment. What is that for you, if it isn't happiness,
what is it? Dr. Shefali: It's to be present to your now
completely.

Tom: Good, bad, or indifferent. Dr. Shefali: Yeah, whatever the now is that
you have brought into your own existence, teaching the principle of cause and effect. You have causes that bring out the effect.

Tom: [00:44:00] Eckhart Tolle actually put
something on your jacket cover, didn't he? Dr. Shefali: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Tom: That's what I thought. For anybody that doesn't know, Eckhart Tolle
has a book The Power of Now, which all of that comes crashing on me as you say that.

Dr. Shefali: Yeah. His work and my work tries to enter the present
moment with a full on acceptance of engaging with whatever shows up. I will engage in the isness of this moment.

It sounds [00:44:30] cavalier and just whimsical,
but really it's not because if every moment is aligned and deeply engaged with, chances
are the next moment will be aligned. We won't go too off course because each moment
you are shooting for authenticity. Authenticity will breed more authenticity. It won't breed some crazy person in 10 minutes,
right? Chances are you will stay on course, right? You'll ask the right questions in a prevalent
way, in a pervasive way.

[00:45:00] You'll stay on course. Tom: What does this look like? Let's carry it out and somebody gets really
good at that, but they're still on the PTA. Board and they have to work, and it can be
a pain in the ass sometimes. Dr.

Shefali: Right. Tom: The sort of highs and lows, is it just
that they're less prone to riding those dramatic waves, and so there's a more even keel in
the moment, I'm present and I experience ... In fact, you do this beautiful job of describing
like [00:45:30] a child can be entranced by a leaf. They just get lost in that moment.

Is that it? The ability to recapture being so present
that you can experience beauty in simplicity for lack of a better way to say it? Dr. Shefali: I think it's being in touch with
the transcendent in every moment. Whether you're scrubbing dishes or changing
diapers, you are in touch with transcendent of this moment. What does that mean? Because transcendent sounds like the opposite
of the now, right? It's like not in the now.

It means [00:46:00] that while you're in the
now of this life form, cleaning dishes, you're aware that you are more than this. You are this and then something else. You are this energy, this life force, this
essence, this awareness. So staying in touch with that, what is nature,
what is our divinity, the flow, as you were talking about, then that allows you to live
in the life based form attachment with ease.

Then you're in the traffic jam and you're
not [00:46:30] losing your shit, because you are in the ...
You understand that this is just the play of life, this is just the play of form. You have a transcendent understanding that
you are not in a car really, in a traffic jam. You're not identifying with that. You're greater, you're larger, you're more
expansive than that.

Always being in touch with that magnificent
transcendence of life and your divinity, so when you're on the PTA board or when you're
in the traffic jam, to be connected to nature, to breathe, [00:47:00] to recognize that you
are beyond this car. Being in touch with that element, where children
are in touch with, brings about a transcendent quality to life. Tom: Talk a little bit about what you said
as to why pursuing happiness is actually a trap. Dr.

Shefali: Because when you pursue anything,
it means you don't have it already. When you don't have something already, you're
in lack. You cannot pursue abundance from lack. Like I said, [00:47:30] the moment now will
create the next moment and the next moment creates the next moment.

If you're in lack, pursuing, striving, hungry,
craving, you may obtain something, you may get to the buffet table but then you're going
to devour it. You won't be mindfully enriched by it. It won't be the jewel at the end of the search. It will be your ravenous and rapacious.

You'll miss out on the joy of the process
of eating mindfully. Only abundance begets abundance. So pursuing happiness is a misnomer. [00:48:00] It's an absolute counterintuitive
misbelief.

It can never work. They cannot go together. Happiness itself is misunderstood. For me, it's the fullness of being engaged
in this present moment, whatever shows up.

When you're here and you're fully accepting
of this moment, then you're accepting of the next moment. You're not looking for anything, you're full
in the now. If your plane is delayed and you're stuck
on the tarmac, that's your now. Now be here [00:48:30] now.

You envisioned a fabulous, harmonious, peaceful,
serene day on the beach, but your child has diarrhea and all you're doing is changing
diapers, well that's your now. Now engage with it, and then watch the waves,
but engage with that, right? This is more what life is, is the ordinariness,
the murkiness, the messiness, but we have to infuse it with the transcendent. Tom: Much to my shock or and dismay, I have
to get to my last question now, but first, where can these [00:49:00] guys find you online. Dr.

Shefali: On my website drshefali.Com. They can visit me at my events. I have events all over the place and I'm having
one in Long Beach, California, where I gather parents together. Not just parents, children of parents, adult
children, all of us are that, right? We rise together to heal and understand how
to break down and deconstruct all what culture has put on us.

Tom: Awesome. All right, my last question. Dr. Shefali: Yes.

Tom: What's the impact that you want to have
on the world? Dr. Shefali: [00:49:30] To elevate parental
consciousness, because I believe that is the core of disease. Tom: Nice and easy. Dr.

Shefali, thank you so much. Dr. Shefali: Thank you. Tom: That was amazing.

Dr. Shefali: Thank you. Tom: All right, boys and girls, I am telling
you this is somebody you're going to want to read everything she's written, watch all
of her talks. It is unbelievable, it's the consistency that
I want you to see.

Just when you think aha, that question will
get her, she's [00:50:00] got an answer for it. It is absolutely fascinating. It was a journey, and that is the highest
compliment that I can pay anybody when I've done research, is that they've taken me on
a journey and made me rethink some of the most fundamental things in my life. Absolutely incredible, whether you adopt it
all or just makes you rethink your paradigm, it doesn't matter.

It is intriguing, it is important, and she
has her finger on the exact right questions that you need to be asking, whether you're
a parent or not. I'm not and I found this stuff [00:50:30]
taking me to an absolutely engrossing, fascinating place. I am truly mortified that this interview has
come to an end, and hopefully we will be able to get her back on at some point. That would be incredible.

Guys, she will change you if you let her. All right, it's a weekly show. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. Until next time my friends, be legendary.

Take care. Dr. Shefali: Very good, good job. Tom: Thank you guys so much for watching.

If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe
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