E-book Give-Away! Consciously Parenting, Book 1

Today is the day!! 

I'm launching my first book as an e-book and an audio book: 

Consciously Parenting: What It Really Takes to Raise Emotionally Healthy Families! 

This is the first book in a 4-part series. I'm SO excited to get this book off my computer and into the hands of parents.

I'm also excited to announce that I'm giving away an e-copy! 

Scroll down to the bottom of this post for how to enter. 


If you win and you already bought it, I'll refund your money!

You can also click here to sign up to receive the first 3 chapters at no cost to you.  Here's an excerpt from the book:

As parents, we have a steady diet of conflicting information coming at us from all directions. The long list of essential dos and don’ts has most of us spinning our wheels in indecision, not knowing what we’re actually supposed to do to parent our children. We follow parenting advice from “experts” even if it doesn’t feel right because we aren’t sure what else to do or we feel that someone else must know what our child needs better than we do.

Consciously Parenting is about listening to your own inner guidance system, trusting your own inner voice about what is needed in your family and for your child. It is also about finding what you need and finding a way to meet your own needs in a way that still respects the needs of your child and the needs of the relationship.

Consciously Parenting gives us a compass and a map to help guide us on our parenting journey with 8 guiding principles based on current science, using intuition as our guide. No one knows our child the way we do and yet we’re so close to our own children that we can’t always see the bigger picture. Consciously Parenting is about gaining a different vantage point and remembering that the most important thing we can do as a parent is to focus on the relationship.

We’re going to make mistakes. And that’s OK. Actually, “mistakes” allow us the opportunity to reconnect and repair the relationship when there has been a disconnection, which is a critical part of attachment. Sometimes we will reach out to reconnect and sometimes it will be our child. And sometimes it will take a while before we can see that our own story is getting in the way of reconnecting.

Parenting is a journey, not a destination. We’ll take “wrong turns” and end up in scary back alleys, but we need to remember that it is only a wrong turn if we don’t learn from it. Eventually. Lessons will be repeated until learned and parenting does a great job of providing opportunities for us to learn.

We become parents because we want to have a loving connection with our children. We want to feel joy and wonder and we become frustrated when we feel anger, resentment, confusion or pain, when we see our child is suffering and we don’t know how to help her. Or maybe we’re aware that we are the one in pain. When we begin to focus on the communication behind the behaviors, we begin to see our child in a new light. And we begin to understand ourselves more deeply. Parenting becomes a gift, a treasure.

             Copyright © 2012, The Consciously Parenting Project, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Mandatory Entry:

• Simply leave a comment below letting me know why you’d like to win!

Additional Optional Entries: (not required to win, come back here and leave a separate comment on this post for each additional entry.)

• Like The Consciously Parenting Project on Facebook
• Follow The Consciously Parenting Project on Twitter
• Subscribe to the Consciously Parenting Newsletter
• Share about this giveaway on Facebook
• Tweet about this giveaway, feel free to copy the text below:

Enter to win @tcparentingproj e-book! Enter thru 4/1/12!

• Giveaway Details:  The give away will be open until midnight EST Sunday, April 1, 2012. Winner will be announced by Monday, April 2, 2012.
• No purchase necessary to win.
• Must be 18 years of age or older to enter.
• If prize winner forfeits or does not claim the prize, prize will be re-awarded at my sole discretion.
• Void where prohibited by law.
• Make sure to leave a separate comment for each entry. Winner will be chosen at random!
• Odds of winning based on number of entries.
• This promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.
• NOTE: In order to enter the contest you must leave a comment on my blog post. To leave a comment scroll to the bottom of the post fill in the form. (If you are reading this via RSS, you will need to visit my actual blog to post a comment.)
• If you purchase the e-book and win a free copy, we'll refund the amount of your e-book purchase.
• Good Luck!

Navigating by Inner Guidance in Parenting (book excerpt)

Consciously Parenting: What It Really Takes to Raise an Emotionally Healthy Family by Rebecca Thompson, MS

The following is an excerpt from Consciously Parenting book, Part I, Foundation of Relationships, to be released March 2012. For more information and to continue reading, visit: http://consciouslyparenting.com/book to sign up for more free excerpts and the first 3 chapters of the book at no cost to you.

Navigating by Inner Guidance

Now, as then, so many families are still struggling, and parents don’t know what to do. Many parents have gone from expert to expert only to find themselves back in the same place or in a worse place than they were before they followed the “expert” advice. At a very early age, most of us learned that the answers are outside of ourselves, and so we seek external solutions to our problems. We think that someone else is going to come and save us.

Part of the problem is that we’re afraid to not follow the advice of someone who seems to know what they’re talking about. Even when something about a piece of “expert” advice doesn’t feel right to us, we disregard that still, small voice within us, and things get worse. Or while we may know intuitively that something isn’t right or makes no sense, we don’t know what to do instead. In the past, much of the parenting information out there has been conflicting at best and misleading and damaging to relationships at worst. We’ve all heard so much information about parenting that we don’t know what is really correct anymore.

That’s where I found myself as a parent. I was listening to my heart and doing the best I could with the information I had, but it wasn’t working. I simply didn’t know where else to turn or what else to do to help my family out of the rut we were in on all levels.

Eventually, I realized the solutions to all the things we struggle with personally and as parents can be found inside us. Like the way back to Kansas was for Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, what we’re seeking can be found within. The difficulties our children present to us are opportunities for us to grow beyond where we are in this moment. My child wasn’t trying to manipulate me, but he was providing me with an opportunity to grow and learn. Parenting our own children provides a unique opportunity to learn about our early experiences. It puts a magnifying glass on those things that worked well for our own parents and those that didn’t. It allows us to understand how we feel about our own needs and the needs of our children, but only if we allow ourselves to be aware and see the parent-child relationship with new eyes.

Truly connecting with our children takes waking up, stepping into full consciousness, and reconnecting with ourselves and our own inner wisdom. It will probably be one of the most difficult things we will ever do, but it is also one of the most rewarding. I know firsthand that finding your own voice can feel daunting. Like stepping off the shore into the ocean, we must first go through the crashing surf before we reach the calmer, gently rolling waves on the other side. Everything becomes easier when we have passed through the rough water and found that we can handle what floats our way. However, it isn’t always an easy journey. Storms are bound to come up and test our ability to stay connected to ourselves in this new way. Indeed, parenting in this manner is a journey, not a tropical island destination at which we arrive with our luggage and simply  unpack and settle in with a frosty tropical beverage, happy kids in tow.

We’re going to start with you, and you will be modeling what it looks like to stay connected to yourself. By doing so, your children will learn to connect to their own inner guidance rather than looking at external sources to find answers. Your children are going to be on their own at some point, out in the big, wide world without you. Helping them find their own internal compass is one of the best things you can do to help them prepare for the real world. We’ll take a look at what navigating by the internal compass looks like at each developmental stage. (And these developmental stages are based on a child’s emotional or developmental age, rather than chronological age.)

With our parenting decisions, we have the power to create connection instead of disconnection, love instead of fear, peace instead of discord. Then we can return to our natural “perfect” state of harmony, peace, and joy.

Like what you see? Sign up for more at no cost to you! http://consciouslyparenting.com/book