How Mindfulness and Self-Compassion Help Raise Good Humans

Hunter Clarke-Fields, MSAE works to model kindness and compassion as a parent. Her motivation comes from childhood experiences in which adults showed anger towards her on a regular basis. She realizes no parent is perfect, and in difficult moments parents may react to their children in ways that aren’t ideal. 

CPTC founder Dr. Ken Ginsburg’s model of Lighthouse Parenting emphasizes the importance of being a stable force as a parent to our children. But, to fill that role, parents must be on stable footing themselves. In her book, “Raising Good Humans,” Clarke-Fields encourages parents to use mindfulness as a foundation for stability. She offers skills, strategies, and a mindful parenting manifesto to help break cycles of negative reactions and support parents to be the kind of caregivers they want to be. I spoke with Clarke-Fields to learn more about her journey towards self-compassion and her mindfulness solution for families. 

Eden Pontz: How did your experience growing up lead you to understand the importance of self-compassion in parenting? 

Hunter Clarke-Fields: I think parents are very hard on themselves. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says “I’m going to scream at my child.” But it’s not a choice. I can explain it in terms of my daughter. When she was almost two, she would have big tantrums, many times a day. Sometimes it triggered my stress response. This might happen to you. And when our stress response is triggered, our nervous system registers that behavior so it feels like a threat. The behavior of yelling and screaming and having big upset feelings felt completely unacceptable to me because when I was little and I had those big feelings, sometimes an adult would rage at me. So, it triggered my aggressive yelling. 

It becomes important to understand that taking care of ourselves and taking care of our stress response is the number one priority. For us to make a conscious choice about how we want to respond to our kids, to be thoughtful about what we’d like to say, or how we’d like to be, we first have to recognize that we are human.  

EP: How does engaging in self-compassion and kindness impact your mindfulness practice and enable you to, as you say in your title, “Raise a Good Human”? 

HCF: Self-compassion is an essential component of mindfulness. It can come about naturally as we start to practice mindfulness – as we start to become more aware of ourselves, of our upbringing, or what we’re bringing to the table with our kids.

Self-compassion is also something that we can cultivate. It’s the act of seeing ourselves with kindness and curiosity, and practicing that curiosity or non-judgment on ourselves. We can speak to ourselves internally as we would to speak to a dear friend, or see our own suffering and offer ourselves kindness. That can be hard and feel awkward to many of us. But it can still be developed, even if it feels strange.

It’s actually practical to be kind to ourselves. Because with kids, really with everything we do in life, we’re going to make mistakes. There’s no such thing as perfection. So, if we make mistakes and then our inner voice is harsh and mean – it can lead us into a bit of a downward spiral. If I’m practicing self-compassion, I say “That was a hard moment. I was doing the best I could.” I remind myself that people mess up sometimes. I remind myself that I’m not alone. It’s very practical because if I give myself that soft landing, I’m able to get back up again and begin anew. I can be more present for everybody around me, including myself. I’m also modeling how to do that for my kids. 

Would we want our kids to be hard on themselves if they made a mistake? No, that’s not what we’d want for them. We have to model that. It’s a skill that can be grown. And it’s essential for every human because we’re all going to make mistakes.

Eden Pontz: You’ve developed a mindful parenting manifesto and teach us about mindful parenting. Tell us about the manifesto and how it helps along the journey.

Hunter Clarke Fields: The mindful parenting manifesto is like a guide for where we want to go and the attitude with which we want to go there. Mindful parents practice being present, authentic, and free to choose how to respond to our children. They are rejecting the culture of “not good enough.”

We live what we want our kids to learn and value. Every day we go inside ourselves to access power that we can practice. We can start again. We don’t have to be perfect. As we do these simple practices to be more present and less reactive, we are changing things for future generations.  

EP: What is mindfulness meditation and why is it such a great solution for when you might feel overwhelmed or stressed or losing your cool in a situation involving your kids?

HCF: Mindfulness meditation is an incredible tool for helping us to be less reactive. When I think about losing our cool, I like to think about it in two ways. There are tools that we can use in the moment that help calm the mind-body system. And then, there are types of “muscles” that we can build over time – muscles of less reactivity. Mindfulness meditation is one of those tools to build the muscle of less reactivity over time.

Mindfulness meditation can decrease anxiety and depression, increase sense of well-being, and reduce stress. One easy way to practice is to sit down for a few minutes. We can feel our breath come in and out. We can stop doing things and solving problems, and just take a moment to focus our attention on our breathing or whatever is in the present moment that we’d like to focus on, like sounds that are coming and going. As we do that, our brain has lots of thoughts because the brain likes to think, just like the ears hear and the eyes see. We have lots of physical sensations. All these things happen and we notice. We practice to come back to what we’re focusing on in the present moment, whether it’s the sounds or our breath. And we do it with an attitude of kindness and curiosity. We practice to sit, rest, and relax with it and to just let things be.

EP: What is the “beginner’s mind” and how can it help us calm ourselves and the way we may react in a given situation?

HCF: “Beginner’s mind” is a helpful idea of just looking at everything as if you were a beginner or with fresh eyes. Each moment is a brand new moment. They say that “you never step into the same river twice” because the water is always flowing by. The same is true with every person you encounter and every situation you’re in. So if we can look at the people around us, the situations that we’re in with this idea of “beginner’s mind,” we can bring a really important attitude of mindfulness to it, which is curiosity or non-judgment.  

The brain wants to be efficient with its energy so it sometimes makes mental shortcuts. But that can lead to us not seeing what’s in front of us. So, we can shift our mindset to say, “If I am brand new to this, how can I be curious about this situation? What is interesting about this? What is new about this? How can I bring an attitude of freshness to it?”

EP: What are some other brief exercises that show how you can practice mindfulness just about anytime, anywhere?

HCF: I like to invite people to get up, sit on the side of their bed, take 10 slow deep breaths and allow their body to settle, instead of taking out their phone first thing in the morning. Explore what your heart and mind feels like today. Feel your feet on the floor and take a moment of presence. Then try it again later in the day and maybe before bed at night. It really helps to practice.

From learning self-compassion to teaching others to be self-compassionate, Clarke-Field’s book can positively impact you, your children, and future generations.