Title: Beauty, Gratitude and Open Heart Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2003 by Margaret Paul Web Address: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 721 Category: Spiritual Growth

Beauty, Gratitude and Open Heart Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

"…beauty on your earth is a shadow of beauty of our heaven, and it’s a bitter thing to have a blindness for beauty on earth, for it makes a longer teaching to see beauties of heaven." Spoken by an Irish spirit in book The Boy who Saw True (anonymous author).

I have been counseling individuals, couples, families and business partners for last 35 years, and am author of eight published books. Since my work is spiritually based, I have developed many ways of helping people open their hearts to love. Opening to beauty is one of those way.

I have always appreciated beauty. Since I’ve been a small child, I’ve collect beautiful things - shells, rocks, wood, as well as works of art, and there are always lots of plants around. There is nowhere in my environment where there is not something beautiful to look at, both inside and outside in nature. When I walk through my home and land around it, my heart fills with awe and love as I appreciate beauty around me. I’ve done this so automatically throughout my life that it never occurred to me that many people do not open to beauty nor create beauty around them.

In working with some of my clients struggling to keep their heart open, I’ve mentioned focusing on an object of beauty, and have been surprised to find that many of them have no beauty around them - no plants, flowers, works of art or objects of nature. When they look around they see walls, appliances, computers and other buildings. Their left brain functions just fine in this environment, but what about right - creative, intuitive, spiritually-connected aspect?

Title: The Challenges of Single Parenting Author: Margaret Paul, Ph.D. E-mail: mailto:margaret@innerbonding.com Copyright: © 2003 by Margaret Paul Web Address: http://www.innerbonding.com Word Count: 853 Category: Parenting

THE CHALLENGES OF SINGLE PARENTING By Margaret Paul, Ph.D.

Having worked with parents for last 35 years and written books on parenting and relationships, I’ve discovered that one of greatest challenges for us as parents is to be loving role-models for our children, showing our children through our behavior how to take personal responsibility for their own feelings and needs. Our children need to learn from our role-modeling how to nurture themselves within and how to create a sense of safety in world. In families where both a mother and father are present, both parents can participate in nurturing child emotionally and taking care of child in world, and both parents can role-model what it looks like to do this for themselves.

Single parents have a far greater challenge - they have to be both mother and father to child. Mothering energy is that energy that nurtures while fathering energy is that energy that protects in world - that is, earning money, setting boundaries with others, speaking up for oneself. While our society often defines women as nurturers and men as protectors, both men and women are capable of both nurturing and protecting in world.

In order for a single parent to successfully be both mother and father, he or she must have learned how to be both mother and father to Child within. In other words, we have to have learned how to nurture our own Inner Child - how to take responsibility for our own fears, pain, anger, hurt, and disappointment, and how to take care of our Inner Child in world - earn money, set boundaries, and so on. There is no way to successfully teach our children these skills until we are doing them ourselves, which means that each of us needs to be in a process of learning how to do this.

We have developed a process that teaches us how to care for and nurture ourselves, while also loving others. This process, called Inner Bonding, teaches us how to become a loving Adult to our own Inner Child and to our actual children. Inner Bonding is a six-step psychospiritual process that can be learned and practiced daily, and that leads to development of a spiritually-connected loving inner Adult.