Episodes
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Belynda Smith is mother to two beautiful boys are now in their tweens/teens, a single mum living in Perth WA. She has been a Certified Hand in Hand Parenting Instructor (since 2017) and built on this solid foundation with a Certification as a Level 1 Aware Parenting Instructor in 2023. She is passionate about parenting with connection, supporting parents in the many roles she has, sharing particularly about the importance of listening for us all and reading, connection and books.
In this episode Belynda shares her journey with Aware Parenting. She describes how receiving listening for herself transformed her early parenting journey from struggle and overwhelm to being able to be the parent she wanted to be. She shares how aware parenting has given her a nuanced understanding of each of her children’s unique needs and what lies underneath behaviour in the difficult moments. We talk about all the ways getting regular, consistent listening for ourselves, ideally in multiple different spaces, supports us in ways that make aware parenting possible. We describe our current set ups for listening and we reassure listeners that having struggles is a normal part of being human and needing support is a natural need for us all. Belynda also shares her love of books and why books bring so much value and joy to her life.
If you would like to learn more about Belynda please visit her website https://belyndasmith.com.au/ and follow her on Facebook: ParentingwithBelyndaSmith and Instagram: @belyndasmithparenting Her podcast is called Tales from the Toolbox Podcast -
Welcome back to a new episode where I talk with one of my best friends, Helen Marshall. Helen is an inspiring speaker on real food, value-based business in wellness, and creating a life you love. She is the founder of Primal Alternative, a company that empowers people to run their own home-based baking business through the Primalista Licence. She has over 30 years of experience in the health and wellness industry. Based in Albany WA with her husband and 2 children, Helen enjoys Body Balance, meditation, walks in nature, and champagne in the spa.
In this episode Helen shares her motherhood story and how she came to practising Aware Parenting when her children were teenagers. She shares some of the ways that she incorporates Aware parenting into her family, how she has learnt to listen to feelings and offer special time. She shares how she has learnt to meet her own needs and take care of herself. She shares how she set up her business Primal Alternative to help over 290 Primalistas in Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK create successful grain-free food businesses from home.
To learn more about Primal Alternative, please visit www.primalalternative.com and follow her on Facebook and Instagram at Primal Alternative. -
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Welcome back to a new episode where I talk about healing from stress and trauma through loving listening. I talk about what trauma is, what some of the sources of stress are for children and how these experiences affect children. I share how our children’s bodies respond to stress and how the expression of feelings with loving support is a natural healing process. I talk about creating the necessary sense of emotional safety for healing to occur and what is not supportive for our children in this process. I share some very helpful quotes and descriptions from Dr Aletha Solter’s book Healing your Traumatized Child. I also share lots of tips and advice about how to listen to our children in a way that supports healing and how to get that for ourselves too and how to explore and process what comes up for us when listening to feelings.
If you want support to listen to your children and help them to heal from stress and trauma or if you want support to explore and release your own feelings, I am here for you. -
Welcome back to a new episode where I have the pleasure of talking with Marion Rose Ph.D. about her wonderful new book I’m Here and I’m Listening. Marion is the best-selling author of The Emotional Life of Babies and is the co-author of Raising Resilient and Compassionate Children with Lael Stone. She has been practicing Aware Parenting since 2002 and is the mother of two young adults. She has been an Aware Parenting instructor since 2005 and is a Level Two instructor and the Regional Coordinator for Australia and New Zealand. She hosts The Aware Parenting Podcast and The Psychospiritual Podcast, and co-hosts The Aware Parenting and Natural Learning Podcast with me! I love this book so much and highly recommend it for all parents.
In this episode we have a beautiful conversation about some of the key themes of her new, best-selling book. Marion shares her wisdom about connection and relationships with our children, doing our own re-parenting work, trusting children’s innate wisdom, loving limits, supporting our children to heal and much more. It is such a powerful conversation.
If you want to learn more about Marion’s book, please visit www.amazon.com in your country. She shares more about her work on social media, and on her website www.marionrose.net. If you want to learn more about my Aware Partnering in Parenthood Course, the link is here https://awareparenting.com.au/my-courses/aware-partnering-in-parenthood/ -
Welcome back to a new episode where I have a conversation with Leah McDermott. Leah is an unschooling advocate and mother of three. After over a decade spent in the world of education, two Masters of Education degrees, and multiple teaching certifications, Leah slowly began to realize that the way we are teaching our children in public schools went against everything that we knew to be true about learning acquisition and child development. Her passion for helping other children and families led to her developing a child-led learning curriculum, creating a supportive space online for parents, and opening Bridge Academy - a private umbrella school for homeschoolers, Leah continues her life’s work of encouraging adults to unlearn what they’ve always believed to be true as they lean fully into trusting their children as natural, capable learners. Leah currently lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, Brian, their three boys, and a collection of pets.
In this episode we have a powerful conversation about some of the damaging long-term effects of schooling and the pressure that children often face at school. We share many of the benefits we have seen of supporting children to learn in their own way, in their own timing, relaxed and self-connected at home. We talk about cultivating trust in our children and dealing with the judgements and questions of others so that we can truly enjoy facilitating our children’s learning at home.
If you want to learn more about Leah’s work, please follow her on social media at Your Natural Learner or her website https://www.bridgeacademy.us/. If you want to learn more about Natural Learning from me, I have a series of articles on my website here https://awareparenting.com.au/articles/?_select_a_category=homeschoolingandnaturallearning. I also offer workshops on Natural Learning here https://awareparenting.com.au/my-courses/parenting-workshops/ and run an online natural learning and aware parenting community together with Marion Rose https://awareparenting.com.au/parenting-coaching/community/. We also have a podcast series together The Aware Parenting and Natural Learning Podcast, that you can find on all podcast platforms. -
I am so excited to share this latest conversation with my wonderful friend and colleague Danni Willow. It is my favourite of our conversations so far! In this episode we explore how we are invited time and time again in parenting to do our own inner work. We talk about why this is often so painful and difficult and share some of the things that can get in the way of us doing our own healing. We share some of the many ways we have supported ourselves and the clients we work with to heal stress and trauma in order for us to be able to offer Aware Parenting to our children. We talk about how doing our own healing work is such a powerful gift to our children too. We end by talking about what we would have loved to have known at the beginning of our Aware Reparenting journey to have made the process so much less painful.
Stay tuned for more details about the new online monthly circle that Danni and I are offering soon. If you would like to learn more, please email me [email protected].
If you want to know more about Danni, please follow her on social media at Danni Willow or visit her website www.thewayofthewoman.com.au.
If you would like to learn more about my offerings and courses, please visit www.awareparenting.com.au. -
Welcome back to a new episode where I respond to a listener’s question about how to navigate the challenging, messy moments we have with our partner/co-parent. In this 3rd episode about partners, I talk about how to bring more compassion and connection to our partnerships using the Aware Parenting framework and how the aspects and principles support us to have better relations. I talk about cultivating trust in our families and supporting our children at times of conflict and disconnection. I talk about how to reduce conflict and tools for bringing more empathy and connection between us and the other parent of our children.
If you want to learn more about this, my course Aware Partnering in Parenthood dives into all this in depth. To learn more, please visit https://awareparenting.com.au/my-courses/aware-partnering-in-parenthood/. At the time of recording this is January 2024, there is a 20% off sale on this course. I also offer joint sessions with both partners to support more ease and connection in parenting. I invite you to get in touch if you would like more support. -
I am so happy to share this final conversation for 2023 with my wonderful friend and colleague Danni Willow. This episode explores how to bring the framework of aware parenting to the holiday times to bring more ease, joy and harmony to what can be a really challenging time of the year. We discuss why it’s often so hard to navigate the expectations and pressures of holiday times and share how to use all the beautiful tools of aware parenting to support ourselves and our children with the big feelings that come up at these times. We share how we have approached Christmas and holidays in our families and share some invitations to support you through it too.
If you want to know more about Danni, please follow her on social media at Danni Willow or visit her website www.thewayofthewoman.com.au.
If you would like to learn more about my offerings and courses, please visit www.awareparenting.com.au. -
This episode is another in the series of conversations with my wonderful friend and colleague Danni Willow. This episode explores how to navigate parenting together with the other parent of our child/ren. We discuss the impact of becoming parents on our relationships and how to navigate parenthood when we have different perspectives on how to parent. We share some things we have found helpful to support conscious connection and respectful communication with our partners. We talk about how to navigate it when our inner children show up for us and our partners/co-parents and how to model more conscious and healthy relationships to our children, having not received that ourselves. We share how to support our children and ourselves at times of conflict, disconnection or separation.
If you want to know more about Danni, please follow her on social media at Danni Willow or visit her website www.thewayofthewoman.com.au. If you would like to learn more about my new Aware Partnering in Parenthood Course, please visit https://awareparenting.com.au/my-courses/aware-partnering-in-parenthood/ -
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 [email protected].
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 . -
In this episode I am speaking with Katie Parker. Katie is a social worker, postpartum doula, parenting educator, women's circle facilitator and mentor for mums in business, passionate about supporting women to find their most authentic and resourced experience of motherhood and business, without the guilt, overwhelm and depletion. She loves supporting parents to build connected and respectful relationships with their children, through listening to feelings, play, and exploring their own childhood imprinting. Katie provides perinatal counselling, parenting and motherhood support through one-on-one sessions, workshops, local mothers' groups and retreats both online and in Gippsland, Victoria. She is also a mother of two beautiful children who have been her biggest teachers in life.
Katie shares how she discovered Aware Parenting and all the different supports that she benefitted from as she started to practice it in her family. We discuss the deconditioning process from the cultural conditioning of the selfless mother as we learned to take care of ourselves as well as our children, to ask for help and to drop the guilt, the shoulds, the comparisons and the self-judgment. We talk about how we all need to have support in our lives for the role of motherhood and finding places where we can be authentically ourselves. We talk about how to intentionally slow down and having the space to receive listening ourselves in order to then hold space for our children.
If you want to learn more about Katie, please visit her website www.katieparker.com.au and follow her on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/katieparkerparenting/?hl=en. If you want to learn more about the Exploring Aware Parenting Community with Danni Willow, please visit www.awareparenting.com.au/community/ - Show more
