Festival
of Conscious Parenting Mission Statement
The Festival of Conscious Parenting is an event scheduled for the Summer
Solstice Weekend of June (21—23), 2013, at the Jackson Theater and Sonoma
Country Day School campus in Santa Rosa, California. The Festival will
showcase spiritual practices and wisdom that can support parents and caregivers
in providing consistently loving and
nurturing environments for children. The Festival is presented in
the conviction that spiritual tools (meditation, prayer, mantra, body-awareness
practices, etc.) of various spiritual traditions offer resources invaluable to
the endeavor of conscious parenting. Those resources can help adults deliberately
model loving, generous, and effective behavior for children, help us
consistently treat children as we would wish to be treated, and help provide an
appropriately elastic yet fully secure foundation for every child’s healthy
growth and exploration of life’s possibilities. The Festival will be a forum for presentation of resources to bring mindfulness
practices directly to children. Other resources offered by the Festival will focus upon enabling parents,
teachers, caregivers, and friends to consistently open their hearts to
children, and avoid harm through application of the principle of non-violence:
the goal of embodying physical, emotional, mental and spiritual non-violence
towards children. The purpose of the Festival is to make these resources
far more widely available than they have been, to audiences that may never have
suspected that such resources exist.
