Siobhan Wilcox (Day 25 of a series) speaks from personal experience about cultivating "flow" and mindfulness as a parent of children with special needs. She describes practices—body-awareness, conscious daydreaming, mindful driving, and intentionally sending love/gratitude into food—that she credits with reducing stress and improving well-being. She cites Dr. Masaru Emoto's water-crystal experiments as evidence for how words and intention affect physical matter, and ends with contact information and a note about an upcoming book.
Chapters
Hey, everybody. Siobhan Wilcox here. Day 25 of parenting. Autism, real and raw. Hope you're doing fantastic. You know, I wanted to talk today about flow. I attended a retreat over the weekend. Beautiful retreat, just very intimate. Five women and the facilitator. And it was just for parents with special needs children. And it was such a rewarding experience. The whole day was just so rewarding. But what I think my biggest takeaway from the day was about flow and about, you know, feeling that you're living in your heart space during your day and then feeling that energy build in your body and allowing yourself to live from there. And it's something I've really, really focused a lot of my time and energy on in my life, is being mindful, being centered, being compassionate, flowing love through me as often as possible. I don't always do it perfectly, my kids would say. I definitely don't always do it perfectly, Particularly when I, you know, get overwhelmed myself when they are overwhelming. But that's okay, because I'm human. But the piece that really is rewarding to me is the fact that I have allowed myself, like, even as I'm sitting here, I'm aware that my feet are touching the floor. So I wriggle my feet every now and then to bring myself fully aware of my present moment. I begin to be aware of the seat and where I am sitting and where I'm touching the back of my legs, it's touching my seat, it's touching my back. I bring all those awarenesses into every moment in my day. You know, when I'm driving my car, I take a lot of attention to really feel my hands holding that steering wheel. So I don't get from one point to another point. And I've forgotten how I drove there. I don't know if you've ever had that experience. Kind of freaks you out a bit where you go, oh, my God, how did I get here? I'm here already. Because you've been in this state of daydream or this state of unawareness on your journey, and a state of unsafety usually as well. But for me, I love to daydream. But when I daydream, I choose to consciously daydream. I choose moments where I will sit to daydream. Then I will choose moments where I am in full mindfulness. And that's where I try and take a lot of my time. When I'm making food, I am focusing on sending love into the food and cutting the food with love, being fully present, breathing deeply, enjoying the experience. And Even if it's putting some chicken nuggets on a tray and throwing it in the oven, I do it in a way that is as much as I can in that moment, mindfully. As I said, I don't get to do it right all the time. But in this awareness I have built over the last 22 years of. Of doing this practice, people like my food, which is a good thing, right? They always go, oh, my God, your food tastes so good. I'm mindful when I make it, I write love on the bottom of my Tupperware dishes that I present food in. If I bring food to a potluck, it's love made with love. Love hearts drawn on the bottom of may sound all a bit wacky, but it's about frequency and vibration and the incredible. Dr. Emoto, a Japanese scientist, is proving how words, how mindfulness, how consciousness creates and affects our world around us. And he took words and he wrote, it was in Japanese, but it was like love, hate. And he put it on water. He froze that water, and he then analyzed the crystals under a very specialized microscope. What was discovered was incredible that the water resonates with the word. So the word love had beautiful snowflakes appearing in it. The word hate had this kind of discombobulated mass of gunk in the water. It looked all, you know, disassociated from itself. He started at that point, and he went on to explore so many different aspects of that work where people came together to pray over polluted water. The polluted water was analyzed first, and then the water after the prayer was analyzed and how it changed the crystals in the water was magnificent. He took water from lots of different places around the world. Hong Kong, tap water, or faucet water, call it in America, was one of the most toxic looking on the planet. He then took water from Buddhist temples, Christian churches, Hindu temples, analyzed it. They were beautiful crystalline structures of beauty in the water. He played different music to water and saw the effect that death metal had on the water where the effect of Mozart had on the water. Just magnificent. But we are 70% water. Our planet is 70% water. So when you think about the larger perspective of our language, our mindfulness, our consciousness, and how we choose to be and how that affects our internal structure, our structure within our beingness. This physical body here is affected by this mental language, by this physical language presented to the world in our emotions, in our feelings. So what if you were to pour love into your food? What if you were to pour love into your water? What if you were to be different in every moment by just choosing to be. You know, I suffered from chronic stress at one point in my life and had stress burnout. And I wasn't a nice person till I was at that time. And it was through my own journey that I learned, absorbed, simulated and experienced the shift that could happen in your body when you chose to live in a different mental space, in a space where you use different language in your day. I just want to lay that out for you today and see if it's a consideration for you, if there's a part of you that recognizes the truth in that statement. And is there a part of you that may feel like you could try it, try it for a day. See how it feels at the end of your day. See do you feel more refreshed? See do you feel more alivened? See how it feels when you bless your food. Every day I sit with my food and I send love into that food. And I thank the people that prepared the food. If I haven't prepared it myself, and even if I do, I thank myself. I thank those that created the food and the line of people that it took to get that food to my table. If it's meat I'm eating, I thank the animal for its sacrifice for that food. It's all in a few moments. Breath. I'm not sitting there for 20 minutes. It's gratitude, it's love, it's balancing for the body, it's harmonizing for the body. I ask that the food is in perfect alignment and vibration with my body. And so it is. And then I eat it, and then it is in harmony with me. And I am one person that very rarely gets indigestion. And that may be to do with my blessing of food. I'd have to do a scientific research on that one. Well, have a wonderful day. Blessed, magnificent day as always. You can email me at siobhanautismexpertsalliance.com and you can register for our teleseries@autism expertsalliance.com I'm so excited to share my upcoming book with you soon as well. And it's gathering energy, it's gathering its own frequency, its own knowledge, its own wisdom. And I'm looking forward to bringing that out. And hopefully by the end of the summer I'll have some chapters to share and I'll tell you more about that along the way. Thank you so much.
