By Vincent, France
Table of Contents
Exceptional casualness
Becoming a parent is a remarkable event, a deeply transformative journey, yet it is also remarkably common. Exceedingly common. Every single day, for countless years, millions of individuals across the planet experience this phenomenon.
But, have you ever wondered what being a parent really means? What does parenthood mean? What does it truly mean to be a mother or a father!?
It’s precisely because the answer is so straightforward that these dual realities coexist: the reality of being an everyday occurrence and simultaneously the reality of being extraordinary.
We’ll come back to that a bit later. But first, let’s begin where it all truly began for me:
About three years ago, life gave me the opportunity to explore the role of being a father.
What I’m sharing here is my own personal journey. And by writing these words, I’m extending this exploration with you.
What does it mean to be a parent?
The heart of this inquiry lies not in providing an answer, but in embarking on a journey of discovery.
For me a question arose, “What does it mean to be a father?”
I also could have asked “What does it mean to have a child?”, but the distinction lies in the act of being versus possessing.
Parenthood is about beingness, not ownership; it’s an immersive experience rather than a tangible possession. This fundamental distinction serves as the foundation for a profound investigation. I am not merely someone who has a daughter; I embody the role of a father.
So, to begin with, it’s essential to grasp this distinction between the domain of having and the domain of being. Why? Because it has the potential to move us from a confined reality, built on possession, into a boundless reality, built on presence.
From havingness we come
The realm of having is also the realm of losing. It is the realm of duality, where everything is framed by conditions, transactions, and opposites.
The society we live in reflects this perfectly. It’s why we call it a capitalist society, a system where every interaction revolves around “What do I get?” and “What do I lose?”
And naturally, as the society is, so are the people composing it. We can’t pretend to be unconditional individuals if, as a matter of fact, the society that we are part of, is the perfect representation of conditions.
It’s like, you can’t expect to run a marathon with a broken leg. As per the state of the legs, so the state of the runner. As per the state of the citizens, so the state of the society, the whole reflects its parts.
For meaningful change to occur, each unit of the society, including the individual “I,” must undergo transformation.
A society based on having, has built an education system based on having. This is common sense. And this we will see very clearly by observing how we interact with our children.
Let’s take some examples from the very beginning: the way we interact with newborn babies.
A baby will cry. It is very natural for a baby to cry, isn’t it?
But in nearly every case, when the baby cries, we react by offering something:
- A toy moving in front of his eyes
- An object to suck on (the modern marvel of the pacifier)
- A song playing from the mobile…
The pattern is set, crying leads to receiving. Only a few weeks olds and the innocence of the baby is already killed by the ignorance of adults, killed in the egg!
This creates strong holdings, big imprints. This creates the pattern of: “I cry, I get something”, a few years later it becomes:
- “I am sad, I must be comforted”
- “I complain, I have to get extra attention”
- “I demand, I should receive.”…
Of course, this example is a subtle one, because as I said, it’s very natural for a baby to cry, for a while it is even his primary means of expression. But that’s one of the mischiefs of life: the simplest is the subtlest, and the subtlest is the hardest to understand.
A few months later, the baby has grown a little, and he is going outside with his parents. Daddy, full of good intentions will start to name all the things he will see, aaaaaall the things:
“Oh look at the flower”,
“See the beautiful butterfly”,
“Listen to this bird”,
“Call the cat”,
“Watch this is a cloud”…
The father is full of good intentions, no doubt, but he is not realising that he is actually cutting the experience of what is, through the definition of a language.
Is a flower the word flower? Is a bird the word bird? Again the innocence of the poor kid, the purity of his interaction with nature is corrupted by the concept of a conditioned mind. The word tree is an information about what is a tree, the word butterfly is an information about what is a butterfly.
Information, we have it. We live in an age of unlimited information, but does true education mean simply providing knowledge?
Those realisations came to me in a very practical way. In the first few weeks after the birth of my daughter, when she first cried, my instinct was to fix it, to pacify her. I clearly saw that I was uncomfortable with her crying. I was visibly affected and worried.
A few weeks later, when we started going outside, I caught myself an innumerable number of times defining the world for her. She wasn’t asking for anything, yet I was imposing a mountain of mental concepts on her, almost mechanically.
To beingness we evolve
These were just two little examples of how easily we fall into the trap of constant exposure to having something. Having a toy, having comfort, having a definition, having information, having opinion, having, having, having.
No. Education is not at all meant to happen in that direction. And of course it will require an enormous amount of strength and humility to change this.
But this is the only way to evolve as individuals and as a whole towards anything meaningful.
Enormous amount of strength and humility because this is the place where we come from, this is the society we have ourselves built. But because it is ours, we can also change it.
To call myself a father is very easy. At the level of language I can call myself as being anything. I can even tell you that I am a tiger, but will this make me to be a tiger?
To be a father means to fit the qualities of being a father, the actual qualities of fatherhood. That’s where only beingness can speak, we cannot possess any of those qualities, we have to embody them. Show me patience, show me compassion, show me love, humility, kindness,… impossible, we can’t have them. We have to be them, so they become us.
And that’s where the shift happens. The shift from having to being. The shift from a limited reality to the unlimited one.
How does it practically happen? In the way we are as parents.
The baby cries. Why should it directly impact my state of mind? Why should it immediately become a problem?
Can I keep a happy, loving state, staying neutral, unaffected by the change?
Crying is normal. It’s one of the first ways a baby communicates. Only when we associate crying with “something wrong” does it become a pattern.
Crying for babies is actually not only or always negative. Here is the understanding of the subtleness we would come back to: The mind tends to be gross, to define, to conclude: crying is bad, something is wrong, so you lose your center, you lose your neutrality, you panic, you want the baby to get something from you.
No, stay easy. This is the subtleness of being a parent. The strength of the subtleness.
Then only we are educating our children. We guide them towards strength by being strong. That’s why parenthood only happens through examples. We have to be that.
And because we are becoming subtle, we can see clearly. We can identify, if the crying expresses a struggle, we can then act accordingly and give what needs to be given. When the baby cries because of hunger, you give food. When the baby cries because of the cold, you give a blanket. Actions then arise naturally, not from reaction, but from clarity.
I go for a walk outside with my little one. I let her perceive the flower, I let her experience the flower, I let her be the flower.
There is nothing to be taken, nothing to be plucked, nothing to be understood. Just being the flower itself.
I am finding the way to give her space, not constantly communicating through words, but allowing her to find her space in the space and to be at ease with what is.
And the magic in that? The more the space of the child increases, the more our own space increases. Because beingness is unlimited.
Non-dual parenting
At its core, the shift from having to being, the transformation from duality to non-duality, is never about changing anything externally.
Parenthood, too, is not about changing a child’s behavior, but about transforming ourselves.
It’s an inner shift, a subtle yet profound change in the way we relate to life itself.
By embodying the qualities we wish to see in our children, we guide them naturally towards presence, maturity, and freedom. Parenting then is no longer a task or a role, it becomes a path of Self-discovery.
In this exchange, the boundaries between individuals dissolve, revealing the deeper truth: that to educate is not to impose, but to nurture growth.
Being a parent is both casual and exceptional. Why? Because it is, in essence, a pure non-dual expression. And in non-duality, contradictions merge.
To summarise this little exploration we had together, I’ll end with a quote from a beautiful book, Shantala, about the art of massaging babies, but more broadly, about the art of being with them, the whole art of parenthood:
And perhaps that’s what parenting truly is, profoundly simple.
About the author
Vince’s journey into Yoga began in 2017 during a stay in Thailand. It was there, shortly after stepping onto this path, that he met Sage ViGo. This encounter planted the seed of an inner pull to continue this journey in India.
Since then, Vincent and his wife Emily have made India their home, fully dedicating themselves to the study and practice of Yoga. Along the way, they’ve had the joy of welcoming their daughter, Luz. The little family stays now at the Yoga Gita Ashram in Srirangapatna, where they explore how Yoga can be lived, not just in theory, but in the practical reality of day-to-day life.
For more information, you can visit the Yoga Gita Ashram website or follow on the social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
1 thought on “How My Daughter Became My Greatest Teacher: A Father’s Journey”
Hey Vincent,
Das ist ein sehr schöner Beitrag zum eltersein. Genau so sehe ich das auch.
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zu deiner/eurer Luz.
LG Helga Sommer