Latest / Complex Kids, Simple Solutions / Tam Taouss — Why Parents of Complex Kids Need to Heal Too
Transcript
- Michelle Choairy: Welcome to Complex Kids Simple Solutions, the podcast for parents raising complex and neurodivergent kids who are doing their best in systems that don't always make things easy. I'm Michelle Shoayde, founder of Special Education Concierge, a mom to a complex kid, a speaker, and an advocate. This space isn't about perfection. It's about real life, the hard days, the small wins. the moments where you wonder if you're doing enough, and the moments where you realize you are. Here we talk honestly, share practical insight, and simplify what feels overwhelming. One conversation at a time. You are your child's hero. Hello everyone, welcome to Complex Kids Simple Solutions. Today we have Tammy. I'm gonna call her Tammy. She goes by Tam also. So, but I'm so excited first of all, because she is calling in from Australia. So this is really super cool. And also because I don't think that we've had somebody talk about what we're gonna talk about today. So, Tam, thank you, welcome. We are very happy to have you. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about what you do, how you got into it and we'll get into more questions in a little while, but just, just give us a little intro. Sure. Look, I'm a Vedic meditation teacher in Australia and online as well. And I'm a Griffith facilitator. And look how I got into this. I've been practicing Vedic meditation for about 14 years now and breath work for about six. And both of these modalities have been really powerful tools in my life to help me regulate my nervous system and operate from a sense of calm and clarity when, especially when life can be quite chaotic. I have a neurodivergent child. I have two children, one is neurodivergent and I've gotten further and further down this path into becoming a teacher because I guess my children have pushed me into this. ⁓ It's a lifelong passion as to how I know how powerful these tools are and how much they can help. using these tools as a parent has completely transformed my life. It's something that I've always used for the past 14 years, especially with meditation, but it's become the most powerful and the most effective since having children. Well, I can tell that you meditate because you are like so calm. I can tell that you're calm, that you're collected. Total opposite of me. anyway, but yes. So you have a neurodivergent child and did you get this beef? Did you get into it before you had your child or did you? Did you go into after? Yeah, look, my eldest child who is neurodivision is always nine. So I learned to meditate 14 years ago and it was a practice that I initially when I first started off, I was using it, you know, this every single day. And there was a period of time when I had my children where I got out of practice and life became quite chaotic as we learn how to navigate life with, you know, well also discover what was even happening with my child. So it was quite a period there where life was just really topsy turvy for us. And yeah. We went out of practice and it really unsettled the way that I operate in the world. And as life got more chaotic and there was less understanding as to what was happening with my children and in my life, I came back to the practice. And at that point it completely transformed how I parent and how I interact with my child because, well with both of my children. But being out of that day-to-day steadiness and that day-to-day stillness. It really didn't allow me to operate from a place of calm and steadiness. So there was a point that was quite challenging for us when we're going through the process of figuring out what was going on with my daughter and down the diagnosis path with autism. And I can clearly remember this in, was in kindergarten and we were having daily three, four hour meltdowns. Oh my gosh. Every single day. And my nervous system was completely shot. I barely function. I was like a shaking nervous wreck of anxiety. And I remember saying to my husband, I feel like I'm going to have a heart attack. I can't do this every single day. I can't operate like this. I felt like I was in like a domestic violence relationship with my daughter. ⁓ there was every day I was, you know, I'm sure many parents with neurodivergent children can relate. yes. Constantly covered in bite marks and bruises and just didn't, I couldn't, didn't know how to help her. Didn't know how to find the right help because I wasn't operating from this sense of calm. There was no clarity in any of my steps. Yeah. took me to that point to realize when I was in my lounge room, I was holding the biggest couch cushion that I could find and I was asking her to run at me just to get it out. We'd been at it for three hours and I was like, get it all out. I just thought, this has to change. This can't continue like this. And it wasn't until I stepped away and I realized that in order to help my child, I needed to heal myself. It's really, it's impossible to show up for her calm, regulated and safe. Yeah, I wasn't feeling that same way as well. Yeah, I always tell my listeners and my parents that I work with, say, if you're not well, your child's not going to be well. And I think that this is exactly what you're saying. Like if you can't be calm and you can't be you know, find that, that strength to, to be calm at the time when they are losing their minds, they're also going to lose their minds even more because they, they, that's just how they react. That's how our kiddos just, you know, that's how they are. But, ⁓ when you said, you know, those, those meltdowns are the three to four hours long. It is so relatable and I'm sure that it's relatable to a lot of the listeners because this is exactly what our complex kids are, right? They have those meltdowns, not all of them, but we deal with that. So tell us, how, how you, how do you do this? Let's, let's talk about the moms that are listening, right? ⁓ How do you do this? How do you, cause I mean, I, I have a hard time, you know, collecting myself when he, when my son is having his meltdowns. It is really hard, especially if it's happening on a regular basis, you kind of end up losing your mind, right? But how is it that meditation and you know, breath work, how does that affect parents? What should we be doing to be able to get to reach where you are, that calm? Yeah, look, I look at meditation as like, it's like a daily muscle movement for our brains. It's like going to the gym every single day for our brains. And it's not what happens in the meditation that allows us to be able to show up for our children regulated and calm. It's what happens after. So every time we sit in meditation, especially Vedic meditation, this specific ⁓ type of meditation is a really beautiful mantra-based meditation that takes us beyond our thought and our feelings so that we can release deep stress from our body every single day. ⁓ When you release this stress, it allows you to show up without that in your nervous system. So many of us operate with this ⁓ low hum of dysregulation every single day. And we are in a sympathetic nervous system focus where we are in fight or flight most times of the day. Whereas meditation and breath work takes you from that fight or flight, that low hum of anxiety and stress that we're all, you know, so many of us are operating from into a state of parasympathetic, which is our restore recovery, calm. Both of these systems, the nervous systems are always at play, but we want to, meditation can take us into a more dominant parasympathetic mode. So the more that we enter into that place of stillness every day, the more that we're able to operate in our, you know, we call it our awake state because we're in meditation, we're in a transcendental calm. blissful state. When we're in that awake day to day state in our life, that calm follows through and that radiates out to everyone that we connect with. In your acute moments, when you're in that, right in the stick of it, in those meltdowns and it is really hard to stay regulated and look, I'm a human being and I still have moments where I'm like, I'm not going to be able to. calm myself and what I try and do when I try and my child's safe is I will remove myself. If that's not available to you, ⁓ acute moments breath work is really powerful. Even just taking a breath in, even though our breath can be quite short when we're in those spider flight moments, take a breath in and try and just elongate your breath out. That slow exhalation will automatically start to calm your nervous system. Yeah. So how does someone get into doing meditation? I'll tell, I'll, be honest with you. So I've tried meditation so many times and I end up falling asleep every single time, either that or my brain is just running and thinking about everything that I need to get done. So how do you, yourself you know as a mom of complex kiddo like you do have all of these things going on in your life. How do you shut that down? How do you not fall asleep? How do you how do do this? Yeah look that is such a good question and such a common question amongst people who have tried so many different types of meditation and you know a lot of meditation can be concentration based or contemplation based. So you might have to focus on a specific thing like your breath or a part of your body or you know, you might be guided by somebody. it is a lot harder to settle in to a calm state and not have this busy, crazy, frantic mind and a million and one things going through your mind if you're doing those types of meditations. For some people it works and it's amazing, but With Vedic meditation, we use a mantra. And this mantra is ⁓ a sound, and it's just a resonant sound that we use to guide us within the meditation. And it's not to focus, it's just to bring awareness to, to allow you to dive in deep past the thoughts, past the feeling, past the stresses, into a deep state of rest. And there might be some times when your body feels like it needs to go to sleep and that's just what your body needs at that moment and you surrender to that. But most of the time it takes you into this really deep restful state and 20 minutes of Vedic meditation is equivalent to four hours deep deep sleep. So when you do this your relationship with lack of sleep changes as well. because you can have that deep rest within 20 minutes. So if you haven't slept the night before because you've had your little child up, you doing whatever they do, it's a catch up time that you can happen twice a day when you meditate. So is it guided or is it just because okay, so can you explain that to us a little bit more, a little bit more in depth on what it looks like? So it's a really beautiful technique. It's a five thousand plus year old technique from the Himalayas in the mountains in India and every student is given a a resonant sound that's that's specific to them and it's specific to where they are at in their life and they use this sound to bring into their awareness and it allows that as they you know have their busy minds they just keep bringing they might have you know a million thoughts I've got to do this for the child I've got to cook my dinner I've got to you know a million things running around but as those thoughts come in instead of just trying to push them away they just favour that mantra they favour and bring awareness to that mantra and just bringing their awareness back to that very gently and over time the mantra will guide them in and the thoughts will just disappear and you just go into this really deep quiet state of bliss. It's really quite powerful and I before learning this technique, I studied many different types of meditation and nothing stuck because of that reason. My mind was always busy. I was falling asleep. was remembering my yoga classes during meditation and I'd be like toppling over and everyone else would be up straight. I know this is a really, really simple, easy technique and Every single student that I've had has been really surprised how even within their first meditation, they can dip into that calm, blissful state. And they come out and they're often just like, wow, I've never, I've never experienced that before. That still is. What is the sound? Tell us about that. That's an interesting thing. Like do you, it's it's a BG sound. That's it. It's a Sanskrit. sound, it's a resonant sound. don't say that it's a word or because we don't want it to be like a word that we can resonate with because it's a sound that just resonates within our body because over time that sculpts into who we are. it's just a sound that because if I say, I'll give you the word banana. Every time you say banana, banana, banana, you're going to relate that to whatever memory sensation, feeling, taste that you have with bananas. So we give you a sound that resonates with you. ⁓ But it's not a word. It's just a sound. Like it's just a... It's a sound. Yeah. Okay. Okay. That sounds so interesting. I wonder what my sound would be. Yeah. So do you... Yeah. So do you assign the sound or is this like something that, how does it work? The sound is there, there's a series of sounds that are specific to where people are at in their age. And that sound is, is come from my teachers and my teachers, teachers and teachers, teachers, It's ancient technique that's been passed down verbally for over 5,000 years. Uh-huh. That's crazy. That's so this is from India in the hill really is so that's really okay. Yeah. Now ⁓ tell us about how have you been teaching your child how to do this? How does that relate to to your kids? Yes. Yeah, look, I've taught one of my children, my eldest child, ⁓ my neurodivision child, she learned with another teacher before I was a teacher. And children have it. slightly different technique in the way that they practice. ⁓ they're allowed to you know we when we learn as adults we we learn to sit with our back supported ⁓ in a very comfortable position but we always have our back supported. Children are allowed to lie down, have their legs up the wall if they want, they can sit up, they can choose whatever's comfortable to them and they meditate for the length of time of their age. So if they're six, they'll do six minutes. Whereas when I teach an adult, it's 20 minutes, the gold optimum standard would be 20 minutes twice a day. But for a child, it's whatever their age is. Okay. And it's the same thing. you introduce the sound and then I'm trying... So, you know, meditation to me, is kind of an enigma because I really, I don't think that I've ever really been able to meditate. So what do you say? What do you think? What do you do when you're going into this meditation? How do you get yourself into it and how do you do this? Yeah. So this is, this is ⁓ a really beautiful, easy technique. So Initially, you just find a comfortable place to see. Make sure you're back supported and your head isn't leaning back, you know, against a seat or a wall because you will fall asleep. But just really cross legged, could sit in a chair just as long as your back's supported. And then we close down the eyes, we sit for 30 seconds and we invite the mantra in. And we say the mantra in our mind or we allow the mantra to come in and we can, it's not about saying it over and over and over and over again. really, repetitively or aggressively, we just invite it in. And then if our thoughts drift off to all our different thoughts, all our to-do list or wherever, we just very gently come back to inviting the mantra back in again. And as the more that we do that, the more we go past those thoughts, we go beyond them and we transcend, which means go beyond, we go beyond our thoughts and feelings and we drift down into a really comfortable state of bliss or in the Vedic tradition we call it Samadhi which is just this really beautiful place where we don't have thoughts at all and we don't have the mantra. It just all disappears into this state of calm and then after 20 minutes we come out of this and you're ready to face the day. What it does is it almost like I feel like for me, it closes down all the tabs. I've got about a million tabs or hundred tabs every single day that I work at. And I slowly just close those computer tabs down. And then I'm able to come out of it with a sense of clarity and often something that has been either troubling me or I need clarity on will come quite easily to me. Yeah, I, you know, for many years, I, you know, we, I've tried and maybe it is that I'm, you know, sleep deprived. I don't know. That's probably what it is. Cause you know, you work full time, you're a full time mom. You're also everything full time. And so, you know, it's just, it gets crazy, but that's interesting that you need, you know, that at some point it's gonna go in and out. feel like, ⁓ you know, whenever I am, whenever it's a guided thing, sometimes it kind of, helps me a little bit. But when you're not being guided, I feel like I'm gonna be all over the place. ⁓ But you said something about the mantra and what is the mantra? The mantra, mantra. Mantra, mantra means, ⁓ it's a Sanskrit word that means it's broken up into two parts, man, meaning mind and tra, meaning vehicle. So it's a mind vehicle. So we use this mind vehicle to guide us and drive us into this state. It's just, it's just a guiding, kind of like a guiding light to help us enter into a calm place. I had no idea. that that's what it meant by the way. So thank you for explaining that. I thought it was something that you would repeat in your mind or that you would do something like that. okay, that makes sense. Sorry, I'm so like, this is very interesting to me because I really want to, you know, be able to meditate, be able to work on that breath work and do all of that. And so it really, it brings me and I and I want to do it. It's just like, how do I even start? How does a parent start practicing meditation? Yeah, look, once I teach a person, a parent, anyone this technique, it's so easy and so powerful that you can once you learn, you can do it every single day. You You actually, I offer my students a weekly meditation where we meet every single week online ⁓ as an ongoing service to my students. But you can do this on your own. You don't need any, you will never need a guided meditation again. Once you have this technique, you can do it anywhere, anytime. You know, I remember I don't live in the city. anymore but when I was living in the city I would meditate on buses, would meditate in busy parks, would meditate... Oh my gosh! You know, obviously more this happened more often than not without children tagging along but now like to be able to fit it into your busy life as a busy parent for me my morning meditation is done before everybody else is awake. I know how valuable even though I'm a tile tired I am from a night before I will always get out that half an hour early to fit that in. Because I know I'm going to get deeper rest in that 20 minutes in that half, you know, more than any other part of the day, trying to catch up or going to bed early that night. Yeah. So, um, tell us how to find you, where to go, how, how does your, your program work? Tell us a little bit about that. Sure. Look, I know a lot of your listeners might not be in Australia. So I teach face to face in Sydney and in the Illawarra region in New Wollongong, in New South Wales and Australia. But I also teach online. So you can find me at my Instagram on my website, which is tamtaus.com, it's the website or that's just my handle on Instagram as well. I always love a good DM on Instagram, so people can find me there. Great. So I always ask this towards the end of the recordings. If there was one thing that you could tell the mothers and fathers who are listening to this right now, keeping in mind that they are parents who have complex kiddos, what would you want the most important thing for them to come out? with whatever we were talking today. First of all, you know, they're probably doing the best that they can possibly do. And they are all so incredible. And this journey is, it is complex and it is hard, but it's so important to make sure that you find time to put your own life jacket on first. hard as that can be. Sometimes that seems impossible, but even if it's just that... Even if it's two minutes of a breath to yourself, take the time to heal yourself so that your children can heal with you. I like that heal yourself so your children can heal with you. That sounds good. I you know, I'm gonna try. I promise I'm gonna try so but thank you so much Tam for being on the podcast. We will have everything listed below and we'll tag you and we will have everything on the notes for all the parents that are listening. And thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. Yeah. And everyone will see you next week on Complex Kids Simple Solutions. Before you go, take a deep breath. You don't have to solve everything today. You don't have to have it all figured out. If this episode helped you, feel seen, grounded, or... a little less alone. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss future conversations. And if you ever want a deeper support, special education concierges here when you're ready. One step at a time, one decision at a time. You are your child's hero. I'll see you next time.