Latest / The Spiritual Parent: Mindful Tools for Raising Spiritual and Conscious Kids / Raising the New Earth Kids: Superpowers, Sensitivities, and Soul Lessons with Renee Boos
Transcript
- 0:01Renee Boos: I seem to be a magnet to demand avoidant people, being one myself, and it's my people, so I love it.
- 0:07Renee Boos: But a lot of people that come to my center have that particular label and I see that, especially the children, they will not accept anything less.
- 0:18Renee Boos: You know they are demanding that we acknowledge a better way of being.
- 0:24Renee Boos: They will not accept something mediocre anymore and thank goodness.
- 0:28Renee Boos: And if you think back through time, you know there were always way back when, right when we were in sort of a tribal existence, let's say there were always the people that were highly sensitive, that were, you know, honored in those groups of people, because they were the people that would alert others to danger.
- 0:47Renee Boos: They could sense things that weren't as obvious.
- 0:51Carrie Lingenfelter: Hi Conscious Parents.
- 0:51Carrie Lingenfelter: It's Keri here and I am here with a little info about raising our mindful kids.
- 0:56Carrie Lingenfelter: I've got some tips and tricks about breaking free of the box and becoming who you are and teaching your kids how to do that.
- 1:03Carrie Lingenfelter: Along the way, join us Hi there and welcome back conscious parents.
- 1:07Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm so excited.
- 1:08Carrie Lingenfelter: I have a treat for you today.
- 1:09Carrie Lingenfelter: I have Renee Bowes here.
- 1:18Carrie Lingenfelter: She opened a.
- 1:18Carrie Lingenfelter: She's a change maker mama and I'm so excited to connect with her.
- 1:20Carrie Lingenfelter: She opened the Neurodiverse Community Center in Lafayette, colorado, and she is all about healing and changing changing the mindset of neurodiversity.
- 1:28Carrie Lingenfelter: Did I describe that correctly for you, renee?
- 1:32Renee Boos: I think I describe it differently every day, so you know, yes.
- 1:35Carrie Lingenfelter: Okay, when it comes from the heart, I feel like it evolves right.
- 1:39Renee Boos: Yeah, for sure yeah.
- 1:41Carrie Lingenfelter: Yeah, so I'm so excited to have you and I think it's strengths and some of the challenges.
- 1:45Carrie Lingenfelter: But empowering our kids and finding labeling them In our house we call it superpowers our heightened sensitivities.
- 2:13Carrie Lingenfelter: Maybe that can sometimes make it hard to be in the body at certain times, but also we try to change the mindset and focus on the positive pieces of being so connected to being a human.
- 2:26Carrie Lingenfelter: Yeah, yeah, so I'm curious, right, being a human being in our human form, um, with our highly sensitive, amazing kids that came to us, um, what?
- 2:44Carrie Lingenfelter: What do you guys frame it?
- 2:46Carrie Lingenfelter: As in your house or in the community?
- 2:48Carrie Lingenfelter: How do you frame some of those pieces, those heightened sensitivities or those understanding?
- 2:55Carrie Lingenfelter: I feel like my kids can read the room, they can read other people, they're drawn towards certain situations.
- 3:02Carrie Lingenfelter: What do you guys frame that?
- 3:04Carrie Lingenfelter: As in your house?
- 3:05Renee Boos: I think for me you know, it was sort of a blessing and a curse that I realized very quickly with my son that I shared many of the sensitivities that he had, but mine had just been so heavily masked due to lack of a supportive environment and, you know, just adulting for so long.
- 3:22Renee Boos: I had my son at 43 years old and he's my only child, so I didn't know anything about neurodiversity at that point.
- 3:30Renee Boos: I just thought I was kind of a quirky person, I'd set up a life that fit me really well, I thought and I felt like I had a lot of control over that life.
- 3:40Renee Boos: And then my son came and I was like wait a minute, this perfect life isn't perfect for him and and I I'm I'm kind of resonating with this it felt like his nervous system was just vibrating.
- 3:54Renee Boos: You know, it was like tangible to me and I I was like there's a familiar hum here, but mine was like, you know, 20 miles back down the road and his was right in my face.
- 4:06Renee Boos: So it was this sort of an awakening process for me.
- 4:09Renee Boos: And then I had a lot of challenge with that in terms of, you know, answering your question.
- 4:15Renee Boos: What did we call it at first?
- 4:18Renee Boos: You know, it felt I'm going to be honest I had been conditioned to think that these things, these sensitivities that I had, were a detriment, and so I looked at them like a problem, initially in myself.
- 4:33Renee Boos: And then, you know, when you have a child that mirrors some of the things that you see in yourself as maybe less than ideal you might think that they're less than ideal in a child, but, very quickly, ideal.
- 4:46Renee Boos: You might think that they're less than ideal in a child, but very quickly.
- 4:48Renee Boos: That idea that my son was perfect.
- 4:48Renee Boos: You know, I had this epiphany one day holding him and we had a rough time and he just looked so peaceful and so happy, which was kind of rare at that time, and I thought he is so perfect.
- 4:59Renee Boos: You know, I knew it despite from the outside world, in our sort of conditioned environment and our peer group and my family and all of those things, we looked nothing like perfection on those kind of typical standards.
- 5:14Renee Boos: But I looked at him and I knew he was perfect and I realized that if he was perfect and he came from me, you know, whatever that means, I don't know these days I'm really wondering about that and he and I have had lots of conversations about how we came to be in this relationship together.
- 5:33Renee Boos: But whatever he was in me and was out of my body, my meat sack, and I thought, well, if he's that perfect, there might be a tiny bit of that in me too.
- 5:43Renee Boos: Well, if he's that perfect, there might be a tiny bit of that in me too.
- 5:46Renee Boos: And it sort of changed the way I saw him, saw us, saw the sensitivities that we shared, and it kind of flipped the script for me, because the things that I had been conditioned to think were so problematic.
- 5:57Renee Boos: I started to see them as gifts.
- 5:59Renee Boos: But I'm not going to lie and say that that happened immediately.
- 6:02Renee Boos: It didn't happen easily.
- 6:03Renee Boos: It was sort of a dying to an old way of believing about things, a total sort of way of being in the world.
- 6:10Renee Boos: But the rebirth is beautiful and so we really, much like you said, believe that these sensitivities are superpowers.
- 6:17Renee Boos: And now, with what I'm doing in the world with the community center, that was one of the big inspirations for me.
- 6:23Renee Boos: Starting is because when I came to that realization here in our home, we were quite isolated and I started to believe that this was not a unique occurrence, that these were superpowers, that these sensitivities were beneficial, and especially at this time in humanity's sort of experience, and so I was given a message, a literal vision and meditation to create a place for people to come together to lean into the beauty and the brilliance of these sensitivities so that they could be amplified and so that these, these gifts, this energy that we can tap into, that we can feel, like you said.
- 7:02Renee Boos: You know, we can read the room, we can sense things.
- 7:06Renee Boos: I think we are like mixed to certain frequencies so that we can amplify them together and I believe that it will change the experience that humanity has in the world.
- 7:16Renee Boos: You know, and it may be by one encounter at a time, I'm not sure it's a great experiment.
- 7:21Renee Boos: So that's why I'm doing what I'm doing and that's a really long-winded answer to your question.
- 7:26Renee Boos: But we think you're superpowers, and I see it every day with the adults, the teens, the young adults and the children that come to my space.
- 7:34Renee Boos: It is evident, there is no doubt in my mind that what oftentimes the medical model deems as a deficiency, in the same breath could be seen as an extreme strength, a gift, something that is so needed, and I always say that everything that I see, that those of us, myself included, that have these labels, need to thrive.
- 7:55Renee Boos: There hasn't been one exception and I've been looking for it.
- 7:59Renee Boos: There has not been one exception to the fact that these things are better for all of humanity, these ways of being, this way of life.
- 8:07Renee Boos: There is no doubt in my mind.
- 8:09Renee Boos: So I think it's definitely a beautiful gift, a hard won one.
- 8:14Renee Boos: Sometimes, you know, it's not easy to be in these bodies with these sensitivities.
- 8:19Renee Boos: I'm not denying that it is not easy.
- 8:22Carrie Lingenfelter: You know it's's really interesting.
- 8:24Carrie Lingenfelter: I think I went through it sound.
- 8:25Carrie Lingenfelter: Thank you for sharing your story.
- 8:27Carrie Lingenfelter: It was a beautiful story and it's interesting because I I was a speech therapist and an elementary educator beforehand, so my, my previous education taught me to look for the errors in a person, to help fix those errors.
- 8:45Carrie Lingenfelter: That's what I was trained to do as a speech therapist right To diagnose and then treat.
- 8:50Carrie Lingenfelter: And so I constantly.
- 8:53Carrie Lingenfelter: When I had my kiddo, my son, who's now turning 10, when he was first born, I was constantly looking for what's wrong.
- 9:00Carrie Lingenfelter: What's wrong?
- 9:01Carrie Lingenfelter: Why is he crying?
- 9:01Carrie Lingenfelter: What's wrong, how do I fix it?
- 9:03Carrie Lingenfelter: And I wanted to label it or figure it out or diagnose it every single time.
- 9:10Carrie Lingenfelter: Whereas now, and so much healing and so much spirituality and all of these pieces that you kind of mentioned that helped to get me to where I am now, also on a very similar path, using the podcast, whereas you're using a community center.
- 9:25Carrie Lingenfelter: It's really cool because I'm trying to share with the world that these kids are coming in a loud way to help us come back to some of the basic human pieces, which is connection, knowing ourselves, slowing down our lives, being within nature sometimes, if the kids are in that zone if we're having a good day.
- 9:49Carrie Lingenfelter: But yeah, those pieces that maybe you and I couldn't achieve when we were younger because we weren't allowed to be the high maintenance kid I think Brene Brown labeled it high maintenance kid of the 80s, 90s, 70s, I think when we weren't allowed to be like that.
- 10:08Carrie Lingenfelter: Now we're starting to understand and we have people like you and I out there trying to say let them be themselves, let's find their strengths, let's find how to support them so they can be who they truly are meant to be here, and we're learning from them.
- 10:20Carrie Lingenfelter: So I think that's a beautiful thing.
- 10:22Renee Boos: I think many of them at least.
- 10:24Renee Boos: I'll speak from my experience with my son and you know I seem to be a mad, a magnet to demand avoidant people, being one myself and it's my, it's my people, so I love it.
- 10:33Renee Boos: But a lot of people that come to my center have that particular label and I see that, especially the children, they will not accept anything less.
- 10:45Renee Boos: You know, they, they are demanding that we acknowledge better way of being.
- 10:50Renee Boos: They will not accept something mediocre anymore and thank goodness.
- 10:54Renee Boos: And if you think back through time, you know there were always way back when, right when we were in sort of a tribal existence, let's say there were always the people that were highly sensitive, that were, you know, honored in those groups of people because they were the people that would alert others to danger.
- 11:14Renee Boos: They could sense things that weren't as obvious.
- 11:16Renee Boos: And so I think that our kids function in much that way, you know, to try to direct humanity back to what it means to be in these meat sacks, these bodies, for this period of time on this planet, connected.
- 11:29Renee Boos: I mean, I'm loosely tethered most of the time, but I had to realize I am here in this body, whether I like it or not.
- 11:37Renee Boos: This thing doesn't work right for me a lot of the times or how I want it to, but it's my resonator, it's my vehicle for this time and I need to honor that, and I think that's a big challenge for a lot of people with these labels.
- 11:51Renee Boos: You know my son spoke at a very young age about how he had come from the nothing and that there were many like him that had chosen to come to this existence at this place in time to reset the balance here, and that people here were wanting to eradicate darkness.
- 12:16Renee Boos: But that was a mistake, because without darkness you can't know light, and that it was about the balance between the two.
- 12:19Renee Boos: And he spoke about how difficult it was to come into these bodies because they didn't work right and the language could never communicate what he really wanted to say and he was like an Oxford scholar at one and a half, but the language, you know, there was no word for what he needed to communicate and so you know, it was like all of this high vibrational frequency trying to downgrade into this material manifestation and it's difficult.
- 12:43Renee Boos: And we look at these kids like they're broken because they're not assimilating into this reality, this material world, this material vessel.
- 12:54Renee Boos: But they're not broken, it's just a difficult, it's a generous and difficult challenge for them, you know I mean if you think about it.
- 13:06Renee Boos: As hard as it is to be a parent with a child that has a lot of needs.
- 13:10Renee Boos: And believe me, I know my son didn't sleep more than two and a half hours until he was six and a half and I had to hold him for that sleep.
- 13:17Renee Boos: So I slept none.
- 13:18Renee Boos: I literally almost died.
- 13:20Renee Boos: But you know as hard as these things were for me.
- 13:23Renee Boos: I had a son who could articulate at a young age that his body would not accept him, and it hurt, you know so yeah it's hard to be a parent, but I think that there are some very special individuals that are here at this time that are making a huge sacrifice to be sort of those, those souls, those beings that alert us to what is not working here and are attempting to bring humanity back into balance.
- 13:56Carrie Lingenfelter: That's such a beautiful way to describe it.
- 13:58Carrie Lingenfelter: Thank you so much, and I can't believe how in tune your son was able to express himself.
- 14:06Renee Boos: Beautiful, he told me once.
- 14:08Renee Boos: So prior to doing the community center, I ran a fairly large interior design firm.
- 14:13Renee Boos: I designed hotels and I would design like 40 boutique hotels a year.
- 14:17Renee Boos: So you know I had a lot of staff at a purchasing firm.
- 14:20Renee Boos: I felt like I was pretty good at all of the things that a type a person wants to be good at right.
- 14:27Renee Boos: And so then I have this kid and I can't even take a shower.
- 14:31Renee Boos: I can't sleep.
- 14:32Renee Boos: We're like barely surviving.
- 14:34Renee Boos: One of us isn't wearing pants that wasn't me, but you know that's how it was.
- 14:38Renee Boos: I was about ready to get rid of mine too, because I wasn't leaving the house and.
- 14:42Renee Boos: I was holding him, you know, in our chair, where we would sit, and I would attempt to get him to sleep, which was so ridiculous because the kid didn't need to sleep.
- 14:50Renee Boos: He had stuff to do during the night all these hours.
- 14:53Renee Boos: I just thought, you know, you need your eight hours or you're going to die.
- 14:56Renee Boos: Well, this kid was busy, he was doing something and he didn't need to sleep.
- 15:00Renee Boos: So I would hold him and try to cajole him to sleep.
- 15:03Renee Boos: And he looked at me and he he called me Renee, because when he was not even three, he said I'm'm not gonna call you mom anymore.
- 15:10Renee Boos: And at this point he had like two sides to him.
- 15:14Renee Boos: One was like an Oxford scholar and the other one was a little surly.
- 15:17Renee Boos: So I was hoping that what he was gonna call me was gonna come from the one side, not the other.
- 15:21Renee Boos: And I said so, okay, fingers crossed, what are you gonna call me then?
- 15:25Renee Boos: And he said well, I've noticed you don't say child.
- 15:28Renee Boos: Would you like breakfast?
- 15:29Renee Boos: Child, would you like to come downstairs?
- 15:31Renee Boos: You use my name, so I'm going to use yours out of respect, just like wobbled away.
- 15:36Renee Boos: And I was like okay, well, that makes sense.
- 15:38Renee Boos: This is going to be a fun life.
- 15:39Renee Boos: You're going to break a lot of social norms and I can't argue with you.
- 15:44Renee Boos: But he said you know, renee, you are very inefficient.
- 15:47Renee Boos: And I said you know, I feel really.
- 15:50Renee Boos: But you should have seen me like five years ago, man, I was good.
- 15:54Renee Boos: And he said you think I'm so smart.
- 15:57Renee Boos: And I said I know you are so smart.
- 15:59Renee Boos: He said it is not me, renee, I just know where to go to get the answers.
- 16:03Renee Boos: You might notice I get a little quiet and look into my source, where every answer resides.
- 16:10Renee Boos: You, on the other hand, you're looking outside of you and you act like your answers are attached to you by heavy chains and you spend all of your energy trying to pull them in.
- 16:22Renee Boos: And I'm sitting there with a mouth wide open.
- 16:25Renee Boos: Wow, looking at a kid.
- 16:27Renee Boos: That's not even four or five, probably not even five.
- 16:30Renee Boos: At that point he was probably four.
- 16:32Renee Boos: Okay.
- 16:32Carrie Lingenfelter: Wow.
- 16:33Renee Boos: And wondering where this wisdom came from.
- 16:36Renee Boos: You know.
- 16:37Renee Boos: And that's when I decided to not care if he ever wore pants again, ever ate anything other than plain noodles.
- 16:44Renee Boos: I just, you know, I was like I don't.
- 16:46Renee Boos: These are.
- 16:47Renee Boos: These concerns are not the concerns that we should have.
- 16:53Renee Boos: He is concerned about the things that matter and I'm spending a lot of my life, force, energy on these things that do not matter at all.
- 17:02Renee Boos: So he's been a brilliant teacher for me and really changed the course of my life in a huge way and I am very grateful and I almost died being his parent.
- 17:14Renee Boos: So you know there's that.
- 17:16Carrie Lingenfelter: Well, I'm glad.
- 17:17Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm glad you maybe have gotten sleep since then.
- 17:20Carrie Lingenfelter: Oh yeah, I'm glad you're up.
- 17:22Renee Boos: I'm back at it.
- 17:23Renee Boos: It's him too.
- 17:24Renee Boos: Like 13 hours a day, it's awesome.
- 17:26Carrie Lingenfelter: Wow, that's amazing, that's amazing, wow.
- 17:29Carrie Lingenfelter: So that's quite a journey to have gotten to that place.
- 17:32Carrie Lingenfelter: I was gonna, you know, for I feel like I'm in a lot of telepathy or several telepathy groups now on Facebook, after telepathy tapes came out and kind of I feel like it's breaking down that box for us, right, it's really helping us with what.
- 17:48Carrie Lingenfelter: Your goal is similar to my goal in connecting with these families and trying to help focus, focus on what we're looking at and we're coming from our hearts and heart space.
- 17:57Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm finding there's parents in these groups and they're asking how to connect with themselves, how to connect with their kids.
- 18:05Carrie Lingenfelter: They they feel like a telepathy piece is a piece that they're seeing.
- 18:09Carrie Lingenfelter: What would you say to families that are starting to experience this, starting to mold, like to open themselves up to these ideas and pieces?
- 18:17Carrie Lingenfelter: What would you say that helped you?
- 18:18Renee Boos: I think my first, like the strongest advice I could give someone, is to let go of your conditioned beliefs about what is real.
- 18:27Renee Boos: Let it go, because you can still come back to that.
- 18:31Renee Boos: But if you can open yourself to believe that potentially more is possible than what you've been conditioned to believe, there is no harm in that.
- 18:40Renee Boos: There's only possibility and potential.
- 18:42Renee Boos: And so I would say, just be open and to let go of this.
- 18:46Renee Boos: I think this goes hand in hand.
- 18:48Renee Boos: You know, when we try to hold on to something that we think is true, I think oftentimes at least I'll speak for myself it comes from a place of fear.
- 18:57Renee Boos: You know, we don't want to be vulnerable.
- 18:59Renee Boos: We humans don't want to be vulnerable and we are afraid of so many things.
- 19:04Renee Boos: And if we can let go, even for just brief periods of time, of that fear and become a little bit vulnerable and that is that is something that was very difficult for me, because I had a pretty traumatic childhood and I had armored myself pretty well and I was really good at controlling things, because that gave me this sense of safety, and so this idea of vulnerability was something that I didn't even want to interface with.
- 19:31Renee Boos: But I have learned that the unknown.
- 19:34Renee Boos: You know so when you don't want to be vulnerable and you're afraid, you want to know things.
- 19:38Renee Boos: You don't like the unknown common sort of trend in our community with these labels, right, yes, and so the unknown is terrifying at times, but what I have found in my meditation practice really led me to this, this understanding, and, you know, tremendous personal healing occurred.
- 19:58Renee Boos: I know that the unknown holds much more promise than anything detrimental to me.
- 20:06Renee Boos: Now I am certain.
- 20:07Renee Boos: And if I'm not willing to step into the unknown, then there is so much potential that I am missing.
- 20:11Renee Boos: And if I'm not willing to step into the unknown, then there is so much potential that I am missing.
- 20:15Renee Boos: And so back to your question for these parents step into the unknown, just try it, you know.
- 20:23Renee Boos: I believe it is safe.
- 20:25Renee Boos: I have found it to be nothing but safe in these instances.
- 20:28Renee Boos: There is a beauty there.
- 20:30Renee Boos: There there is love, there is the potential for the kind of connection that I think we were in this experience for, yeah, and our children can be our guides which is, you know, sort of changing that conditioned idea that as a parent, you're here to guide your child.
- 20:48Renee Boos: As sure, in some things the mundane, you know you're going to teach them how to drive and how to hold a fork and all of that right.
- 20:55Renee Boos: But I think that our children have the potential to guide us in these other ways, a huge potential to do that if we will.
- 21:06Renee Boos: If we will honor what they're bringing and their knowledge, humble ourselves a little bit, step into the unknown with an open heart.
- 21:17Carrie Lingenfelter: Yes, embracing the unknown can be such a process to get to right.
- 21:21Carrie Lingenfelter: There's so much healing because you have to look at the inner child pieces as a parent.
- 21:27Carrie Lingenfelter: What is my need for this control?
- 21:29Carrie Lingenfelter: How much conditioning have I had myself as maybe a high maintenance kid that wasn't allowed to be like that as a kid, or maybe had the PDA yourself as a kid and didn't realize it, or we're a highly sensitive kid.
- 21:44Carrie Lingenfelter: It's.
- 21:45Carrie Lingenfelter: It's really interesting.
- 21:46Carrie Lingenfelter: I've started to fully embrace the unknown and I feel like as you do it more and more, it becomes so much easier and you're like delighted by what comes to fruition and it's like whoa, I didn't even expect this, I didn't even think this was a possibility, I didn't even know this would come my way, or things that you hadn't even imagined that come alive.
- 22:10Carrie Lingenfelter: So there's definitely.
- 22:12Carrie Lingenfelter: Have you had part of that healing journey for yourself?
- 22:15Carrie Lingenfelter: I don't know.
- 22:16Carrie Lingenfelter: I know it's probably a long.
- 22:18Carrie Lingenfelter: My healing journey was very long as well and I was raised spiritually.
- 22:21Carrie Lingenfelter: I had a good, you know, a pretty stable childhood.
- 22:24Carrie Lingenfelter: There was a lot of control in my childhood but I know I see why I was in so much control because I had to be in control.
- 22:31Carrie Lingenfelter: Because I was in control.
- 22:32Carrie Lingenfelter: There's a lot of control to break for us and we still use those tools to come back when we're feeling that we're trying to control again.
- 22:40Carrie Lingenfelter: So, yeah, we're human, we're in this human, this meat body, I think you call it.
- 22:45Renee Boos: Meat sack, Meat sack.
- 22:46Renee Boos: I'm trying to be nicer about mine.
- 22:48Renee Boos: I'm like I actually feel you and like you now, but you are still a meat sack.
- 22:53Renee Boos: Sometimes I'm like come on already.
- 22:56Renee Boos: This is so limiting, let's get on with it here.
- 23:01Carrie Lingenfelter: Those are my children.
- 23:02Carrie Lingenfelter: They're both like.
- 23:03Carrie Lingenfelter: I am limited in this meat sack.
- 23:05Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm ready to be 18.
- 23:06Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm ready to do my passion in life.
- 23:09Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm ready for my dream.
- 23:10Carrie Lingenfelter: Like they feel very limited at seven and almost 10.
- 23:14Carrie Lingenfelter: They're like I'm done.
- 23:15Carrie Lingenfelter: I'm ready to be an adult mom.
- 23:17Carrie Lingenfelter: Why, why isn't this going faster?
- 23:19Renee Boos: Yeah Well.
- 23:20Renee Boos: I am an adult and I'm ready to be something else.
- 23:22Renee Boos: So exactly what that is.
- 23:26Renee Boos: But I'm trying.
- 23:28Renee Boos: I'm spending a lot of time getting this meat sack to resonate at a higher frequency, that's for sure, because I know there's more potential and it's holding me back sometimes.
- 23:37Carrie Lingenfelter: I love it, yeah, definitely I feel it this is great, yeah, so it was like a question was no worries, I was thinking you don't have to share all the pieces that you went through.
- 23:50Carrie Lingenfelter: But I think I think for me I came when my son was born.
- 23:55Carrie Lingenfelter: I was really trying to control the situation.
- 23:57Carrie Lingenfelter: I had told my husband I'm a speech therapist, I'm an elementary educator, I got this, I know this, I can do it.
- 24:02Carrie Lingenfelter: I don't.
- 24:03Carrie Lingenfelter: You know, you're good, you can backseat.
- 24:05Carrie Lingenfelter: But as soon as he was born and looked in our eyes, we were like holy smokes, our world is shaken, I know nothing.
- 24:10Carrie Lingenfelter: And then he, my husband, said he's beautiful, carrie.
- 24:12Carrie Lingenfelter: And he turned and looked in his eyes and he was like wow, we don't know anything.
- 24:16Carrie Lingenfelter: Both of us were just rocked to our core.
- 24:19Carrie Lingenfelter: Yeah, from that.
- 24:20Carrie Lingenfelter: And then, yeah, we have a little bit of that.
- 24:22Carrie Lingenfelter: You know the demand avoidance and the oppositional force as well.
- 24:25Carrie Lingenfelter: It's like the more we push, the stronger the pushback came.
- 24:29Carrie Lingenfelter: So there was a lot of healing journey for both my partner and I to figure out how to be more of a cooperative participant with our son, to hear him to connect.
- 24:40Carrie Lingenfelter: Did you feel like you had to heal pieces of you and your journey to get where you're at?
- 24:46Renee Boos: Yeah, most definitely.
- 24:47Renee Boos: We are a family of three, autistic, demand avoidant individuals, and I'm also ADHD, so I've got a sort of characteristic there, and we didn't know anything about any of this when we started this journey, and so it was quite a learning experience for us.
- 25:03Renee Boos: This desire for control was very strong in all three of us.
- 25:07Renee Boos: Even the tiny infant decided that he was going to sort of direct how things were going, and we were strong oppositional forces initially.
- 25:18Renee Boos: It didn't take us very long, I think, as I talked to others, to come to terms with the fact that that wasn't going to work.
- 25:25Renee Boos: I mean, for me it was pretty quick to.
- 25:28Renee Boos: I think it was that resonance that I could feel.
- 25:31Renee Boos: I'm a very energetically sensitive person, highly intuitive, I channel sometimes.
- 25:37Renee Boos: Now I think I'd been doing it for a long time and just didn't know what it was, and so I would get these messages that would help me to understand what my son needed, and and it was actually what I needed too understand what my son needed and and it was actually what I needed too.
- 25:54Renee Boos: And so it was a.
- 25:54Renee Boos: It was a long.
- 25:55Renee Boos: It was a long and short healing journey.
- 25:56Renee Boos: I think mine happened.
- 25:58Renee Boos: I had to lose almost everything in that journey and I lost my business.
- 26:04Renee Boos: I lost friends and family.
- 26:06Renee Boos: We were extremely isolated.
- 26:08Renee Boos: I didn't leave my house for more than an hour or two a week for like six years when I'd been traveling you know, 25 days a month with my previous career.
- 26:16Renee Boos: So I had to sit with myself and with my son in a home alone and sort of acknowledge what was painful, what I was resisting.
- 26:26Renee Boos: I had to think about why my son was relentless.
- 26:30Renee Boos: He is the strongest person I've ever encountered and I am no weakling.
- 26:35Renee Boos: But, that kid.
- 26:36Renee Boos: He's amazing.
- 26:38Renee Boos: He will not accept mediocrity in anything, and so I wasn't really allowed to take a long time to heal.
- 26:44Renee Boos: I was forced to heal quickly and I received these drops of wisdom, you know, seemingly out of nowhere, from my son, which were absolute gifts.
- 26:55Renee Boos: You know, they would come at just the right time, Just when I was feeling the most broken.
- 26:59Renee Boos: I would get some insight that came from don't know where, because we were not.
- 27:05Renee Boos: I grew up Catholic and I was not practicing, and so I didn't know anything about anything that he was talking about.
- 27:13Renee Boos: But he would say things and then I would.
- 27:16Renee Boos: I would feel that they were correct, Like I would feel the energy behind what he was saying, and then I would look into it and I would be like my goodness, this is in like five spiritual texts.
- 27:28Renee Boos: You know, I mean no doubt this is no joke, this is truth here and I have a little messenger, a relentless one, and so I'm going to listen.
- 27:38Renee Boos: But yeah, it was.
- 27:39Renee Boos: I got very sick, I think, from just.
- 27:43Renee Boos: I think it was sort of a reconditioning of my meat sack, to be honest.
- 27:47Renee Boos: Yep, it dissipated a lot, almost to the point where of no return, and then it transformed pretty miraculously and so, as scary as that was, for me it was a true healing.
- 28:00Renee Boos: I remember I had a moment where I was, where I was feeling like everything that was wrong I love I hate that word now but then I was using a lot right and wrong, good and bad.
- 28:09Renee Boos: Everything was wrong.
- 28:10Renee Boos: I love I hate that word now but then I was using a lot right and wrong, good and bad, everything that was wrong about us was my doing, my fault.
- 28:16Renee Boos: And then I had this epiphany, in this moment of desperation and meditation, that everything that I was thinking was wrong could also be framed as everything that was actually right, and it was just a matter of perspective, kind of like my son spoke about darkness and light.
- 28:33Renee Boos: It's a matter of perspective.
- 28:36Carrie Lingenfelter: Yes.
- 28:37Renee Boos: And so my perspective changed many times and like, with these you know acknowledgements of this fact and then my healing journey would progress.
- 28:48Renee Boos: So it was.
- 28:49Renee Boos: It's been an amazing.
- 28:51Renee Boos: My son's turning 10 next month and it has been an amazing 10 years.
- 28:57Renee Boos: I tell him I'm so thankful for him because I was like a millionth of the person I was before I met him.
- 29:03Renee Boos: Yeah, you know, I'm so grateful, very grateful.
- 29:07Carrie Lingenfelter: Yes, yeah, I.
- 29:08Carrie Lingenfelter: It's really interesting.
- 29:10Carrie Lingenfelter: The gifts that we receive raising these amazing kids and the challenges that we go through sometimes can bring us to such a beautiful place.
- 29:19Carrie Lingenfelter: As you described, hardest things for my partner, my husband and I, has been losing friendships, feeling isolated.
- 29:33Carrie Lingenfelter: I think what you're doing with building a community is really special, because I think so many parents of neurodiverse kids can feel so isolated, especially if you have kids who maybe mask outside in society.
- 29:51Carrie Lingenfelter: In school my kids they go to a social-emotional-focused school, project-based learning school near us and every time I mention things to teachers they're like what?
- 30:02Carrie Lingenfelter: I never see that.
- 30:03Carrie Lingenfelter: So that's how my kids are, where they're holding it together during the day.
- 30:09Carrie Lingenfelter: That's how my kids are where they're holding it together during the day.
- 30:13Carrie Lingenfelter: But then at home it can feel so isolating because it looks like the perfect picture from outside.
- 30:18Renee Boos: I didn't experience that as much because my son really never had to mask because he's been unschooled from the beginning.
- 30:25Carrie Lingenfelter: Yeah.
- 30:25Renee Boos: So because you know it was not my intention initially, I did not even know such a thing existed, but it's what he needed, so I was fortunate enough that I could do that.
- 30:36Renee Boos: The NCC was really born of that same idea.
- 30:39Renee Boos: Like so often, our children and us as their parents, our family unit we're forced to present ourselves in a way that's acceptable to those around us, present ourselves in a way that's acceptable to those around us, and sometimes those around us.
- 30:57Renee Boos: What works for them doesn't work for us or what they think works for them definitely does not work for us, and so, like you said, it can be very isolating and my concept, my sort of my inspiration for the NCC was there are many places that you can go, especially if you acquired labels in life, to get fixed, to work on your challenges right, and we all come into this meat sack with a bucket full of challenges and hopefully, I think, like 25 buckets full of gifts.
- 31:21Renee Boos: But I think we're really conditioned to look at that one bucket full of challenges and work on that before we really focus on these gifts.
- 31:30Renee Boos: The gifts are taken for granted.
- 31:32Renee Boos: The challenges are where the focus goes and oftentimes for our children they have, you know, they're in five, six, seven therapies a week and they're focusing on all of these challenges and they don't have much time to lean into their gifts because they're masking so heavily that when they come home and have some freedom, it's just meltdown, you know, let it all out time.
- 31:52Renee Boos: So, it is isolating.
- 31:53Renee Boos: Yeah, so I thought with the NCC I'd like to create sort of a home away from home for people, where they can come in with their bucket full of challenges.
- 32:01Renee Boos: But we're going to, we're going to ignore that one when we're together and you bring your 15 buckets full of gifts and let's dip into those things and let's do them together with no judgment, however you want to do them.
- 32:14Renee Boos: So when we have an event at the ncc, I might call it like art night.
- 32:20Renee Boos: But what happens at art night is someone takes a nap, someone's hungry, so we cook in the kitchen.
- 32:26Renee Boos: Somebody else wants to stargaze in the backyard.
- 32:28Renee Boos: Someone else is showing off their car that's powered by depleted uranium in the front parking lot.
- 32:33Renee Boos: Someone might make a piece of art, but there's no like conscripted idea of what that is.
- 32:38Renee Boos: I mean, someone conjoined three stuffed animals the other day and that was their art experience.
- 32:43Renee Boos: It doesn't matter, we just come together and we do what we wish, or nothing, or some combination of all of it, in non-judgment of one another.
- 32:56Renee Boos: Yes, I try to hold the frequency of love in that container.
- 33:01Carrie Lingenfelter: You know just the idea of this beautiful acceptance that we all deserve yes, you know, as a parent raising kids that are neurodiverse, it was so beautiful to come to your center and we came on the opening day to check it out, and my husband and I.
- 33:18Carrie Lingenfelter: It was really interesting because we both said, wow, I don't feel like I'm trying to restrain my kids, I'm trying to keep them in the box that society expects them to look like.
- 33:32Carrie Lingenfelter: Right now, I feel safe.
- 33:34Carrie Lingenfelter: Right now.
- 33:35Carrie Lingenfelter: Both my husband and I said we feel safe for our kids.
- 33:39Carrie Lingenfelter: They can act the way they want, they can behave the way they want, they can be free.
- 33:42Carrie Lingenfelter: And we felt free as adults, as the parents.
- 33:45Carrie Lingenfelter: It was really cool.
- 33:46Carrie Lingenfelter: You did a wonderful wonderful job.
- 33:48Renee Boos: That's what's happening and I can say that things have evolved significantly since that opening day there has.
- 33:55Renee Boos: There is definitely this palpable feeling, and I'm not the one saying this it's amazing people come in thinking it's a retail store or something.
- 34:04Renee Boos: So I don't have enough money for a great sign and I'm not maybe not even going to put one up, because it's awesome that random people will come in and they'll step like five feet in the door and they'll go what is this place?
- 34:16Renee Boos: What is, what are you doing here?
- 34:19Renee Boos: yeah, it's beautiful my gosh, it feels so wonderful and they're perplexed and I tell them, and they know, then they're in tears and they want to volunteer.
- 34:28Renee Boos: And then they tell me that you know, maybe this're in tears and they want to volunteer.
- 34:30Renee Boos: And then they tell me that, you know, maybe this is their neurotype, they're curious about it.
- 34:33Renee Boos: And there's definitely the concept, the message I was given and I just had the container and enough crazy to try to do it with no money and you know, no help.
- 34:47Renee Boos: So you know that's it.
- 34:48Renee Boos: But you know that's my MO, so let's do that, let's give it a go.
- 34:51Renee Boos: It has done exactly what I was told it needed to do.
- 34:56Carrie Lingenfelter: For sure it is a beautiful experiment about what is possible so much for sharing your journey and your family and how you've found this whole piece of you, how you found NCC, how you followed this path that you were led along.
- 35:23Carrie Lingenfelter: I love the courage you had to do all of that and thank you for sharing your Changemaker journey with us.
- 35:26Carrie Lingenfelter: It was beautiful to hear.
- 35:28Renee Boos: Thank you.
- 35:28Renee Boos: Thank you for giving me the chance and thank you for what you're doing.
- 35:31Renee Boos: It's so wonderful that we can all now come together and just openly share.
- 35:37Renee Boos: It's such a gift, you know.
- 35:39Renee Boos: It's what we learn from each other's lived experience, I believe far surpasses anything that we can find elsewhere.
- 35:48Renee Boos: You know, we are meant to help each other and by sharing our stories, I think we do that.
- 35:54Carrie Lingenfelter: Yes, yes, it's beautiful, so it continues on the path.
- 35:57Carrie Lingenfelter: Thank you, renee.
- 35:58Carrie Lingenfelter: Yeah, thanks.
- 35:59Carrie Lingenfelter: Well, that's a wrap.
- 36:00Carrie Lingenfelter: Thanks so much for tuning in.
- 36:01Carrie Lingenfelter: Changemakers.
- 36:02Carrie Lingenfelter: This is Keri, and if you haven't done a review for us five stars and a little few words about what you've enjoyed in our podcast episodes we would really appreciate it.
- 36:12Carrie Lingenfelter: If you guys would like to ever message me, I would love any questions you have or any feedback at info at hearttoheartlifecom.
- 36:22Carrie Lingenfelter: We also have a brand new website which we're super excited to share it's hearttoheartlifecom.
- 36:28Carrie Lingenfelter: Thanks so much for tuning in and happy life, happy times.
- 36:32Carrie Lingenfelter: Changemaker families.
- 36:33Carrie Lingenfelter: Bye.