I was walking down the High Street and stopped to chat with a good friend. I was telling him about a challenge in my life, calling it bad luck. His response was simple: "Maybe."
That single word caught me off guard. I paused and asked, "What do you mean, 'maybe'?" He smiled and said, "Well, you don't know yet. It may end up being something good for you in the long run." I laughed because I understood immediately. I was so focused on the moment, stuck in my own story, that I wasn’t seeing the bigger picture.
He then shared a story from Alan Watts—the famous Chinese Farmer story. It goes like this:
The farmer’s horse runs away, and his neighbors exclaim, "What bad luck!" The farmer replies, "Maybe." The next day, the horse returns with several wild horses, and the neighbors say, "What good fortune!" Again, the farmer responds, "Maybe." This continues with ups and downs, and each time, the farmer’s answer remains the same: "Maybe."
This story is a wonderful reminder that we often don't see the full picture. What seems like bad luck today could turn out to be a blessing tomorrow. Instead of getting stuck on labeling something as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ embracing the power of 'maybe' helps us stay open to life's possibilities.
In yoga, much like in life, this mindset is valuable. By staying open to whatever comes our way—whether it’s a difficult pose or a challenge off the mat—we build resilience, flexibility, and calm. It’s a beautiful way to flow with life's changes.
This lesson is something I love to share with kids. It helps them understand that not everything needs a label. Feelings and situations can just be without the need to call them good or bad. By embracing the power of 'maybe,' they learn to stay curious, open, and ready to face whatever comes their way—on and off the mat.

​

Today is #WorldMentalHealthDay got me thinking about the tools I use on a regular basis that has formed a solid raft in my life. It is something I come back to time and time again. It has quite literally kept me alive and at others, filled me with such peace and acceptance of who I am, what I can do, what I can not and the courage to express that. 

The self-reflection that comes with the practice, has helped me forge strong boundaries, grown belief in myself and raised my worth and value from off the floor. It costs nothing to do except time and needs nothing of great importance to practice. I do it as needed, so it has become an integral part of my life; and that of my children. I consider it to be one of my most valuable tools for life and up there with how to cook, change a plug and earn money.

Mindfulness is a deeply complex subject and something I’ve been exploring for over 20 years but for me, it simply means to be awake at the moment, of bringing my attention into the now. Of tuning into the present, still my mind and slowing down. Feeling inside my body, feeling anchored into the present moment. And it’s by being here right now and awake and aware at this moment that brings me time to be in creation of my behaviour rather than in reaction mode and playing out past outdated programming that’s been triggered within me.

It’s when I am in this place of being, in this place of awareness I can choose to move my focus of attention from what I don't want to have happen, to what I do. It gives me time to consciously create the steps to take me and the situation that I am into a positive conclusion.

And to help do this we can use our senses. By focusing on what you can see or hear around you, what you can smell, what you can taste, what you can feel, leaning into where you are right now rather than brushing it under the carpet and using the numerous distraction techniques we have all mastered. 

Using your breath and doing some focused breathing will rapidly change how you are feeling. It will regulate your nervous system helping settle your brain so you can think more clearly, changing your emotional state from the fight or flight mode, to the rest and digest mode. 

Focused breathing will pull your attention from the negative spiral of thoughts about what could happen, what has happened, the worry and fear around that, the overwhelming feelings that are coursing through your body and reconnect you to an anchor; the breath. It will help you stay connected to the present moment. Where you realise you are safe and all is well in this moment. It is in this state of ‘being’ that we have a choice, you have the ability to choose the direction you wish any particular situation to go.

We can create an anchor with our children and ourselves really easily. You can use their favourite teddy, my son had a clothes peg he would squeeze when he was overwhelmed, space can even be an anchor, sitting on your favourite part of the sofa can be an anchor. One of my anchors is up by the cooker, being at the helm of my home.

I like to use one which incorporates a bit of EFT tapping and breath work and when I use it my body relaxes and my mind goes still. It brings me back to myself. It regulates my nervous system and deescalates situations really quickly. It’s one of those things that the more you practice the more effective it becomes.

Start by tapping the edge of your fingertips tips, by the nail, with your thumbs, go through each finger, however many taps and cycles you need and at the same time take a deep breath in through your nose for the count of 4 and out through your mouth with pursed lips, for the count of 6; or longer.

I like to call this Ninja Tapping or Stealth Tapping because you can do this in the supermarket or the children can do this under their desk in school and no one will see them doing it.

Try it now…

As you tap and breathe bring your focus of attention to this and only this, notice how the body relaxes, your shoulders will drop and your mind goes still.

Our mental and emotional health is as important as our physical health. We need all three in balance to experience a positive and healthy life and there are a lot of amazing tools out there that can help. We have a Positive Parenting online course that is free at the moment if you fancy that or if you would like any more info or have any questions then please get in touch I'd be happy to help.

​Big Love,

​Trish,
Founder of WiggleBums, NLP Master, Trainer and Integration Therapist

Mindfulness is about recognising what you are feeling in the present moment and naming that. Staying in contact with what is happening right here right and now and allowing oneself to feel all of that.

This is something that has been conditioned out of us as children. 

For many of us our BIG emotions, tantrums, or times of struggle could not be handled by our significant others and were stopped through various methods from chocolate biscuits, to be separated from the rest of the family to being chastised, belittled, shouted at or even slapped. 

We were taught that who we are in our times of despair was too much, we were unloveable, not likeable and as such, we needed to suppress, hide, distract and not feel those feelings or voice our upset. When all along the person who ought to have been guiding us just did not have the skills in place to do so. 

What a different landscape it will be when our children have grown in an environment with a mindful practice as the cornerstone of life.

When we give our children space, support and guidance to be and work through their difficult experience it's amazing how fast they move through.

When they are not given this space and the experience isn't allowed to be felt, acknowledged and understood and so gets stuck and will keep getting played out until adulthood in the hope that it will eventually be understood, healed and cleared.

Rather than focusing on getting rid of any negative thoughts and feelings mindfulness offers an opportunity for you to lean in safely and with intention working through those big emotions, thoughts or behaviour and clearing it once and for all.

WiggleBums & Mindset Matters Weekly Mindfulness classes x

Your mindset determines your experience of the world and impacts throughout all areas of life. It affects your motivation and productivity and will invade all key life areas from relationships to finance.

It is an essential building block to growing self-esteem and self-worth and will be the difference to succeeding at something or not. It affects our daily self-dialogue, that internal voice and plays a critical role in how you cope with life's challenges and setbacks and reinforces our most intimate beliefs, attitudes and feelings about ourselves. 

When a child is brought up with an 'I Can - I Am' attitude life's challenges are just that, challenges, that they can discover how to work through and overcome. Their resilience grows as does their self-esteem and confidence. They believe in themselves and their abilities, that they have a place in this world, that they deserve to be here and that it is o.k to shine.

Their positive growth mindset shows in what they choose to do and be.

When a child is brought up within an 'I Can't - I Fail' environment when they haven't been allowed to make decisions for themselves, been constantly criticised for getting it wrong or not been given the space to have a go at life with an 'everything is a learning' attitude, they will find life's challenges too much. Their resilience suffers as does their self-esteem and confidence. They lack belief in themselves and their abilities and it shows in what they choose to do or don't do.

The brain adapts to the environment that it has and will respond perfectly to it. Some brains grow in a loving, conscious, happy environment and so it will be shaped to respond to that.

Other's will be living with violence, the constant risk of being attacked either verbally or physically or both and it will adapt to that.

In the latter a combination of freeze, fight or fly will be the preferred mode of protection. A child may withdraw and play it small to scared to put themselves out there, some may be in fight mode or on the defence. Whichever it is, the brain is working in direct response to their upbringing, what they have been told to believe about themselves and the world around and is working perfectly to protect themselves at all times. Both of these mindsets will be re-enforced over time through experience and will determine how they live their life.

A mindset is developed by the projections, judgements and assumptions of significant others and reinforced through experience...

• Parents
• Teachers
• Friends
• Enemy's
• Religion
• School
• Books
• Films
• Social Media
  

What you put in you get out!

Children will only ever live up to our expectations of them and so it's up to us to help create a positive growth mindset by being aware of;​

• How we speak to children
• How we speak about them
• What we think of them
• What we expect from them
• Our judgments and opinions of them

By becoming aware and consciously deciding on how we respond to children we can then create the space to start establishing a new way of speaking and being.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog about language and how we can structure our sentences to have a positive impact on the children in our care.

If you can't wait for that then you can use the code PositiveParenting1 at checkout to grab the Mindset Matters online course - Now only £37 until Midnight Sunday 26th April.​

Big Love,

​Trish x

My eldest is nearly 18 and I so wish I knew then what I know now. Although, to be fare it has seen us navigate the teenage years relatively unscathed!. My daughter is 5 and has been raised on this technique, that quite literally changed our lives! 

I didn’t realise how important language actually is in influencing people’s behaviour until I started to put it into practice. It was a challenge at the beginning, because we are all, to one degree or another, brought up in a similar fashion when it comes to language and the words that our chosen to speak with our children. I believe this technique is revolutionary and everyone who cares for children ought to be taught it as it benefits both children and adults alike.

Simply put, we need to ask our children what we DO want of them and not what we don’t. The brain at this age is very undeveloped and hasn’t learnt to recognise ‘negatives’ such as ‘don’t’ ‘try’ and ‘stop’. They are just making sense of language and what it all means and we take it for granted that they can interpret what we are asking from them. So when we ask them to do something we actually DON’T want them to do it is all very confusing. We are asking them to work out not only the words and their meaning but also what it is exactly we are asking of them to do. It’s much easier to deliver a straight forward, positive command; for example:

“If you don't eat your tea you won’t get any pudding”

The command they are hearing is ‘eat your tea and you won’t get any pudding’ 

See how confusing this is for them and the focus is on not getting any pudding! 

Flip it to:

”Eat your tea and you can have some pudding”

Another example:

“If you don’t get your shoes on we won’t go too the park”

They are hearing ‘get your shoes on and we won’t go to the park’

Flip to:

”Get your shoes on and we can go to the park’

“Don’t run!”

​They hear ‘RUN’

Flip to

’Walk’

“Don’t spill that!”

They hear ‘Spill that’ 

Flip to

”Keep the water in the cup’

You will be surprised just how many times a day we command our children to do the stuff we DON’T want them to do and they, in their innocent way responds perfectly; by doing it. So start to ‘FLIP’ your language for the opposite and positive, what you DO want them to do and see how your lives blossom. Ask your self “What is it that I really want them to do?” Because remember, our children only ever want to please and do what is asked of them and will always live up to your expectations of them; no matter how low or high that is. They are only after praise and love and kindness and connection and clear direction. This technique wraps all of that up and helps create a super positive growth mindset for both you and your child which will have a huge impact for years to come.

If you feel too, I’d love to hear how this changes your daily experience; please share in the thread.

Big Love,

Trish, WiggleBums/Kids Founder x

By Patricia Maddalena, Founder of WiggleBums/Kids and Integration Therapist at www.livingfree.eu

I really wanted to share something with you that I learnt on my WiggleBums training it has had a dramatic influence on my life this week.

So the story starts last week when my daughter stepped into her power and point blank refused to take a bath and wash her hair when I asked. We’d been camping she was all kinds of grubby and her hair was in one matted dreadlock at the back of her head! I thought, in my wisdom, that the best way to deal with this was to wash her hair and smother it with conditioner to remove the knots. She did not agree and let me know in no uncertain terms that she did not want to bath. I took a breath!  All my heckles were up and I could feel my anger building. We were in a hurry I didn’t have time for an argument. I asked her what she needed so she would be ready to take a bath. She said she was hungry. “Hoorah” I thought, and immediately scrambled down stairs found a cracker and some hummus and brought it back to her. Her response  of “I don’t want that!” sent me into orbit. Luckily my husband saw the escalation and stepped in so I could go to another room and breath deeply before she got it with both barrels.

I calmed down, she apologised and you would of thought that would have been the end of it. But no. Two or three days later she came into the office while I was working bringing me a wooden heart I’d made for her a couple of years earlier, that normally hung from her wardrobe door handle. I had written I love you on it.  She handed it to me and said “ You should have this back I don’t deserve it.” I looked confused. She carried on; “I was really rude to you the other day so I don’t get to have this any more.” It was at that point I realised how much of an effect our argument had had on her.

​She believed that her rudeness had stopped me loving her. I couldn’t believe it. In my adult mind the argument over bath time was nothing. A small blip in an otherwise pleasant day. To her it had removed my love and made her unworthy of it. This is where my training kicked in. I realised I needed to let her know in no uncertain terms that I loved her, every bit of her, even the bits that shouted at me and were grubby and had knots in their hair. I sat her down and tried to explain that just because I was cross it didn’t mean I didn’t love her I just wanted her to have a bath. I explained I loved EVERY bit of her and she responded with. You don’t love the bit that makes my room messy or the bit that got slime on the carpet or the bit that doesn’t like going to bed. She had a huge long list of bits I didn’t love. I felt heart broken that she felt like this. I needed her to see it from my point of view. So I tried again. How was I going to do this without agreeing she could have a messy bedroom and not wash her hair and stay up all night??? 
Then it came to me. Something I’d heard in my training. I do love all the bits of you I said. I just don’t always agree with the choices you make. We all make choices all the time and sometimes your choices and my choices are different but that doesn’t mean I don’t love you. With that she seemed satisfied. Retrieved her heart and wondered off singing a greatest showman tune. Later that day she tested me again. As she lay on the floor and refused to get up to go and clean her teeth she asked; “what about this bit do you love this bit?’ I love you I replied just not digging the dirty teeth choice. She smiled got up and went and brushed her teeth. Hopefully I’ve redeemed myself a bit and helped her to understand me a bit better.

Love Tracy WiggleBums/Kids Monmouth x

http://www.wigglebums.uk/monmouth.html