From conception to birth a child is following a spiritual mission that is the task of the I being or True Self. The mission is the intent of the spiritual entity that lives between lives.

Between birth and 18 months, a child looks to adults as powerful representatives of the divine or spiritual world from which he/she has just emerged.

After 18 months, life begins to present compliance conundrums to the child that require adjustments to fundamental soul impulses. The spiritual mission is obscured as the personality forms a mask that is a combination of the mission and the compliance adjustments needed to keep in the good graces of the divine (powerful) adults on who the child is dependent.

As the mission recedes in memory the child develops fears of not being successful in life. As a result of this fear, the soul gesture is to pull back from life.  Carl Jung says that the child learns to fear life.

At the change of teeth (7 to 9), adults no longer represent the divine world but are still secretly envied (or feared) because they have mastered skills that have allowed them to engage in life without pulling back. The most important thing an adult can give to a child is the assurance that the adult is striving to have their own life make sense. This is ironic because the adult who has found ways to be socially engaging and compliant with life’s challenges often finds that the skills that they have accrued to be active in life have caused their life to become senseless. This is because the skills don’t seem to link to the spiritual mission. This causes a fear of death in the adult. The fear is that the adult will die before finding their spiritual mission in their life. To die without realizing the spiritual mission in one’s life is to lead a senseless life. If an adult conveys senselessness in life to a child then the child will let fear become the primary learning modality in childhood rather than the learning processes linked to integration. Fear disintegrates the linkage between the soul and the spirit and strengthens the linkage between the body and the soul. In order for the adult to find a sense of self in life, the adult must unlink the fear-based linkages between body and soul and relink again to the mission. This means going through the fears in the personality that have been put into place in order to become compliant and replacing them with higher skills that develop the sense that the adult is in connection with the spiritual mission in the soul.

These milestones in the life of the soul are mirrored in the neuroanatomy of the brain. They are also mirrored in the many myths and fairy tales that describe the journey from the spirit down into life and back again. This is the hero/ heroine journey that is the source of all archetypes of human existence. This correlation between myths, neuroanatomy, and human life experience is the foundation of the say, see, do process.

Here is a list of twelve narrative themes that can be used to begin a dialogue with a child that centers on the adult having a sense of meaning about life. (from Dan Siegal in Parenting from the Inside Out)

• Where did you grow up?
• Who was in the family unit?
• Who were you closest to?
• Find five words to describe your relationship with your family of origin as a whole.
• Describe the separation mode/timing between you and your family as you matured.
• Were you stressed by a person in your family?
• Were you threatened by anyone in your family?
• Were there losses in your family?
• What were the changes over time in your family?
• What was the key influence on your development?
• Who were the significant persons who influenced your development and how were they influential in your life?
• What would you wish for your child beyond what you had?