In this Conversations With Healers episode, my guest is my 7-year-old daughter Eda Aktekin, an artist, storyteller, cat and unicorn lover, and passionate nature and Earth advocate. I wanted to have this conversation with Eda to capture her 7-year-old wisdom and light, and to honor the essence of ‘mom’ in all of us. Eda had a lot to say about:
- how healing means taking care of nature for her,
- why she loves art and the beauty of creating something based on your imagination (like caticorns aka cat unicorns with wings),
- her favorite way to make art (think of your favorite animal and make it more fun by adding rainbows and unicorns),
- her process for writing stories and how she adds problems into her stories to make them more interesting, and what cupcakes can teach us about finishing stories,
- what she thinks I do in my healing work,
- what points you can use for a simplified acupressure tapping for kids, and when to use tapping,
- her definition of meditation = doing stuff that you like,
- how she switches her thinking and the stories in her mind when something upsetting happens, and how she doesn’t believe any people or stories that make her not feel good,
- what to do when people around you are mean or upset, and how it has nothing to do with you,
- what she recommends me to be a better parent,
- what she is looking forward to this summer (including this Turkish food),
- what we can do to be happy and to enjoy our summer,
- and what she recommends us to do to be kind to the Earth and the environment.
My favorite healing nugget from Eda is “(People are mean to each other) because they just don’t have a good day. It’s something about them, not us. You can ask what’s wrong or you can just try to ignore it. Maybe talking to the person could make it worse. Wait a few weeks or days and then maybe come back and talk to the person.”
You can find out more about Eda’s art on her Instagram page @artbyeda. You can see lots of examples of caticorns, unicorns and Eda’s love of color in her art.
With this special episode, I would like to wish a happy Mother’s day to you regardless of whether you are a biological mom or not, or regardless of whether you are a female or not. I invite you to honor that part of you that is nurturing, nourishing, and care-taking for you and others. And if you are in the process of making peace with your mother and your mother wounds, or mourning the loss of your physical mother, I hope that you can bring to life that part of you that already knows how to mother yourself.
Eda and I found a wonderful little book called ‘Mom, I wrote a book about you‘. It has lots of little writing prompts that she completed for me. One of my favorite ones is ‘If I had to get scientific about it, I’d say you’re made up of equal parts: (written by Eda) love, meditation and heart’. You can find this book at this link.
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With love and light,
Damla
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