The Peaceful Parenting Podcast · Sarah Rosensweet

Big Feelings and Mindfulness with Hunter Clarke-Fields: Episode 216

·40 min·2 clips

Hunter says mindfulness practice builds non-reactivity by helping feelings come and go.

1. The Peaceful Parenting Podcast episode with Sarah Rosenzweig and Hunter Clarke-Fields focuses on taking care of difficult feelings in parenting. 2. Hunter Clarke-Fields appears as a mindfulness teacher, parenting expert, host of the Mindful Mama podcast, and author of Raising Good Humans. 3. The episode asks how parents can stay peaceful when their own feelings and their children's feelings are intense. 4. Hunter says she first read about mindfulness as a teenager because she was a highly sensitive person with big ups and downs. 5. She describes a later sitting meditation practice that changed how she experienced overwhelm and kept her from feeling floored by difficult emotions. 6. Hunter connects that change to her first pregnancy, when she imagined a calm child and then learned that parenting was not something she could control with expectations. 7. She says her daughter Maggie was intense from the beginning, with an intense birth, intense babyhood, and intense emotional storms. 8. Hunter names two common responses to difficult feelings: blocking them and becoming flooded by them. 9. She gives examples of blocking that include the instruction not to cry, chocolate, drinking, phone scrolling, shopping, and over-busyness. 10. She says over-busyness is rewarded in society but can train people to avoid being present and to stay in future-oriented doing. 11. Hunter contrasts blocking with flooding, which can look like drowning in sadness, misery, shame, or anger that feels impossible to stop. 12. She uses a 'big hamburger' metaphor to describe what happens when feelings are shoved away without a way to digest them. 13. Hunter says Sharon Brown's research shows that people cannot selectively numb feelings and that numbing blocks both painful and joyful experiences. 14. She explains that willpower alone did not stop her own yelling and that changing her reactions required building new habit energy over time. 15. Hunter says a child's temperament can require steadiness and rhythm from the parent, not just a wish to be gentle. 16. She describes mindful acceptance as sitting with a feeling, noticing body sensations, and saying 'yes' instead of 'no'. 17. Hunter says acceptance can reduce the grip of a feeling and sometimes make it go away completely. 18. She connects reflective listening to co-regulation, saying that when a parent is truly present, a child's stress can settle. 19. The episode has an interview format with practical examples, direct coaching language, and repeated references to Sarah's workshop and membership. 20. Parents who want concrete tools for anger, shutdown, or emotional reactivity will likely get the most from it.

As heard by us

Hunter Clark-Fields looks at why peaceful intentions can collapse into anger, and why steadier parenting takes practice.

The episode works through a familiar parenting bind: a parent can know the calmer response and still feel anger, yelling, or aggression take over.

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Why you'd press play

When the peaceful response you meant to give disappears in a hard moment, this helps you understand the feelings underneath without turning on yourself.

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