Parenting with Presence - Nervous System Wisdom for Everyday Challenges

Parenting with Presence: Nervous System Wisdom for Everyday Challenges

Saturday, May 2 - 2:00–4:00 pm - at Yogakula
With Kate Munding & Julie Johnson

Parenting at any age can be deeply meaningful—and at times profoundly challenging. Whether you’re navigating toddler tantrums, school-age defiance, adolescent shutdowns, or the emotional intensity of teens and young adults, moments of dysregulation can leave parents feeling reactive, helpless, or disconnected from the relationship they care so deeply about. This experiential workshop offers parents a compassionate, neuroscience-informed understanding of what’s happening beneath big emotions—at every stage of development—and practical tools for responding with clarity, steadiness, and connection.

Together, we’ll explore how the nervous system shapes behavior for both children and parents across the lifespan. You’ll learn why reasoning often fails when emotions run high, how stress and unresolved past experiences influence our reactions as adults, and why co-regulation—rather than control, fixing, or force—is the foundation for emotional resilience, trust, and long-term relationship health. When parents understand what’s happening in the brain and body during moments of conflict or shutdown, new possibilities for response emerge.

Through guided discussion, breathwork, reflection, and paired sharing, participants will learn tools can be used in the heat of the moment—during conflict, resistance, or emotional overwhelm—as well as ongoing practices that build resilience, emotional balance, and secure connection within the parent–child relationship over time.

This workshop is for parents and caregivers of children of all ages—from toddlers to teens and beyond—who want to:

• Better understand their child or teen’s emotional world
• Respond more skillfully to defiance, shutdown, reactivity, or emotional intensity
• Reduce power struggles and reactive parenting patterns
• Stay more grounded and regulated during stressful interactions
• Strengthen trust, safety, and connection in their relationships
• Gain practical, trauma-informed tools they can use immediately

Participants will leave with a clearer understanding of their own nervous system, concrete strategies for supporting their child at any developmental stage, and the reassurance that challenges in parenting are not a sign of failure—but an invitation to deepen connection, understanding, and resilience together.

About the Teachers

Kate Munding is a Guiding Teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center and serves on the Spirit Rock Guiding Teachers Council. She is the guiding teacher for Assaya Sangha, a women’s Buddhist meditation community in the San Francisco East Bay, and teaches retreats, daylongs, and Family Programs at Spirit Rock and other retreat centers. Kate has been a mindfulness educator in schools since 2008 and is the co-founder and lead teacher of Now Children, an online professional development community supporting educators and mindfulness teachers bringing mindfulness to kids. Her work is rooted in the belief that mindfulness is a transformative practice for both personal and collective healing. Kate is also a mother to a young son and lives with her family in the East Bay.

Julie Johnson is a parent coach and educator with over 20 years of experience supporting children and families as a teacher, educational researcher, and parent coach. She works with parents of children of all ages—from toddlers through teens—to reduce power struggles, defiance, and emotional overwhelm, helping parents become calmer and more confident in their role. Julie holds a master’s degree in education with a specialization in social and emotional learning and uses a positive, attachment-based, trauma-informed approach grounded in Hand in Hand Parenting. Her work is informed by both professional expertise and lived experience, including parenting in a blended family. Julie believes deeply that no parent should have to figure this out alone—and that with the right support and tools, family relationships can become more resilient, connected, and nourishing over time.

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