The Awakened Parent

An Awakened Parent is a Thriving Parent. A Thriving Parent is an Awakened Parent.

I want to tell you where I’m writing this from.

Not a place. A state.

I am sitting in something I genuinely did not believe existed for most of my life — a steady, quiet fullness. Inspired purpose. Real connection. Community. A self-respect and a self-love I spent decades without.

Excitement for the road ahead.

If you’d described this version of me to the man in the garage, the man in the car at the turnout, the man representing himself in court with nothing left — he wouldn’t have believed you. He couldn’t have. He didn’t have eyes for it yet.

I came to this place from anger. From rage, isolation, brokenness, and a bone-deep lostness. And I did not walk a straight line to get here. It was crooked and slow.

I fell more times than I can count. I got addicted. I got clean. I fell in love. I got divorced. I fell in love again. I got used. I got played. I got messy. I got organized. I ate healthy. I ate junk. I stopped eating. I woke up soaked in sweat too many times to count. I felt alone, so alone. I saw darkness with no light in sight. I watched “family” disappear. I watched people who loved me turn their back on me. I moved my kids 9 times. I watched my credit fall from 800 to 397 (i didn’t even know it could go that low haha). I built my credit. Again, I watched it fall. I went to court so many times. I don’t know if any of the judges ever saw or heard me. I don’t know if any of them cared about my children. I opened my eyes on many mornings, so disappointed that I was still here. I daydreamed and fantasized about not having to carry my bag any longer.

But here I am, in a life better than I knew was possible.

And I have to tell you the truth about how I feel writing that, because it would be dishonest to pretend I’m composed right now. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude. It has taken twice the amount of time to write this chapter due to all the tears I found myself having to navigate. So many people were patient with me while I found my way — The LDS Church. Santa Barbara & Goleta School Districts. The United Way. Catholic Charities. The poor guys and girls I played basketball against over these years–but none more than my kids.

Izzie. Rocco. Bodhi. Frankie. Blu. All of them. They waited for me while I woke up. They loved me from behind the wall I hadn’t learned to take down yet. And they never stopped being exactly, perfectly who they are.

That’s what this last chapter is about. It’s about the parent who wakes up. And I can tell you that everything you’ve read in this book has been leading here — to you, in your own life, coming home.

Let me say something plainly that I’ve only pointed at until now, because you’ve earned it.

Almost all of us are cooking somebody else’s recipe.

You know the one. Get good grades so you can get into a good school. Get the degree so you can get the good job. Climb the ladder. Make the money. Find someone who ran the same recipe. Buy the house. Do this. Don’t do that. Stay away from this. Go find more of that. And on, and on.

It’s handed to us so early and so completely that we never think to ask whether it actually works.

So let’s ask. Because we have the data now.

Never in human history have more people followed that recipe — and never have more people been medicated, anxious, empty, and worse. The recipe we were all handed, the one we’ve been chasing our whole lives, does not deliver the thing it promised. It does not lead to a life people report back on as successful and fulfilling. For enormous numbers of people who followed it perfectly, it led somewhere much darker.

I don’t think the problem is that people aren’t following the recipe well enough. I think the recipe is wrong. It was built to produce good workers and good consumers, not whole human beings. And I think somewhere inside, you’ve always known that — it’s part of what made everything feel so heavy. There was this quiet sense that you were doing what you were told and it still wasn’t adding up.

The awakened parent stops running the recipe that was never going to work. And picks up the pen.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe we’re actually here for. Not the ladder. Not the 6-pack abs. Not the followers, fame, or fortune. Not the accumulation. Not being perceived as successful or powerful.

I believe we’re here to evolve — as beings, as souls, whatever word doesn’t make you flinch. To wake up to what we actually are. Unique, creative light Be’ings of love having a human experience. And I believe almost everything else we chase is, in the end, a distraction from that one real assignment.

I’ll say a word about the “something more” underneath all this, and I’m going to be careful with the language, because the usual words divide people and I don’t want to lose you at the finish line. I’m going to call it the Intelligence. You can call it God, the universe, Heavenly Father / Mother, Life, nature, Source, or nothing at all. In Alcoholics Anonymous, some old-timers tell the newbies who struggle with “the God word/concept” that their GOD can be the (G)roup (O)f (D)runks — use whatever word doesn’t make you cringe. Here, I am referring to the something that is clearly running things you did not author. The Intelligence that has beaten your heart since before you were born, without you ever once instructing it. The Source of creation that grew your entire body from two cells. The Heavenly Father / Mother that made you and the stars from the elements sourced from a supernova explosion. That is, right now, doing ten thousand things inside you that you take no credit for and could not begin to manage.

Here’s the awakened parent’s great discovery:

You are not separate from that Intelligence, out here alone, forcing your life into shape by willpower. You are an expression of it.

And the most fulfilling shift I know of — the crown of this whole journey — is when you stop trying to control your life against that Intelligence, and start co-creating your life with it. You bring the direction. It brings a wisdom and a flow far beyond your small planning mind. You point the boat; it moves the river. Together you make something neither could alone.

And when people touch that — when they really taste it — they don’t come back describing what they got. I’ve watched people receive things they’d chased their whole lives, and to a person, they don’t talk about the thing. They talk about a feeling. I felt whole. I felt full. I felt loved. I felt like I'd come home. Because that was always what we were actually after. Not the house, not the life we’d have when we were 20 lbs less, not the fix, not the milestone, not the gold medal. Wholeness. And wholeness was never at the end of the recipe. It was underneath everything, the entire time, waiting for us to stop running long enough to feel it. Wholeness wasn’t that “hole” in your chest finally filled with a washboard stomach, the right job title, or a vacation home with an ocean view. You dont get to add the “W” to the “hole” in your chest by getting your non-verbal child to speak or your special needs child potty trained.

Underneath it all — beneath the striving, the grief, the story, the fear — there is just this: love, and awareness, and the incredible experience of being alive. That’s the ground. That’s home. That’s what you are, and what your child is, and what you both always were. You get to add the “W” in front of the “hole” in your chest by realizing you are love, aware of the piece of life you’re fortunate to have the opportunity to experience.

Again, I share one of my favorite quotes from Mooji, “The place you are looking for is the place from which you are looking.”

Take a moment and recall your journey: as a child, teenager, when you were a part of a particular group or home, all by yourself. Remember back to learning about being pregnant and the day the nurse handed you your child……To the diagnosis and the different experiences and relationships that happened along the way……. Under these experiences, “wholeness” existed. For many of us, we allowed the experience to create a “hole.”

You’ve done the work. You paid your dues. You focused on what matters. Whether you have a 6-pack or not changes nothing. You are already there. “The place you are looking for is the place you are looking from.” You can’t unsee what you’ve now seen. It’s time to celebrate! Not the milestone, not because you possess this knowledge known by so few. Celebrate life! Celebrate Love! Celebrate your child. Celebrate the gift of awareness.

There are zillions of planets. Most of them consist of dirt as far as we’re able to see. You got dropped on the only planet we know of with so much going on. You were given the gift of awareness. Enjoy all there is to see and experience.

Be the Love that you are. Watch how your experience brightens with your loved ones when you show up “whole,” present with a recipe you wrote that was created from this place of love and fulfillment.

I want to give you something you can do right now, today. It’s small, and it changed everything for me.

Take a napkin. A scrap of paper. Anything.

Write the word REACTION.

And underneath it, write the word CREATION.

Now look at them. Really look.

They’re the same letters. The exact same raw material. Creation is reaction, rearranged.

That’s the whole thing. That’s this entire book on a napkin. You were handed a set of letters — your life, your pain, your child, your programming, your story. And you have spent a great deal of your life arranging them into reaction — into fear, defense, survival, the same patterns running the same way. Awakening is not getting a different set of letters. You don’t get new letters. Almost no one does. Awakening is discovering that the very same material — nothing added, nothing taken away — can be arranged into creation instead. Now let’s dive even deeper into this change in the way we view the same letters/life. In “reaction,” you don’t “c” (see) until the day is moving at 100 miles an hour and all it seems you’re doing is putting out fires. On the other hand, when you act as the creator of your life, “Creation” has you “C’ing (Seeing) before acting, which means your action is centered around your vision….your recipe….your life for you and your family.

Your child’s diagnosis. Your hardest year. The thing you’ve been calling your tragedy. Same letters. And you, the awakened parent, are the one who gets to rearrange them.

I will speak for myself, and I never thought this would be possible, but for me the tragedy became the gift. The gift has led me here. The river has connected our paths.

(If you do this — if you see something in it — I would genuinely love to hear about it. You can write me at chad@roccoblu.com. I mean that. I read them, and I love knowing where people are on this road.)

So here we are. The end of the book.

And I have to tell you about the strangest part of my own journey, because it’s the reason for what comes next.

When I reached this place — awake, alive, inspired in a way I’d never felt — I didn’t want it to end. And I looked around for the next step, and there wasn’t one. There was no map for where I was going, because I was forging a path that didn’t exist yet. The next step was there, I think — I just couldn’t see it. It was invisible to me. And I had to summon it out of nothing but an inner calling.

I can’t fully measure what that did — that combination of being lit up with purpose and having no clear next step in front of me. But I know it’s a great deal of what birthed RoccoBlu. I built the thing I wish someone had handed me at that exact moment.

So I’m not going to leave you standing at that same edge with nothing.

There’s an Invisible Chapter to this book. It was always here — you just couldn’t see it yet, the same way I couldn’t see mine. And it’s where the real work of the awakened parent begins: not reading anymore, not learning a new model, but building.

Because here’s what happens when you wake up. The old obstructions come down, the stories lose their grip, and you find yourself sitting in front of a blank canvas — free, maybe for the first time, to design a life that’s actually true to you. Not the world’s recipe. Yours.

I call it The RoccoBlu Recipe — and I named it after my kids on purpose. Rocco and Blu live from a place most of us spent our whole lives trying to get back to: pure, unmanipulated, uncompeting joy. They don’t perform. They don’t compare. They don’t want what someone else has. They are simply, completely themselves. They are the truest teachers I’ve ever had in the art of being authentically who you are — and that is exactly the spirit your own recipe gets written from. Not a prescription I hand you. A life you design, from the same pure and honest place they live in naturally. I encourage you to stay conscious of who you truly are as you take these invisible steps. You do not have to do anything to be loved. You do not have to achieve anything to feel free. You are Freedom & Love itself. The only thing that has changed is you’ve removed that (the lens, blind spot, old story, past-down prejudice, judgement, etc.) which stood in the way of you seeing your true nature.

The Invisible Chapter is where you build it. You’ll design your own daily, weekly, and monthly practices — your own rhythm, your own time blocks, your own way of living — the recipe that turns everything you’ve learned here into a life you’re genuinely proud of. Two tools are waiting to help you do it: Life Design, inside the app, where you build your recipe alongside a whole community of parents designing theirs — with support, connection, and the room to go deeper. And a Self-Mastery Tool Kit you can hold in your hands if you’d rather start on paper. Either way, the pen is yours.

To start, just sit with these three:

What would my life look like if it were designed from who I actually am — not from the recipe I was handed?

What does a great day feel like for me — not perfect, but great — and what small practice could bring more of them?

If I trusted the Intelligence to handle the “how,” what direction would I point my life in?

And when you’re ready to go all the way — to take this new way of seeing and truly reprogram the old patterns at the root — there’s a next step called RoccoBlu Rewire. It’s the integration phase: where you hunt down the remaining blind spots, release the last of the stories that were never true, and begin rebuilding your subconscious from your unlimited nature, instead of from whatever got handed to you when you were far too young to choose it. But that’s for when you’re ready. There’s no rush. The river will get you there.

For now, I just want to say thank you.

Thank you for walking through the hardest rooms of my life with me — the garage, the car, the bathroom floor, the courtroom, the red dress. I didn’t share them to be admired. I shared them because I needed you to know that the person telling you there’s a way through has actually been where you are. Maybe not your exact circumstances. But the darkness, the aloneness, the sense that this was all just too much. I’ve been there. And I found a door. And I spent this whole book trying to hand you the key.

You are not broken. You never were. You are whole. An unlimited being who was handed a hard set of letters — and you are about to discover what you can create with them.

Your child is not a tragedy. Your life is not a tragedy. Your child may turn out to be the very thing that woke you up.

And this ending? It was never an ending. It’s the first blank page of the life you get to design.

I can’t wait to see what you build.

With all my love and gratitude, Chad

This is the last chapter of the book — but not the end of the road. Find your way into the Invisible Chapter, and let’s keep walking together.