I am a mother. A kindergarten teacher. A woman learning to come back home to her own body and her own life.
In my process, I’ve done all kinds of therapies and courses, and lately, I kept hearing Gabor Maté talk about attunement. Rationally, I understood the concept, but I didn’t internalize it on a personal level. Until…
A few days ago, I witnessed a scene that touched me more deeply than I could have imagined. One of my sons was playing with a three-year-old girl. He, very energetic, expansive, with his dinosaur games, hunting, noise.
She, quiet, almost always close to an adult. She wasn’t agitated, didn’t run, but seemed to prefer watching and listening.
At one point, my son said:
“I’m a dinosaur! I catch bunnies!”
I smiled at first, until I saw the little girl tense up. She didn’t say anything. Her face just changed. Her eyes lowered, her body withdrew slightly.
And my son saw it. He felt it. He stopped. He went silent. After a few seconds, he continued:
“I catch bunnies… to play with them.”
The little girl raised her eyebrow, checked with her soul:
“Are you a friendly dinosaur?”
“Yes,” he answered.
And from that moment, something relaxed. They kept playing. They laughed. They got close. They played with that magic only children know how to access when they feel safe.
Later, the little girl was the one attuning to my boys’ game and started chasing them, growling like a bear.
I felt I had just witnessed a lesson in attunement, passed on with no lectures, no theories, no textbooks.
Just through presence.
…Just through presence.
Just through that invisible thread that ties two beings when one says: “I see you. I feel you. I respect your rhythm.”
Tears came to my eyes. Because, in a way, I felt like I was watching a scene I had never experienced as a child.
I remembered myself, the quiet little girl who withdrew when the world became too much, too loud, too unpredictable.
No one ever asked me if I was scared, if I felt safe.
No one ever stopped to attune to me.
And now, decades later, right in front of my eyes, my son is doing what no one ever did for me.
He feels another soul.
He observes it.
He respects it.
He soothes it.
Without me ever telling him, without explaining what “attunement” means, without giving him a complicated vocabulary.
In that moment, I felt the chain break.
That the wound didn’t get passed on.
That my inner work, all the therapy sessions, all the pain faced and wept through, all the fears confronted… bore fruit.
Not in a speech. Not in an article. But in a child’s choice to become a friendly dinosaur.
And I knew that’s where true healing begins.
Not when I perfectly understand the concepts.
But when I instinctively choose to be gentle.
When I become a safe space for someone else.
When I transform the world, not with words, but with small, almost invisible gestures that change everything.
Attunement is not about doing.
It’s about being.
Being with the other. With all that they are.
No rush. No correction. No urge to change them.
Just to see them.
To feel them.
To receive them.
Just like, maybe unknowingly, my little boy received me when he stopped.
And showed me that everything I ever dreamed was possible, is.
And it begins here.
At home.
In a game of dinosaurs and bunnies.