Struggling to love your parents!
While reflecting on a question that I was asked recently, I felt drawn to share it here. The question – ‘Why are we told to repair our relationship with our parents to heal from trauma? What if you don’t like your own mother/father? How do you reconcile?’
The simple answer to the question why is because we are deeply connected to our parents, they are a part of us. Whether we like them or not is immaterial. Not liking our parents, and not just our parents, but other members of our family, like our siblings, is similar to not liking parts of ourselves.
An integral part of our life purpose is to remember/learn to love all these different parts of ourselves. This is the path to reclaiming our wholeness to be able to live life with peace, love, joy, good health and prosperity – something most of us long for.
This is easier said than done though, especially if a difficulty exists in the relationship. Knowing something is easier than living it ie feeling it. Just because we are told to love our parents, is not enough to be able to feel the love.
For me, a daily spiritual practice helps to go within and figure out the way forward when I feel stuck or unable to move forward. It feels easier to love the part of me that is struggling to love the parents or someone else that I feel I ought to love. It feels easier to hold this part of me that is struggling with love and compassion, acknowledging that there is something painful, some difficulty, a wound perhaps, held in my being from the past.
It does not feel necessary to figure out the underlying cause. Trying to fix problems, ignoring them or running away from them does not seem to work either. It feels possible to transform difficulties with love.
Sometimes this approach can even help transform my feelings to gratitude from anger towards the person, gratitude for helping me to experience the difficulty and help this wound surface to my conscious awareness so that I do not have to keep experiencing it. Compassion and gratitude are different strands of love. It seems easier to feel compassion for the part of me that is struggling, than to feel it for another person.
For Reiki students, this question seems to be about the Principle – Honour your parents, teachers and elders.
For people interested in Astrology, I find it interesting that this question arose at this time of Sun in the sign of Cancer, the sign of home, family and feelings. Cancer is ruled by the Moon, the planet/star of emotions and inner self. To me, this indicates how tuned in this person is to Universal flow.
This is where I am at this time, on the journey of learning to love and heal. With continued daily practice of Reiki, Yoga, Soul Plan healing, I trust that more insights will surface in time. I find comfort from this quote when I find myself struggling with a relationship:
“You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday.
You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.”
― Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher
Hi Mamta,
I really loved your thoughts about what you do to reconcile with any untoward feelings that may arise towards your loved ones and appreciated what you practice by focusing on the ailing body part where you feel the stress arising when you think of that person. You then work on nurturing that body part and facilitate its healing through your practices. I also like the fact that you alluded to of not trying to reason why the arrow of pain is there, but rather to pull it out first so that it causes no more harm to oneself. For me, that part would be my chest and heart area where I experience a heaviness and tightness. After reading your thoughts, I have started focusing on the heart and chest regions when practicing Reiki.
My personal situation applies to a parent who currently lives with me, and is miserable and depressed primarily because the parent daughter roles are now reversed and the parent is unable to let down their ego to reconcile with this truth and move forward. It is also ironical that the son with whom the parent had the best relationship when we were growing up, is now unable to take the responsibility of being the caregiver due to family circumstances. Despite hearing negative things about myself from the parent I care for now, I have always been a loyal daughter and have saved her several times from spiraling down because as you’ve mentioned, we share a deep connection with our parents.
There’s a belief that we also choose our parents to fulfill our goals and aspirations, and thus, how can we harbor any ill-feelings towards them. But it is still extremely challenging to feel real compassion for a parent who has always said more negative things about oneself just because one wasn’t as intelligent as one’s sibling and had poor adjustment skills. I have had issues with my skin and my gut for my entire life, something my sibling didnt have and thus, yes, I was more “maladjusted”.
Nonetheless, I would never dump my parent as I just can’t bear the thought of sending the parent to an institution especially beacuse this is something the parent absolutely doesn’t want to happen in their lifetime. I actually like to take care of all the needs of the parent and would be happy if the parent were to express some gratitude verbally. It sounds very superficial to a bystander, but is helpful to me especially since I live in a culture where expressing gratitude either verbally or through body language is the norm.
I also found your comment on feeling gratitude for the surfacing stress very inspiring. We all try to suppress negative things in our life not realizing that they play a pivotal role in making sense of life and enable us to move forward better equipped. And I absolutely adored your remark about it being much easier to feel compassion for one’s ailing part rather than the other person whom we feel has wronged us.
But now I do ask you another question. Do you feel that working on one’s own afflicted area and bringing it healing enables us to truly transform the hostile feelings towards the other person? Some people say that autoimmune diseases that usually have no cure manifest from either past or current life unresolved trauma, and can be healed at a spiritual level by truly forgiving the person that we feel has inflicted harm upon us. We have to feel true compassion for the person we perceive as a perpetrator although they likely acted the way they did or do to alleviate their own suffering.
Thanks Mamta for sharing your precious thoughts and offering me some insights on how to deal with uncomfortable situations.
Dear Chetna
Thank you for the feedback and for such an open hearted sharing. It takes courage to share your vulnerability. And I really admire you for taking on the role of caring for your mother.
Interesting that you felt the connection with the ailing body part. You may find a previous blog post http://reikiwithmamta.com/reikiblog/2018/05/listening-to-the-body/ helpful for the physical body.
When I refer to parts of ourself, I mean the functional parts of my inner being, the part that is struggling to love the parent, for example. I feel being compassionate to these parts of my being, is one way to reclaim and integrate them, harvesting the gem that is hidden underneath the difficulty, moving forward on the path to reclaiming our wholeness.
I feel that there are many reasons/layers to autoimmune conditions. I do not know if this way of being will be enough to resolve the uncomfortable feelings or physical/health conditions. All I know is, feeling compassion for the part of me that is struggling to love/forgive, helps me to find peace in difficult moments, when I am suffering.
Hope this is helpful.
Dear Mamta,
I appreciate your thoughtful response and clarification about what you mean by the term “part of oneself” that I took literally while you meant it figuratively. I may go off topic a bit with what I speak of next, so I do apologize for that in advance.
I believe that the soul carries an imprint of past life experiences and if an autoimmune problem is present, it has to be some unresolved traumatic past life experience/exeriences that the soul underwent that is now manifesting in one’s present life. The body is a garment that houses the soul. Without the body that is capable of generating thoughts, feelings, and sensations, it is impossible to experience pain or joy. Suffering starts as soon as one is born although it will manifest at different times in different people. For me, even though it started early on through my skin and gut issues, and then burning the midnight oil to get A grades in school and college while my own brilliant sibling got the same results studying for a fraction of that time, my suffering seems much worse now because I see my parent suffer for no apparent reasons.
I feel like a failure at times as I am unable to offer the parent any relief despite hours of reasoning with them about why life is so good despite everything that has gone wrong, and lovingly helping the parent with their daily needs and concerns. The helping part of me is spontaneous and voluntary and doesn’t involve any grudges such as why should I have to take care of the parent when they had such a lovely relationship with my sibling growing up while always finding flaws with me. When I performed the last rites for my other beloved parent, I already knew that I was destined to be the new caregiver for the surviving parent. It was not by chance that I had the privilege of being with my deceased parent in their last moments.
While doing Reiki after responding to you the first time on this topic, an inner voice told me to give my parent a hug that I did after contemplating it for several hours. It did feel good though as the parent was more welcoming than they had been in the past when I tried to hug the parent. But of course, the parent still softens and smiles more when the parent is talking to my sibling and the sibling’s kids, and that is great because that is the most happy the parent appears today. I feel that it surely has something to do with the parent’s past lives when they likely developed a very loving closeness to my sibling that is unshakable with minor bumps. I have expressed several times to the sibling to call the parent as much as possible, but time and family constraints come in the way and thus the calls are only weekly. And how much can I pester. The sibling is an adult and should know better.
Since the only way to end suffering is to change one’s perception of what has occurred, my goal will be to accept how my parent is today and avoid resolving the problem for them. The parent is likely carrying a trauma from the past, and thus I should stop viewing myself as a failure. That might help keep my autoimmune skin condition in remission or it may not. I may have an unresolved past life trauma that I am not consciously aware of. I had tried a past-life regression session with the guidance of a hypotherapist, but I couldn’t be transported back to any past life experience within the time constraints of the session.
Thanks again Mamta for your time and patience. Best regards