Daily Divine: Getting along with our parents.

If you’re over forty, you probably have some baggage with your parents.
 
For whatever reason, younger generations seem to have less angst about their folks; they have less trouble separating from mother and father.
 
However, for most of age 40 or over, there is deep learning curve surrounding the parental units.
 
And yet no matter what your childhood experience, even if it was difficult or even horrible, you begin to grow into a new understanding. 
 
As you do your inner work, you move from this place of absolute pain and anger and fear and rebellion against your parents, to a place of separate and independence, to a place of compassion.
 
In some cases, your parents are declining, and, you have become the adult as your parent is moving toward the stages of toddler and babyhood.
 
Even for parents who are nowhere near that: who’s minds are still sharp as a tack, who are making decisions and living their lives… we discover that we feel differently about them than we once did.
 
It’s not about us becoming the adult, and they the child
It’s not about them becoming helpless, and we need to take care of them.
 
It’s about us doing our inner work, and slowly but surely coming to a place of compassion for this person who has held space as our parent.

We see them our parents as individuals, the same way we see our partner, our child, our friend, our colleague.
 
All the old strum und drang goes away.
 
We see them in full compassion for all the experiences they’ve had, good and bad, all of the pain they’ve had, all the pain they’ve caused, what they’ve worked through, what they haven’t  worked through.
 
And instead of putting them on this Parent Pedestal, we bring them into our hearts, simply as another soul on the path.
 
You might not have turned the corner yet to compassion for your parent. It might take a lifetime to get there. But when you do, you know that you have cracked open into a new place.  

​Much love, SARA