Happy 4th of July! We hope you’re having a wonderful holiday.
At Cor, the month of July will be all about family.
We believe our healing journey with family, especially with our parents, is one of the keys to living a meaningful, awake and loving life. In fact, I personally think there is no real inner peace for any of us until we make peace with our family of origin.
For most of us this is not so easy. And I know that some of you had really tough, and maybe even abusive, childhoods. I understand that personally, as my own childhood was far from perfect, and I also experienced abuse and neglect. My mother was a raging alcoholic all of my childhood and teenage years, and my father was too immature to deal with it.
My parents were born at the end of WWII, and experienced horrors I can’t even imagine in their first few years in life. They were also deeply traumatized by their own parent’s trauma. They never received help dealing with any of this, and then I came along when they were just entering their twenties.
But I didn’t understand any of this until much later. It took me many years of therapy and workshops, and countless pages of journal writing, to heal. Then in my mid-thirties, after a lot of skilled guidance towards fully feeling my own pain, I actually felt their pain, frustration and bitterness, and started to build compassion for them. Slowly, true forgiveness emerged to a point where I authentically, and not as a mental concept, could forgive them for the harm they caused me. That’s when my love for them really came forth, not from sentimentality or a sense of duty as their daughter, but from a deep reservoir of my inner being that I could now access since there wasn’t so much unhealed stuff covering it.
Yet, another level of love was waiting to be tapped into. It dawned on me that this particular mother and this particular father were the perfect parents for me! On a primal level, it was simply because without them I would not be here. I am literally made from their bodies, we share the same DNA, and I exist only because of them. When I really let that in, something big opened in me.
On an even more profound, and more spiritual, level I realized I wouldn’t be the teacher, the healer, the guide for other’s transformation that I am now without them and our journey together. In fact, I believe it is only through my own difficult childhood that I can now be with the suffering of my brothers and sisters on the path in a compassionate and non-
My young parents loved me as much as they could, and now as they are older they express their love as much as they are capable of, and that is enough for me. I now truly don’t need them to be any different than they are, and actually find their little quirks and imperfections endearing. I am just so grateful I get to be with them in this new state of being before they leave this Earth.
I so appreciate that I finally, now in my early fifties, am able to receive their love just the way they can give it. My lifelong story of being “unloved” has vanished into thin air. I instead feel held by a much greater Love, with a capital L, a Love that resides deep within my own being and also permeates the whole universe. A Love that orchestrates everything, a Love from which my whole family comes, my grandparents, my parents, my children, my grandchildren and I. A Love that is boundless, infinite, and all encompassing and far surpasses any blood relationships.
And yet, my journey into that Love started with my family. Our families are our home bases; they signify our origins, our belonging, our “tribe,” our being incarnated in a body, our place in humanity. Peace starts there, always. Only when that base is healed, open and flowing, can we fully expand to Love’s height and depth.
So, I invite you to honestly and compassionately inquire into your relationship to your family of origin. Is there anything that still needs healing? Is there further to go with your family
All my love to you,
Britta
