Teach Your Children

For the last handful of years, I've been working through some pretty painful, long suppressed issues from my childhood. The desire to continue to move through them both motivated me to sign up for the silent retreat and provided a great deal of anxiety about what I'd have to face on that cushion with none of my usual distractions around to call upon when the going got particularly tough. And indeed, at times, it has been really, really tough. For the first 24 hours or so, I used one of my favorite distractions: thinking about someone else's issues and how I might be able to help them heal. (I'm particularly adept at focusing this kind of energy on the men in my life - after all, I spent my childhood hopelessly devoted to trying to cure what ailed my father.)

With the compassionate guidance of the person leading the retreat, I watched myself not dealing with my own issues, and gradually, I began to settle into my own body, my own issues, my own healing. And what I found, when I did this, was not scary at all -- and not tough in the way that it had been in the past when my mind had the opportunity to keep me in unproductive loops of the past, my identification with it, and its ability to determine my future.

Quite the contrary: what I found was a deep well of strength, an unshakable peace, and a whole bunch of compassion for myself, for my parents, for my sister, and for all others who've entered into parenting roles without being whole themselves.

My Mom, who turns 66 today, was pregnant with me during this Crosby, Stills and Nash performance. As I continue my own healing journey, I'm going to keep returning to both the challenge and the reassurance I find in these masterful lyrics:

Teach your parents well

Their children’s hell

Will slowly go by

And feed them on your dreams

The one they pick's

The one you’ll know by.

Don’t you ever ask them why

If they told you, you would cry

So just look at them and sigh

And know they love you.