Flow is my Father; Love is my Mother

As I move through this strange bewildering journey called life, I deal continuously with the cards dealt me in my family of origin. Looking at the shadow tendencies in my life, I see echos of my parents still affecting my decisions and attitudes. My father spent much of my childhood in depression, and my mother in bitterness that he was not what she had wanted or expected.

Often I have looked for the redeeming qualities in them; and there are some for which I am grateful. But lately, I have asked, what are the qualities I have learned from life that gave me birth as a spiritual being, that fathered and mothered this new phase of my life where I live so much richer than before?

Flow has been a critical lesson for me. Instead of demanding the universe be a certain way to meet my expectations, and becoming passive when it does not, I have slowly let go of my insistence, and have learned to flow with the stream of life. It is a dance - I desire certain things, and the universe likewise has its tendencies; together, if we dance and flow, we affect each other, and an ease develops where there is a sense of fitting together, a sense of companionship. Flow is what allows me to take action in the world without cursing the failures nor insisting on impossibilities.

Likewise, love, in the form of acceptance, has been equally critical. I am learning day by day to take everything I find inside me - every nasty thought, egotistical desire, grumpy stinginess, and fearful withdrawal - and look at it with gentleness, like an unruly child whom I love no matter what he does. Once that unruly part of me starts to feel loved and accepted, there is a melting and a sharing of the secrets that has been keeping him fighting me. There is that sense of safety, of home, where you truly cannot do anything wrong.

So, flow and love are my true parents - the reaching out and the reaching in, the masculine and feminine, the creativity and the vulnerability - they are replacing the very imperfect forms that introduced me to life. Maybe the purpose of my original parents was simply to hand me over to better parents when the right time came.


Comment posted by
at 12/26/2006 8:31:30 PM
This post has a very nice poetic flow. Rather than focus on concrete actions or specific examples, the post gives me a more visceral feel for how you are integrating the legacy of your parents. You are healing their emotional impact from one level up; from a level that is more symbolic and embracing rather than specific and linear. Kind of like the healing we may experience in dreams where the impact can bypass the logical mind and be felt on a deeper, more somatic level. The poetic/symbolic/transpersonal and rational minds work together to create integrated healing.


Comment posted by
at 12/26/2006 6:39:51 PM
It is less about redefining my birth parents, and more about seeing flow and love as my parents, guiding me towards a life that is richer and more satisfying than what I had before. I have often approached life from the attitudes that my parents unwittingly taught me, but am slowly learning to adopt these new attitudes as guiding wisdom.

I find it hard to reject my parents’ attitudes, despite their obvious harm - it feels as if I am rejecting my parents themselves. And in a way, I am - I am leaving the familiar attitudes of home and choosing a new way with no memories to guide me. Part of growing up, I guess.


Comment posted by
at 12/26/2006 6:21:10 PM
I had a chance to read your Christmas post about flow and love. It sounds like your journey towards self acceptance is finding a self definition,

I got a little bit lost in the theory, though. Which part is something you are experiencing in yourself? which part is what you are experiencing from others, if any? It seems like you are redefining the roles you have learned about your birth parents, your mother’s bitterness and your father’s victim mode of resentment. Like maybe you believed, at some time, that this was the way the world was. And maybe you are looking at them differently? Or are you finding substitutes for what you really wanted? Or are you finding the love and flow from an internal source to nurture your own child? I am confused about what you might be saying here.

I hope you don’t mind sharing more - this is a bigger picture than you usually write about your own inner world, I think.