2007.02.25

Ellaeenah

Let us talk today about relationships… different relationships. I am going to focus on four relationships… our children, our spouses or significant others, our mothers and our fathers. If one can study these four relationships, one can study oneself completely. Our deepest, most subconscious traits are completely and utterly revealed in these relationships.

Relationships with our children… your child is a mirror reflection of your inner child… that inner being that is formed by the time you are six/seven years old. The way you treat your children, is the way you treat that special inner child that is YOU. Each time you are irritated with your child, each time you are angered by something that he or she has done, each time you feel the need to reprimand and chide, you have to understand that it is your own inner child that is the cause of your frustration. If you are the kind of parent who finds it difficult to allow your child to grow up, where you need to do everything for your child, where you wish to be constantly hand and foot in service, there is a reason why….it is because your inner child is calling out for attention. This lack of attention towards the inner child is reflected as an almost obsessive attention paid to your biological child. When the child, lets say, tells you a lie and your reaction is inappropriate in its extent or depth, whether the reaction is a physical one or directed emotionally towards the child… you know, intellectually that a child lies only out of fear, but this intellectual realization is not enough to temper or modify your reaction….there is a reason why. Each time you hear an untruth from your child, your inner child reminds you of the several untruths you have told your own inner child.

What are these untruths? I don’t feel bad… it does not hurt me… I have gotten over this issue… I have forgiven and forgotten…And the inner child is screaming out I have not forgotten…I have not forgiven… I am hurting. But you are not listening because you are so busy lying to your inner child. And it is this lies that is reflected in the lie your biological child tells you. The words are different, the situations are different, but a lie is a lie. And just as you are scared to reveal the hurt to yourself, your biological child is lying out of that same fear, but you don’t want to see that. So you may actually beat up your child, not for telling you the lie, but for daring to make you aware that you are telling the lie. And because this awareness is at such a subconscious level, we may never be aware that we are ill treating our child, because we are beating up our inner child.

Those times when you are able to interact with your child in a fun, healthy and positive way, you are in perfect communion with your own inner child. When the channel between you and your inner child is clear, when you are listening to all that your inner child wishes to tell you, you are not doubting it, you are not denying it, you are not suppressing it, there is respect in the acknowledgement of your inner child, you will also be able to respect your biological child. And in these periods even if your child were to commit a misdemeanor worse than the telling a lie, you will be able to deal with this in a positive manner that is truly a response to the situation.

Each time you are with your child, try to understand where you are with your own inner child. Your relationship with your child is a vital revelation of this aspect of yourself.

Then what happens when a parent reacts adversely to one child, but positively to the other? Every child is a soul, and every soul has an energy structure. One child’s energy structure is extremely similar to your own. All your deepest pains and traumas can be very easily highlighted for you by the child whose energy structure very closely matches your own. And it is this child that you react adversely to, because that child highlights for you the tiniest pain that you are in denial of.  Though it seems that a close match of energies would lead to a synergy, this is not so. The synergy takes place only when and if you are in complete harmony with your own inner child.

Then there are situations when, with the same child, you react adversely at times, and respond positively at other times. Of course, as mentioned earlier, you are in balance or off balance with your own inner child. But something else could also be going on here. In that moment of time when you are in greatest denial of the inner situation and thus the external creates a reaction that is completely out of proportion.

Lets say K is in complete denial of the fact that she is not paying attention to her self, and in facts strongly declares that she is paying attention to herself, then her reaction to her biological child who, lets say, does not call her up as often as she wishes him to, will tell her the truth. Does this make you feel neglected? Angry? Can you see what is happening here? Your own higher energies are using your biological child as you’re your most beautiful mirror to tell you that you are not paying attention to you inner child, and so your biological child is not paying attention to you. If we can healthily use our relationships with our children for this purpose, it will bring about much change and improvement in your relationship with your children. 

If you are having a constant quarrel, conflict, with your inner child, then you face the conflict with your biological child. And how do you know what the inner conflict is all about? Just review the external conflict and it will give you the answer to the inner conflict. To search within, you have to look outwards with an inner eye. Look at the child outside of you, but change the perception. Don’t look out with blame, but in with responsibility.

Each time you have a joyous time with your children, remember to pat yourself on the back for being in communion with your inner child. Sit back and allow yourself to experience, consciously, this feeling so that you remember it and work towards it when the inner imbalance crops up. Do not let these periods pass by without experiencing them fully, so that you are urged to experience them again and again.

Now we come to our spouses or partners. We owe as much gratitude to them as we do to our children. Were it not for them, a very large part of our sub-personalities would remain forever hidden. Our spouse is our sub-personality. And how do you identify this? By asking yourself a very simple question. What about your spouse/partner irritates/annoys you the most? THAT is your sub-personality that you are in complete denial of.

Take a few moments just now and allow your soul to give you the answer to this question…What do I perceive as the greatest fault in my spouse/partner? THAT fault is your deepest, most denied fault. It has really nothing to do with your spouse… it is all about you. Isn’t it true that though you are aware of some other flaws in your spouse/partner you accept these without irritation, without annoyance? Because these are NOT your sub-personalities!!! So they do not ring a jarring bell.

I am sure many of you are saying just now.. I don’t think that’s true.. I am not like him/her at all. Let us address that. Very often the manifestation is deceiving. Let us assume that you find your spouse extremely arrogant, and you know that you are not arrogant. But not so fast! Sometimes it’s the so-called meek who are truly arrogant but because their persona is mild, others do not realize that they never say sorry, that they never acknowledge that they are wrong, that the talk almost always subtly turns towards blame for another. In the fact that they are able to fool the world by their overt gentleness, lies the greatest arrogance. So you might often be saying to yourself… what do I have to be sorry for? It is my arrogant spouse/partner who has everything to be sorry about!

Let us take other areas that might be annoying. Your partner’s inability to communicate. Very often wives complain of this to me… he just does not talk to me. It’s because you are not talking to yourself!! It’s because you do not find anyone to talk to you, within yourself. If you cannot talk to you, how can another? If you cannot love yourself, how can your spouse love you? If you are unfaithful to self, how can you demand faithfulness from your partner?

If you think that your spouse is a big know-it-all, seems to have all the answers, and really annoys you… that is because you are in denial of your own enlarged ego and your spouse is magnifying that for you… AND YOU DO NOT LIKE IT. WE DO NOT LIKE MAGNIFIED VERSIONS OF OUR FLAWS.

But that is why we have relationships. That is why we have relationships. This might seem so out of place with the roses and candles, and candy and love. But the soul knows that in the human realm it is far simpler to look out than to look in, and if we can bring into our lives, in such a significant manner, someone who is such a magnified mirror that you just cannot ignore it, then we will be forced to acknowledge our flaws without fear, guilt or shame. When we suppress these truths, they are projected larger than life onto our partners. It is like seeing it on a 70mm screen.

And why do they need to be so large? Because if they were not, you would ignore these all over again!!!! So if within you your greatest flaw is abuse of power, as a woman you might marry a man who will beat you up. You have created your husband! You have created your wife!! So that you can look at this screen day after day, night after night. Endlessly, relentlessly, this screen plays on and on, till you finally acknowledge with every fiber in your being… THIS IS WHO I AM.

An alarmingly large number of people today are having extra-marital relationships. Why? They want to switch films!!! But it doesn’t work. In the beginning the film may appear different, but somewhere in the middle, you realize that the story is repeating itself. How many films will you switch? Partners may change their outer forms, but you never change inside, so the story remains the same.

You do exactly the same with your spouse /partner as you do with your child. Each time there is a conflict with your spouse, look within. What is the conflict here, within? And sometimes you have to think it through because the answer is not so apparent. The husband returns home late, in spite of knowing you have to go out with friends, and the wife is very angry. What is there for you to see? When your husband came home late what did it really make you feel? May be that he does not have respect for your time? For you? Did you feel walked over? Now look within… how much time do you give yourself? How often do you walk over your own feelings?

There is not one instance in your marriage that must be allowed to go unnoticed. Whether it is a moment of joy or sorrow, it has been created by self, for self. Is she/he cheating on you? Look within. How have you cheated on yourself? It is very easy to blame our spouses. The truth is that we choose and create our spouses/partners so that each night we can bow our heads in gratitude to them for magnifying our sub-personalities.

And then we come to our mothers. Through experience, my own and others, I have learnt that girls have a special experience with their mothers and boys with their fathers. A son and a daughter sometimes have such differing views of their parents that you might mistakenly think that they had different parents. I have also learnt that the more a father resolves his issues, the greater is the natural inner resolution within the son. And the greater the resolution of the mother’s issues, the greater is the inner resolution of the daughter.

Our relationship with our mother tells us how much we are emotionally present for ourselves. Can we provide an emotional anchor for ourselves? What is the depth of our self love?

So the next time, dear S, you slam the phone down on your mother because you feel she does not love you enough, understand you do not love YOU, that you are not able to provide for yourself an emotional cradle, a security nest. So you created a phone call from Mom, and this was the Universal Gift for you.

If you have experienced your mother as completely nurturing, unconditional in her love, non-judgmental, non-critical… no, there is no one here who can make claim to that, because not one in this room has unconditionally loved ourselves, uncritically loved ourselves, loved ourselves without judgment. Your mother is a reflection of your emotional quotient. Your relationship with her tells you how strong you are emotionally. Being strong does not mean being strong in the face of death, tough in the face of humiliation. No. That may just be a very good way of suppressing reality. Emotional strength is when you are breaking up within into tiny, little million bits, and the only thing holding you together is your deep love for your self. When you are crying like your heart is breaking, and the only arms you need around you are your own. That is emotional quotient, and that is when you get the mother you truly desire.

And as you change, and as you grow and evolve and mature, your emotional quotient grows as well. Haven’t you found that as you grow older, your relationship with your mother often transforms into something comfortable, or even beautiful? This is not because you are able to forgive mom a little more, but because you can love yourself a little more!

And now we come to our dads. Though most girls see their dads as their universe, most sons react to their dads as their greatest subconscious threat. What is the threat? They see in you, as their dad, a power which they wish to have. The little two year old looks at dad as super hero, and every time he does something wrong, dad turns around and says…this is not right; I am disappointed in you. No son of mine behaves in this manner. And the two year old, or twelve year old, or fifteen year old, looks up at this citadel of power and inwardly cringes because he KNOWS he can never match the power of his dad. Will I ever be able to please dad? So dad becomes his greatest threat.

But, for all of us, whether we are daughters or sons, our dads are our symbol of our inner power, our inner authority. If your relationship with your father is not a healthy one, it means that you are powerless within. If your relationship is strong, overcoming all spats, then you know that you are blessed by your inner power which is your strongest companion.

So you have your child who reflects for you your inner child, you have your spouse who reflects for you your sub-personalities, you have a mother who reflects your ability to love and nurture yourself and you have your father who mirrors your inner power, strength and authority.  What more can you need when you are searching within?

I know someone will ask me, what happens when I, lets say, don’t have a father or a mother? When your issue of powerlessness or lack of self nurturing is an issue of several lifetimes, you choose such strong external situations. When the problem becomes critical, its resolution needs to be even stronger.

Every relationship of ours tells us something about ourselves, but in our daily lives it becomes very difficult to be in such a state of heightened awareness. But if we can focus on these four significant players in our game of life, we will come out triumphant. And soon all your relationships will transform.

Why have you left out siblings?

Because in the scheme of the soul choosing its blueprint, the siblings do not play as significant a role. A soul will not choose the mother because of the siblings. You can call the siblings ‘an added bonus’. What siblings reveal to us are the support systems we have within ourselves. The sibling that you may have a conflict with, has an energy structure much like your own, and thus cannot provide you the support system because the lack of support that you face within, will be reflected outside. But the root of the lack of support systems internally, lies within the lack of self nurturing and/or inner powerlessness.

What about friends?

We tend to look at friends in a very restricted manner. Those who are there for us emotionally, those who stand by us, we call them our friends. Those who are the thorns in our sides, we certainly do not call them friend. For me, the definition of friend is anyone who aids me to enhance my growth. This might be in manner I can appreciate, or in a manner I attempt to resist. Friends are tiny parts of us we keep all around us, so that we ensure that each moment we are growing and evolving. In the game I play with the four vital players, each time I stumble and fall, a friend will prop me up, either by giving me a friendly hand or a friendly ‘kick in the rear’, which forces me to stand tall and straight again. Friends are part of my own beingness that I have strategically placed all around me to ensure that I am in constant growth.

There are some who go through life without parents, siblings, partner, friends….

For such persons, who are few in number, study their astrological representations of their soul blueprint. You will find that this soul will have some of issues, the commonest one of which is power abuse through emotion.

When they choose such difficult life paths, they do not do so out of a sense of punishment… not at all… but rather in their growth they have come to realize their patterns and choose to experience situations where they have no one to enter into power play through emotional abuse. They choose to experience lack of external emotional support so that they can experience its true intrinsic worth.

A second reason could be that the soul has constantly looked outside for love, and has used all relationships as emotional crutches. So it chooses situations where it has no option but to turn inwards for love and nurturing. The soul in its fullness of understanding chooses experiences that will give it no opportunity for it to cling to or use as emotional crutches. When no external crutches exist the basic instinct of the soul for love, forces the soul to turn inwards, often as the last resort. Thus the soul, voluntarily, closes all other doors, but the door taking the soul inwards.

What about children who are sent away to boarding school at a very early age?

I have often found in the astrological blueprints of such children, that the child chooses to move away from the primary caretakers in order to turn inwards for love and power. You must remember that up to 12 years of age we, all of us, choose to repeat the same life patterns of the past, e.g. rejection or abandonment.

Why?

You convert the past into the present so that you can focus on the present in a far clearer manner than you could on a past of which you have little or no knowledge.

Will these experiences repeat themselves in future lifetimes as well?

First, K, understand why you have chosen the experiences in THIS lifetime. What is it that you wished to grow into, or grow out of? Once you are completely aware of this, you will move more consciously towards that purpose, without any resistance or gripe about the situation you are caught in. When there is such focus on the purpose, it will be fulfilled, and as soon as the purpose is fulfilled, it does not need to repeat itself, because growth and assimilation has already taken place.

(The meeting ended with a lot of emotional sharing between members of the group.)