This post is based on a dharma talk that I gave at a teen meditation retreat last week. Above is a guided meditation, below is a recording of said dharma talk:
Everyone feels somehow dissatisfied with how they were raised, even people who loved and respected their parents and caregivers. There was too much judgment, anger or maybe even violence; not enough love, support, or attunement.
While it might be easy to resent our parents and caregivers for what they did not provide, raising kids is an insanely difficult job. And many parents, maybe most of them, are not well equipped to do it. They try their best, but with limited resources. Our parents were harmed by the suffering of their own parents, and are still children in their own way. They haven’t been able to fully mature because they themselves didn’t get enough love. And as hard as they may have tried not to recreate that dynamic with us, they end up doing it anyway.
What is a parent’s job, though, really? Because if our parents aren’t perfect, it means they’re not equipped to give us the nonjudgmental unconditional love we expect from them. Maybe it’s reasonable to expect them to love us and keep us safe. But perhaps it’s also their job to challenge us: to pass on the suffering of their parents, and their parents before that, because it’s our turn now to transmute it. As we become caregivers to our own hearts and minds, we see that we are just stewards of the family lineage of suffering.
Looking back, might you see ways that the suffering of the people who raised you helped you understand the world in a unique way, helped you really know what suffering is, helped you find compassion, and come closer to knowing what love and support feels like?
Why are you reading this essay today? Maybe it’s not an accident that you stumbled into meditation, dharma, and the kind of work that turns hatred into love. Maybe it's not an accident that you arrived here, with this particular inheritance of traumas, memories, and circumstances. Maybe you can use it to free yourself and everybody around you.
I inherited so many good qualities from my parents. But I also inherited their pain, and their particular patterns of greed, aversion, and delusion. I want these patterns to stop with me. I don’t want to pass them on to my kids. And I don’t want to pass them on to everyone else in my life.
But I don’t want to stop there. Being a steward of our parents’ suffering is not about suppressing our reactivity so we don’t cause harm— that would mean we were somehow too broken or wounded. Instead, being a steward of our ancestral suffering positions us perfectly to meet a particular set of challenges in our lives and the world around us.
How has the pain your parents passed on to you been useful for your awakening? How has your learning from that pain been helpful to people in your own life? Are there places you haven’t healed from your childhood? If so, what are those wounds teaching you?
We are caregivers to our own hearts and minds. When we turn to ourselves with the loving attention we didn’t get from our parents, we heal ourselves, we give ourselves the love we’ve been seeking, the love that heals us, that makes us whole, and gives us the sense of safety needed to be loving and generous to everyone around us. When we see that we can give ourselves what we’ve been seeking from our parents, we start to release them from the expectation that they give us what they simply did not have.
We start to learn to meet ourselves in all these ways when we meet our minds with the kind, curious attention. In the end, you are the only one who can really see and be with all the parts of yourself. Release someone else from responsibility for your pain and meet yourself with the love you’ve been longing for. Or rather, feel for the love of kind awareness that is waiting for you to rest back into it— all around you and within you in this present moment. This is how we set ourselves free.
Two Percent with Michael Easter
I was recently on this excellent podcast with my friend Michael Easter, where we talked about the chaos in the world and some ways to reframe it in your mind. If you don’t know him already, his substack is great. Check out the episode here:
Young adult retreat at Spirit Rock
Join me, Vinny Ferraro, and Matthew Brensilver for this retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center for 18-32 year olds, August 4-8th. When the three of us get together, it gets weird fast. But in a good way (we hope).
