Give Thanks to our Father and Mother
A joyfully poignant note this season
Hello everyone,
Happy holiday to those of you celebrating Thanksgiving! May you have a beautiful time with the people you have chosen to be with. If you have the exquisite luxury of sitting around a table with the people you love and call "family", do take a moment to savor it.
On that note, let me share with you a moment that might add some joy to this season for you.
Recently, while filling in my PhD application, under the part about family information, I felt for the first time some poignancy reflecting upon my upbringing.
I wouldn't consider my childhood to be that adverse. I mean, I still grew up fine, and many people have it waaaaay worse than me. Who didn't grow up with some degree of innocent mishandling of our parents (i.e "inherited trauma")?
That story of "I'm fine" is exactly the issue: I didn't know what's possible because I had no comparison.
What is it like to grow up in a loving and happy family? In many ways, I have been wondering that question for a long time. Indeed, it has led me to beautiful moments with my chosen families. Somehow everywhere I go, I have felt welcomed 🙏
This brings me to a graphic I saw the other day as I walked by a temple near where I’m living in Hanoi.
For a moment, let's put our skepticism and cosmology aside and consider this karmic view of life as a statement of causality, “if this then that”. Also, don’t read it too literally. While we have literal parents, how often do we feel “orphaned”, uprooted, untethered, abandoned, uncared for in this life? (Stephen Jenkinson has a great talk in his Orphan Wisdom school on this topic)
It brought up a poignant question to myself: how might I have mistreated my symbolic fathers and mothers?
Why does that matter? Because our relationships with our direct parents mirror to our relationships with the world.
I learned this teaching from my mentor and adopted father, Dr Home, who learned from his teacher: "Our relationship with our mother mirrors our relationship with the Great Feminine, the nurture, abundance, beauty and love of the world".
He shared with me, in the characteristic voice of a wiser one who has made mistakes: "For a long time I blame my mother for so many things. It wasn't until I truly learned to accept and love her with all her flaws and appreciate just how much she had been through, did my life begin to feel abundant in every sense of the word".
It struck a huge chord with me. I've been distant from my mother, who's now a nun, and it's a challenge that more I and more I am taking on to be closer to her. Indeed, as I begin to take the risk of being closer (thus losing the "cool" facade), I feel a greater sense of luck in life.
To be a good child is to receive fully, in deep gratitude, such abundance, and love. And it starts with our own mother.
If you feel deprived in anyways - and most of us do, even if materially we are way better of than our parents - this is the world asking us to learn to receive. (John Wineland has a good great 3 mins talk on this)
In complement, our relationship with our father mirrors our relationship with the Great Masculine, the purpose, order, direction, and structure and of the world. As some of you know, I didn't grow up with a father figure. The gift of his absence is a sensitivity to "father figure", whom I often consciously seek.
To be a good child is to receive fully, in deep gratitude, such guidance, and direction.
Father-hunger is a real phenomenon. Perhaps one reason these strong men figures like Jordan Peterson have become so is that we are indeed craving for them.
If you feel lost, that's the world asking you to learn to be a father to yourself. Or find a good role model of a father-figure (which sometimes can come in the forms of a younger, motivated, know-what-he-wants-and-will-go-get-it friend 😛My take: just that you had a bad one doesn't mean you cannot find a better one (or find ways to appreciate it...)
DISTORTION
Of course, these are ideals, and ideals do get perverse. The distorted feminine is absolute chaos and over control. The distorted masculine is absolute rigidity and lifelessness. All of us have experienced those distortions in our parents, and most of us are still healing from these.
It helps to remind ourselves that our parents are, by definition, imperfect (and so are we. Imperfection is the feature, not a bug of being human 🧑🦲)
AND we must not forget the best in each of us. We can remind ourselves, and perhaps to our parents too in a loving way, that at our original, undistorted core, we could be that way to each other.
And as much as joyfully possible, we can begin to undo such distortions, first within ourselves and then with the world immediately around us.
How do you heal then?
That would be another huge topic. For now, let me share with you the words of the beloved and much respected Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh from his tiny yet powerful book, The Art of Communicating.
"Suppose in the past you said something unkind to your grandmother. Now she is no longer alive, so you can’t apologize directly to her. Many of us carry the guilt of something we have said or done that we think we can’t rectify. But it’s possible to erase that unskillfulness of the past. The past isn’t exactly gone. If we know our communication continues, then we know the past is still there, disguised in the present moment. After all, the suffering is still there; you can touch it.
What you can do is to sit down, breathe in and out deeply, and recognize that in every cell of your body there is the presence of your grandmother. “Grandma, I know that you are there in every cell of my body; I am your continuation. I’m sorry I said something that made you suffer and made me suffer. Please listen, Grandma. I promise that from now on, I won’t say such a thing to anyone anymore. Grandma, please accept helping me in this practice.” When you talk to your grandmother like that, you can see her smiling to you, and you heal the suffering of the past."
Now to bring this to your own life, notice what reaction you have to these ideas. If you are like me, strongly resisting order and structure and thus are often more or less lost, perhaps it's time to say Thanks to the father figure whom you didn't quite have. If you resist chaos and creativity, time to appreciate the mother figure who might have been either too distant or overcontrolling.
Give thanks to our parents this season. Even if we do not agree with most of what our father and mother did to us or did not do for us. Even if our hearts ache thinking of them.
I hope this perspective might help you appreciate the family time this season even more.
Let me know what got stirred up in you. Meanwhile, may you see your great mother and father everywhere, give thanks to them at their essence, and receive their gifts fully. May you be blessed with the love of the world, always.
Announcement:
A great online course: for those of you who share the passion for social change and developing yourself, here is a good course Bright Future Now. I just took it and highly highly recommended it. It's deep psychodynamics + systems theory + strategies for cultural change and more. Plus connecting with lovely people from around the world within a beautifully designed and facilitated context. The teacher, Robert Gilman, has an approach that very much resonates with RPC ethos, and he also embodies his vast synthesis of the field.
You can watch a video presentation of his here. Embodied Strategy & Skillset for Cultural Change. If you do sign up this week for early bird, let me know, I can connect you with a few other friends for group discounts!
Personal Updates:
I'm doing very well. Lots of exciting stuff on my end.
if all goes well I will be back in the US in 2022 for grad school.
The book will be released in the US in mid Jan too.
And I'll definitely write more in English 😀
Reflecting on this thanksgiving season, all I could say is: Boy, I've gone so far. Thank you for all the love and support from near and far. I wouldn't be where I am thanks to all the small and big ways you have been in my life.
Thank you, again.
Khuyen