Ep.48/ Karma & Family Of Origin
From a karmic perspective, our birth circumstances are not a coincidence. Whether you believe in reincarnation or not, it can be empowering to consider that we might have been drawn to our family of origin as a template to show us where we need to evolve and heal on a soul level.
When we can take responsibility for our life, we can move from a place of helplessness to hope. It is our decisions, choices and responses that determine the quality of our life rather that the situations from which we come.
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Have you ever considered that our birth circumstances might not be a coincidence and that there is a way to relate with our family of origin situation? Whether it is happy, mad, glad, or sad. It can be really empowering and helpful if we approach it wisely and openly.
Everyone has a biological family, you might love them, you might hate them, you might want nothing to do with them. In fact, you might not even know them if you are adopted or have been separated for another reason and the circumstances of our biological birth and our biological birth family are really formative. Whatever the configuration is, our birth family has tremendous impact on our relationship with ourselves, with others and perhaps even our whole worldview whether we are aware of it or not.
The experience of family is really important to us as humans, how we are treated by our caregivers and our relationship with them can really set a template for how we treat ourselves in our own internal environment and how we interact in relationships and how we interact in most areas of our life. And the whole field of personal growth work can probably be traced back to family of origin issues for most people which is really good news because although we may feel like victims of circumstance, I know I did for a long time, we have free will and we live in an interactive universe. And how we react and respond to our life circumstances is more important I believe, than what those circumstances are. You may have had a horrible family experience, or you may have an incredibly loving and supportive one. Most people fall somewhere in the middle and wherever you fall on that family spectrum of horror to health, our family relationships challenge us to grow. If you had difficult traumatic painful or abusive relationships with your caregivers, chances are you trying to put those dynamics behind you and create something better for yourself. If you had deeply intimate and loving relationships with your family of origin, then it generally brings with it a fear of what will happen when that's no longer there and the challenge of great loss when those people decline and pass away.
"Family relationships challenge us and that is not a design flaw.
There is a lot of ways to understand the concept of karma and from a soul level perspective, it is way beyond the law of cause and effect. And the perspective of karma as it affects our birth circumstances in the way that I am going to talk about, it is deeply informed from the perspective of reincarnation or the continuity of the soul across many lifetimes. Now you don't have to buy into it and by jury is still out will have to wait till I crossover to make a verdict but I won't be able to come back and tell you guys about it but I've found it really helpful way to look at things from a personal growth and personal self-responsibility perspective. I often look to the natural world as a metaphor for our own internal process and I don't know how I got through all the school I did and not learned this until just recently but we were talking about the water cycle and the element of water. And somehow in the water cycle I had always thought that water molecules kind of dismembered themselves and then came back together. Each water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms (H2O). And kind of to my amazement, a biologist friend of mine told me that pretty much all the water on the planet was created billions of years ago. And so as water goes through the different cycles of rain and ice and evaporation and back into rain again in all the different places that it cycles through our bodies, through plants, through the oceans and rivers, in the clouds and atmosphere, those water molecules for the most part maintain their own continuity. I find that fucking amazing and to me it kind of speaks to the idea of reincarnation but again, we will see. But it is a powerful idea to consider that the water that is in our own bodies that we consume and excrete, that we used to wash our hands, feed our pets, to cook with and clean with, that water has lived many lifetimes and likely traveled all around the world. Our bodies at any given time are about 60% water.
So, from a karmic perspective as I am going to talk about it right now, the circumstances of our birth and our family of origin are not a coincidence.
No matter how difficult or wonderful, we were drawn to the specific configuration of our birth family and those circumstances. particularly our relationship with those circumstances, show us exactly where we need to grow on a soul level in this lifetime.
One could even say that we agreed to or chose those particular circumstances. Now this is not on a conscious level, this is not a personality choice. This is like the law of attraction on a soul level. And I believe that our feelings and our felt experience really provide our greatest compass in our life that what brings us joy, connection and fulfillment, is the direction we want to go toward and what causes us pain, dissonance or is destructive, that's what we need to learn from, actually we can learn from both of course.
Following our joy can be just as challenging as healing our pain. And one way to understand how a soul might be drawn to Incarnate in a particular circumstance moved it out of the realm of what we would call choice and more would I visualize like a lock and key. In some spiritual traditions particularly some aspects of Buddhism, the most important moment of your life is considered to be the moment of your death. That where you're at mentally, emotionally, spiritually, relationally at the moment of your death has tremendous impact on the qualities or the configuration that you are going to be drawn to on a soul level in your next incarnation. I tend to see people, structurally I'm a really visual person, so if you consider a person on a soul level as if there could be like a shape, I kind of see it like a key it has all those up and down bumps on it, every key has kind of unique shape and places where highly developed, places where underdeveloped, where we have peace and acceptance, where we have rage or fear unresolved wounding. At any given time, we could kind of graph those out. If we could have an EKG on a psycho spiritual soul level and from the perspective of continuity of the soul, that graph or key is very flexible to always changing and moving depending on, well maybe it's not changing and moving if you don't do any work and you're completely frozen and rigid, not everybody evolves but the purpose of the larger process is to evolve and the purpose of pain and joy from my perspective is to get us to evolve but we don't have to. So, at the moment of our death whatever that particular graph key shape is, in our next incarnation we are going to be drawn to the lock that the key will fit into. And so, our own unique graph of brokenness and brilliance, of healed and wounded, of selfish and selfless will draw us into the circumstance that perfectly matches where we need to grow and where we need to be supported.
Ep.48/
Karma & Family Of Origin
When I think about my own life although I felt tremendously victimized, I get to blame my mother for my problems for a really long time, I milked that. I don't like the idea of being a victim but when I am in blame I am actually a victim and I felt like a victim of my birth circumstances but when I look at it from this perspective when I take responsibility that perhaps what if I chose these people. I look at where I'm at today and if I had had a different family I would not be doing the work that I'm doing right now, I would have had completely different life experience and I wouldn't trade out one thing from this point because it's all become compost for my garden. And my soil is rich in healthy and I am growing cool vegetables and Flowers right now. I get hummingbirds come in and bees, it is good. It is all water under the bridge that serves me and has pushed me, shoved me off and right up against the wall where I had no other choice but to grow. And although my parents have both been dead for a long time, my relationship to them continues to evolve and just in the last few years I've come to deeper levels of healing and forgiveness of my mother that I never thought were possible. My father, I am still working on. I will keep you posted but I got some time, I am hopeful. And my relationship with those family of origin relationships have had tremendous impact on how I consciously parent my own children and my own continuously growing ability to be intimate with others because I don't want to die the way my parents died.
You know when my mother died, five people came to her funeral and three of them were with me. I am not sure what her karmic graph was or key shape on the way out, but it is not one I want to repeat, and I am not going to.
So the thing I like about this perspective that:
there are some mysterious karmic implications of the circumstances of our birth is that it actually gives us tremendous personal power because when we take responsibility and move out of a victim position, we can make our own decisions and choices from where we are today.
We do not need to be victims or prisoners of our past and this is tremendously empowered because it is our responses, choices and decisions that actually determine the quality of our life. Today really can be the first day of the rest of my life, in fact it is, each moment is a unique opportunity to do things differently and take a new direction. It is kind of this amazing infinitely creative template that we all live in but most of us do not realize it.
I was a student in this really powerful workshop on shamanic understanding of relationship and we did a series of journeys inquiring about the deep nature of the teaching of these major relationships in our life. And it is very powerful to look at each person in our life as if they were our teacher. What if that person on a soul level volunteered to be our teacher in this life? Even if they were cruel, abusive, absent and what are those circumstances calling from us? So much to my shock, if shocks not too strong a word, my inquiry about my relationship with my mother revealed that that relationship was primarily to teach me the path of healthy service. My mother was a very weak and sickly person. She was very smart, and she was tragically codependent. Her own father had been a terrible alcoholic and my own alcoholism was a huge wedge between us because it triggered all of her own and result stuff. We never really liked each other, and we never bonded. In fact, the saddest thing about the death of my mother was that when she died, I was not sad. That relationship was a pretty chronic source of suffering throughout my life and when she passed it was actually relief. And we have a much better relationship in the 14 years since she died and because of my own spiritual practice with ancestors we do have a relationship. She still does not have a ton to offer me directly but indirectly she remains one of my greatest teachers and I have very curiously repeated many of the life circumstance patterns that my mother experienced. I was born by cesarean; my first child was born by cesarean. Very different experiences, my mother felt completely disempowered and victimized by my birth and never had another child and although I spent my entire pregnancy trying to not have a C-section. I had a midwife, a doula, had a birth tub I was going to have the baby at home. I did yoga every day up until the day before I went into labor, took every herb after 62 hours of unproductive labor, I ended up with a C-section and it was one of the most powerful spiritual awakening experiences I've ever had. I unfortunately have this pattern that the things I'm most afraid of or most don't want to happen I have to go through, I'd kind of like to outgrow that one but I can't say it doesn't serve me. I so did not want to have a C-section and it was so exactly the birth I needed. It blasted me open and healed my own experience with my own birth. My mother was divorced twice, I had tremendous judgment about her for that and I'm now divorced twice and those experiences were not dissimilar from my mother's marital experiences and have brought me forgiveness and understanding for her that decades of therapy has not been able to. So, whether you've been adopted, cherished, abused, abandoned or deeply loved, this information in the circumstances of your own birth family and when we take responsibility for those, it can give us some pretty profound information about where we need to grow and evolve on our own path. I know it has for me; family of origin, the gift that keeps on giving.
