By Christopher Tydeman

Throughout the SoulFullHeart healing/growth process, much is felt into around our relationship to ourselves (i.e. our parts), our birth parents, our friends, and our mates.  We have written extensively about those in this blog.  The one relationship we have not written much about is our relationship to our children.

Each combination of relationship (mother to son, father to daughter, etc.) has their own specific dynamic.  When our children arrive in this world, both past and current life agreements we subconsciously made with them begin their construction and playout.  Our experiences with our birth parents, our societal/religious conditionings, and our past life woundings, all coalesce to shape the dance between parent and child.

Through the formative years, parts of us invest a lot of energy in protecting and guiding our offspring.  They represent something to us.  Our greatest hope and our biggest fears.  We project so much onto them that the mere thought of their “failure” or lack of well-being is combated with a barrage of care-taking and/or excessive demands.  To lose them physically or emotionally feels like a fate worse than our own death to a part of us.

In this fused state, it is hard to conceive that our children have their own soul trajectory.  Their own needs and experiences they must have on their individual journey.  This becomes increasingly clear the older they get.  An emotionally healthy and awakened relationship would naturally find its completion around 18.  This doesn’t necessarily suggest we would never cross paths again someday or consciously avoid seeing each other.  It would just be the embarking of their adult journey, taking with them all the love they received in their youth.

But, we collectively are not in a healthy emotional state.  Our children are still children at 18 because we choose for them to be that way.  Our needs and inadequacies took precedent over their real growth.  They are stunted.  Sure, they may run a Fortune 500 company, but their emotional immaturity causes them to treat others unjustly, take advantage to satiate their greed, or run a company into the ground because of issues of control.  Or they may live a “normal” life with a spouse, their own children, a stable job, and a nice house.  But internally they are dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

As a young man, my father would tell me, “I don’t give a shit what you do for a living, as long as you are happy.”  My mother made it her mission to see me graduate college to fulfill something she desired in her own life and as a symbol of what was considered “successful”.  In each case, it was more about them than it was about me.

I carried this with me into the birth of my own daughter.  My fears and hopes were transferred onto her.  All a part of me felt I couldn’t be, hoped that she could.  But to be that meant her breaking away, so another part kept her small so she wouldn’t.  “Be big! No, be small!” Was the energy of my parenting.  A dichotomous push-pull.

As I progressed through my eventual healing, I had to draw boundaries with those that I had an unhealthy bond with.  This included family, friends, and later a mate.  But the one who got the “pass” was my own child.  She had her own vision for her life and that didn’t include healing toward emotional and spiritual awakening.  The others in my life who weren’t ready I said goodbye to, but a part of me could not accept that with my daughter.

Fast forward a couple of years later.  I have found myself in the belly of my care-taking.  Letting go of my need to be needed.  Feeling and seeing the impending industrial imperial implosion.  The ensuing chaos and violence, both physical and emotional.  I have entered into the Brave New World.  I can talk about it until I am blue in the face, but that won’t matter if someone is not able or willing to feel it.  It becomes a soul choice.  A personal decision.  To tug or force someone to get them to come along serves neither me nor them.  There is only one choice…let go.

To say goodbye to my daughter is by far the most difficult thing I have had to do.  It was a choice not made overnight.  It has been, as with all other difficult moments, a process.  Gut-wrenching and tear laden.  To continue a relationship with someone whose path is divergent to mine is not self-loving.  It is also enabling that person to stay in denial and smallness.  I love my daughter too much for her to be in either.  But more importantly, I love myself too much to continue to be seen as less than what I am, even if it is my own child.

As I walked away from her, tears in my eyes, pain in my heart, I could feel the Divine with me and with her.  Mother tells me,

“You make choices based in Love, you enter Love’s eternal grace.  Your kingly act of courage is the greatest gift to your daughter, to yourself, and the world at large.  There is no goodbye, for those souls meant to be together will remain so in heart.”

In that moment, I felt trust.  A trust that she will find her way in her own time, with her own choices.  A part of me is letting go of protecting her and trying to “save” her.  I will always have the desire for her to be a part of our SoulFullHeart community.  She has VIP status.  BUT, it is with her sovereign choice and my needs being met, that that can happen.  Until then I will hold her close to my heart as I prepare for the next phase of my soul’s journey.