Personal Learnings in Relationship

It is amazing how learning can occur.  After yesterday's blog, Lessons of Relationship, I found myself including key ideas with the daily meditation circle I lead in Second Life.  As a part of the sharing I related a little about my mother and my experience of relationship.  One of the participants asked a most profound question.  "How do your words relate to your relationship with your mother?"

Oh yes, even those sharing meditation are in relationship with each other, and here was a participant reflecting to me and asking a powerful question to teach me.  As I answered I realized that the true learning for me was that relationships are indeed all about us.  My mother may have made transition over 5 years ago but here I was, looking within, at myself, and seeking to understand what I had brought to the relationship.  Her death in no way prevented me from bringing the relationship to a close and doing the work I needed to do.

When you gain that perspective suddenly ideas like, I wish I'd told them I loved them before they'd died take on a whole new feel.  If anything, someone dying is actually the perfect opportunity to look within and to complete your work of awareness around the relationship.  The other person is no longer in that expression and will not distract you with their own expectations on relationship.  You are freed to do the work in the most perfect of ways (assuming you can see past a broken heart; this may take time).

I then got to thinking about other recent contemplations.  I had recently exposed, and have been working through, a belief around abandonment.  At first my reflection had centred around the fact that my single mother had had to go to work behind the bar each night (or go out and drink), and would literally abandon me, the solitary seven year old, in our tiny flat to entertain myself.  As I write this I am reminded that it got to the point that around the time I was ten or so I would find myself actually avoiding my mother returning home (and this remained for many years).  I'd gotten so primed by fear of a drunken mother coming back from the pub (either working or drinking) that when I would hear her coming up the stairs I'd turn off the lights and the gas fire, and pretend I was alseep.  Is it any wonder then that I learned as a child that relationships were to be avoided; after all, if I would either be abandoned or abused through a stupor of alcohol why would being in relationship draw me?

However, upon reflection I realized that the lessons of abandonment didn't stop there.  My father had also abandoned me when I was 4.  He'd chosen heroin over me, and had allowed my mother to leave him, thereby abandoning me.  How many times had I lied to other children at school saying that he'd died of bone cancer.  As a young boy I remember hearing that bone cancer was one of the most painful ways to die; I projected that idea of a painful death on his part to mask the buried agony that was being ineptly handled by a scared child.

And with this latest realization I am now empowered to find fulfillment with my father.  He's not been in my life since a young age but that does not matter.  Both he and my mother have, amongst other things, provided me with the gift of awareness.  I am so very grateful to have awoken to my Sacred Self in this moment.  Thank you Roger; thank you Judie.  I love you both!

In my previous blog I commented that no relationship is an accident.  Everyone we have in relationship is there for a sacred exchange of growth.  My relationship with my father is about me; it is about me forgiving him completely, and knowing that he did the very best he could.  I know that when my mother came home each night and found me asleep that that part of her that was God knew that I was pretending to be asleep and she felt pain.  I hold a knowing of love for her right now, asking her to forgive that scared little boy, for he did not know what he was doing, nor was he equipped to deal with his fulfillment of that relationship in that time.  I know she was doing her best, and I am sorry that she had to suffer so that I could remember in this moment.  I know that God is with me, that I could not truly be abandoned, and that I am now healed of the hidden beliefs of being abandoned by my parents.  I claim love for myself, and for them both.  I thank them for the opportunities they have given me.  After all, they gave me the gift of abandonment so that I might in this moment come to savour the lessons of relationship so much more right here, right now.