Your terrible childhood.

I recently went to a Buddhist workshop on compassion and I more recently went to a group talking about letting go. In both groups, the older people spoke about the memory that one of the awful things about their childhood was that it was uptight. Their parents never talked about what was going on. They were seriously worried and intimidated about what the neighbors might think. The handicapped were warehoused out of sight. You always put up a good front. Any aberration was swept under the rug. Life was often a lie, and nothing outside of Leave it to Beaver happy family was tolerated. Many of the speakers were resentful about this.

Then, the 35-45 year olds had a very different complaint. Their hippie parents, or their rock band parents, or their damaged by fighting in Vietnam parents, let it all hang out. They allowed drugs and sex and rock and roll to pervade the home. There were no boundaries. They stayed up at night until they fell asleep under the table. They moved all the time. They had to parent the parents. You didn't judge or condemn anything lest you be called uptight.

Everyone seemed to have gotten a raw deal. But, all the people in these groups were working on letting go and having compassion and moving on into wholeness. These are great big steps/lessons that we all have to learn at some point in our lives. No bad can come from being more compassionate of ourselves or others. Often people don't learn to let go until they are dying. It is much brighter do this when you have more time to practice it. These lessons, in my experience, often need to be practiced over and over. You have to be a Bodhisattva to conquer all of life's suffering.

But, several thoughts came to me. One is that we get exactly what we need in this life. This brings us back to Karma. I chose the parents to whom I would incarnate. They presented me with exactly the challenges I needed for this incarnation. My experiences with them brought me to exactly this moment of possibility in this life and I am in this moment in a beautiful, safe place surrounded by compassionate people sharing my story. Pretty cool.

What I came away with was a jumble of thoughts. The first one, and it is very loud, is that most parents were doing their best with what they had and the mega and minor circumstances they were in. Another thought is that with a certain mind set, nothing is ever enough. There is no objective measure of what enough love is or what enough money looks like, or what enough nurturing is. That is in our heads. So, the thing to change is our mind. "I have enough" becomes a most fruitful mantra.