Adrian of Conscious Life News writes:
At some point, you have to reckon with your behavioral patterns and beliefs from childhood. For most people, that means dealing with their family issues.
In many respects, people are dealing with family issues from day one of their spiritual journeys. That is because if you were raised in a family situation, then you created a whole lot of invisible and unconscious beliefs by following what your family was doing. If you didn’t have a family growing up, you still absorbed a lot of ideas and copied a lot of patterns from the people around you at the time. Any way you look at it, you’re going to end up doing a lot of spiritual work on the stuff that happened and got learned when you were young because all of that forms your mental and emotional foundation. That foundation dictated to you most of what you thought was possible to do or be, and the levels of your life all got built off it. Now, it’s time to take down the “family house.”
The History of Family
While I haven’t done much research on the history of families, a couple of things do seem to be fairly evident. One of which is that family was central to survival. This is especially true when we’re less than 5 years old and can’t do anything for us. It’s extremely likely that we would die if we did not rely on our families to feed us, protect us, clean us up, and so much more. This is a fundamental human truth.
However, in centuries past where there weren’t social safety nets–and for many societies in modern day as well–family was the social safety net. There was no unemployment, food stamps, welfare, or anything else to help out. Trying to survive on one’s own in many civilizations and climates was extremely difficult. Having more people around to gather resources, protect you from warring factions, care for you if you got sick, and other additional tasks were extremely important supports to your survival. Being that our survival is one of the driving forces inside of us, relying on family became an unsaid and deeply accepted belief for most people around the world.
Once again, I haven’t researched this, but I encourage you to do so if you need to check into it. As I often say, I don’t have your truth for you, and it is important to be engaged with your growth process. However, I think that what I am saying makes a lot of sense. To get started inquiring about family, I encourage you to ask yourself, “Why do you need family?” See where your inquiry takes you.
Your Family History Unveiled
There’s a lot that goes on in early childhood, and a lot of it isn’t mentally remembered by most people. However, it is emotionally remembered, physically remembered, and energetically remembered. That’s why for many of you going deep into old pain and issues, you may not really have any memories to go on. You’re just working with the upset of your baby self when you weren’t taken care of for a half hour on day, or if you endured long periods of neglect, then there may be a great deal of pain and discomfort arising with no general thoughts. In this way, your healing work addresses things you don’t remember and helps you resolve old pains that have probably influenced you in more ways than you can imagine.
For some of you, I may be getting ahead of this work. The first step is a willingness to unmask the family karma inside yourself. Doing so will invariably challenge a lot of your beliefs about your family members. It is very natural to accept the stories that our parents tell us about ourselves, themselves, and the world. While the teenage years and early twenties bring about an individuation process, there are limits to that process. A lot of the deeper core beliefs stay in tact. A son may affiliate with the Republican party in the U.S. while his father is affiliated with the Democrats, but they both may still cling to a core belief system around right-and-wrong. Thus, that foundation dictates how the son can believe. A lot of the possibilities for understanding life are eliminated by that underlying belief system, and unveiling that is part of a critical process of moving towards greater freedom.
That’s just one small item in a huge list of family behaviors and beliefs to unveil if you want to truly be free and to know yourself.
Opening the Pandora’s Box of Family Issues
Once you start opening the box of family issues, it’s very difficult to close it again. I am sure that some do, but the more free you become, the more you look inside that box. You typically find that you don’t want anything inhibiting your freedom. So you look again and again, and you will very likely find more and more ugliness.
Read more HERE.