Mother’s Day

I remember a horror movie titled, Mother’s Day, and while I don’t recommend the movie I do perceive that some or even much of our interactions with both Mom and Dad, though not a horror, are far less rewarding and pleasurable than they might be.

I also remember watching a scene from a movie where a very young Sean Penn is waiting for an elevator. The doors open on an older man and woman and Sean says, “A Mom and a Dad, I’m home.”

Ram Dass said, “If you think you are enlightened, visit your parents.”

How is Your relationship with your parents?

Completing your relationship with your folks is one of the deepest, most beneficial and most rewarding things you can do. It is also a necessary precursor to completing your relationship with yourself. What does completing your relationship with your parents mean? I have seeded the garden of words that follow with explanations, practical suggestions, complaints and tricks all aimed at growth and nourishment as you relate to your parents and yourself.

A new friend of mine has her parents visiting as I write this and Mother’s today. While I don’t yet know her well, I am being instantly introduced to what I imagine to be the most reactionary and least revolutionary parts of her, because I am watching her around her parents.

Parents, not personally but generically, invite an iron clad, instantaneous, automated bond between stimulus and response. Initially getting along much better with your parents begins simply by just noticing any difference in your breathing when you are around them, on the phone with them or when you think about them, or imagine them coming to visit for a week.

Breath is a pretty good indicator of stress, and reactions to parents are often stressful. If you hold your breath, even momentarily when in proximity to your parents you are likely in an early stage of getting to know yourself through interactions with them. At these early stages small, homeopathic doses of parents are probably safest. If your breath becomes faster and more shallow than usual when you think of your time with your folks, you are likely in the middle stages of getting to know them and yourself. If you have no idea what happens with your breath when around your parents, please start to notice. If, when you are around your parents or thinking or speaking to them, you breathe deeply and get a sense of warmth, of home, or smell homemade bread even though there isn’t any cooking, you probably have completed your relationship with your parents, or you are five and your parents are very nice people.

Different parts of us grow up at very different rates. We are never more mature than the composite maturity of all of our parts. There is nothing, nothing like time with the parents to let you know both your personal maturity and your inner evolution. Breath, as I have said, is a good indicator of where you are in this process, length of time between stimulus and response is another. How quickly do you respond to anything your parents might say or do? If you have children, how quickly do they respond to anything you might say or do? If you have a spouse, how quickly does he or she respond to anything his or her parents say or do? The quicker the response the further you are from completion with your parents and with yourself as well.

How Bad Can It Get?

Around our parents we shamefully respond really quickly and often with the least mature parts of ourselves. Mom says, “Honey, I just wish your life was a bit _________.” Fill in the blank with almost anything, such as: easier, happier, more fulfilling, more like mine, different, richer, wiser, more full, more full of children. Nearly anything our parents say has the possibility of driving us up the nearest wall. Why?

At the root of some of the problems we have with our parents is that we really don’t know who our parents are to us. We don’t know if they are our friends, we have no choice about them being family, we don’t know if they own us, or want us. We don’t know if we care if they approve of us, but we certainly don’t want them to disapprove of us. They stand as one of the last links, an unknown link between us and the grave. We have known them for a long time but it isn’t likely that our relationship with them has evolved since the stone-age. We do know that no matter what age we are they have always been older. We know that, to some degree, we both thank them and blame them for us being here. We know that when we were tender and young they were at best amateur parents. We know that they got here before us and are likely leaving before us. We know that we would do almost anything to please or displease them and can’t actually figure out how to consistently do either. We know that we pass judgment on each other with regularity.

“Honey, remember the time when ___________?” Funny, I’ve been talking to my therapist about exactly that time for the past two years.

Are your parents your friends? Well, one of the best things about friends is that you pick them and if you don’t want to hang out with them you don’t have to. Another really cool thing about friends is that you like being around them. With friends, hopefully, you are something close to equal, with parents that is seldom if ever the case. As we age, if we have the least bit of perspective we notice to some degree that we are adopting some the aspects of our parents that we liked the least. If we, heaven forbid, have kids we discover we are saying the same sorts of things to them that our parents said to us. Not having kids is the worst insult ever to some parents.

Whose life is it anyway? You likely met your parents before you knew any better, way before the age of consent, and it is really likely that raising you was the toughest job your parents will ever do.

Most species on Earth don’t even recognize their young after a year. Humans often know their offspring for entire lifetimes. Dogs don’t have their parents over for brunch, eagles aren’t expected to call home or send Christmas cards and cats don’t have to be social to family or non-family members. Yet we are supposed to be at least civil and hopefully loving of our parents for a lifetime. We owe them our lives’ which means that we, at least to some degree, blame them for the fact that we are alive. They have seen us with our pants down, they have seen us on our first date and they have been responsible for us, whatever that means, for the first eighteen years of our lives and often more. They have taught us what they know, wittingly or unwittingly, and we are the continued source of their greatest pride and embarrassment. What we are to them and what they are to us isn’t negotiable. We have our genes in a knot.

Relationships are all about angle of interaction. Are you better than someone? Are you richer, smarter, funnier, older, younger, taller or prettier than someone? We relate by comparison; we compare ourselves to others. But, where parents fit in with this sort of comparison is at the best of times difficult to figure out.

Parents are a bit like a food you know you should like but you simply can’t make up your mind whether you like it or not.

The only time a relationship with parents really works well is when it is evolving. When it ages without evolving we are in trouble: we simply don’t get to grow up.

Completing Your Relationship with Your Parents

I dare say that I have completed my relationship with my parents. It wasn’t easy, it didn’t happen overnight, but it was worthwhile and continually contributes to my relationships with everyone else.

I recall an ancient ritual my parents and I used to do. I would arrive home after days, weeks, months or even years and my father would quickly head down to the garden. It seemed, no matter what the season, there was always some garden emergency to attend to the moment I arrived home. My mother and I would, rather too quickly, begin to talk about how rude it was for him to leave right when I got home.

For years my mother and I bonded time after time over the topic of my father’s rude behavior, not realizing we were being exceedingly rude ourselves. Please, please, please begin to look at the politics of your own relationship with your parents. Doing so may seem like taking your medicine, but like good medicine it may heal ancient wounds.

I remember the day I arrived home and my father headed to the garden and I joined him. That simple interruption of an old pattern shifted our relationship forever.

One of the basic signs of maturity is how quickly we react. The more quickly we react, the less time and space between stimulus and response, the less mature we are. While this isn’t a hard and fast rule it is certainly the case far more often than it is not.

Part of completing your relationship with your parents is being around them as who you are today–not who you were when you were akid, not who you were when you were bad, or young, or helpless, or anything less than who you are today. Another part of completing your relationship with your parents is being with them as they are today–not who they were when they were big and you were small, when they were all-knowing and you were first forming your opinions, when they were oppressive, reactionary, providers, or anything else.

Way too often parts of us simply don’t grow up and in any moment with your parents those un-grown, undefended, unhealthy, over-feeling parts tend to show up messing up what might have been a perfectly wonderful Sunday afternoon.

There is a time to talk around your parents and a time to shut-up. Until you can tell which is which, a very advanced stage, it really works to talk when you don’t want to talk and shut-up when you can’t help but talk. In other words, when you can’t be trusted to act in your own best interest do the opposite of your immediate tendency.

Completing your relationship with your parents is about having them be just the way they are this moment and just the way they are the next moment. It is about caring endlessly and not controlling them. Completing your relationship with yourself is the same.

As Werner Erhart said a long time ago, “If your mother is a dragon, then your mother is a dragon. If she breathes fire, then make sure you don’t get too close.” The only thing wrong with your mother being a dragon is if you don’t know she is or you don’t think she should be one. Dragons are fine as long as you treat them like dragons. Completing your relationships with your parents, yourselves, your kids, your bosses, your spouses or your friends is all about knowing who they are in this moment and paving the road to their being anything they might be in the next moment: with presence and without preference.

One of the best things about relating with parents is that this is nearly always the most difficult, primordial place of completion for you. If you can dance sweetly with your parents, if you can live completely with your parents, you can do so anywhere with anyone.

Completing your relationship with your parents is having them do what they do, say what they say and be exactly as they are. If you stand in judgment of your parents or hate your parents or love your parents then stand in judgment of your parents, or hate your parents or love your parents. Notice the way that you are, be the way that you are, and if you judge that you are wrong or they are wrong then judge that you or they are wrong. Resisting anything is resisting everything. Embrace yourself exactly as you are.

Often, with parents, pretense has worn thin. What this looks like is that we already know what Mom is going to do when we tell her we are on a diet at Thanksgiving and she, of course, doesn’t disappoint us. She says exactly what we think she will say and we have exactly the reaction we have always had to her approval or disapproval.

Alchemy of Relating

Any dance, when it becomes sufficiently patterned and predictable, stifles us instead of inspires us. The essence of science is that you mix the same things together and have the same results each time. Relationship, hopefully, is not a science. And relationship evolving is seldom predictable. Relationship is alchemy. In alchemy you mix the same things together and get a different, unpredictable result. Our greatest evolutionary gift, other than an opposing thumb, is attention. When we know what is going to happen that doesn’t inspire our attention. We think we know what our parents will do and we probably are often correct. Our prediction of what they will do becomes predictive of what they will do. What they have done in the past tends to infringe upon what they can or will do in the future. When this happens consistently, which is often the case with parents, we get locked into relating patterns that bore us, upset us or make us want to run away screaming. If someone strokes your arm it may feel nice, but if they stroke it over, and over and over again they will actually wear away your skin. My dear old friend, Mike, ran an ultra-marathon in the rain. (Ultra-marathons are not unlike most relationships with parents.) Mike had a seam on the inside of his T-shirt which rubbed away at the soft tender skin of his underarm on each stroke for 123 miles. It took years for this wound to heal.

Completion is all about healing. It is about forgiving your parents for who they are and what they have done as we forgive ourselves for who we are and for what we have done. It is about stepping into that marvelous alchemical point at which we really don’t know what we or others will do in the next moment. It is about sitting in the eye of the storm with infinite possibilities when probability simply isn’t on our side. It is about having the most ordinary moment be the most extraordinary moment just because we are there, because we are present.

Home is Where the Heart Is

I recall a time in my forties, when I visited my parents. It was winter and I was exhausted; I didn’t know how badly I needed a bit of refuge. As I stepped out of the car I failed to notice a thin coating of ice on the blacktop. I fell, cutting my hand badly and banging my head, knocking myself out. When I came to I was lying on a bed in my parent’s house. My mother came into the room and sat on the bed, I curled up next to her and wept. It was just what I needed.

I remember my son, Judson, who was a bit accident prone as a kid, jumping from his dresser to the floor and banging his head. His forehead quickly swelled to a terrifying lump. I played the tough parent. I held him as he cried. I was as brave as he was scared. I took the high road of blocking the incident and letting him know that it was OK and that he would be OK. We just needed to sit there with me being the parent and him being the child and we were fine.

Six months later, Judson bumped his head again and a horrible lump swelled into a bump bigger than a baseball on his forehead. This time I wasn’t the parent. We ended up cuddled up together on the bed with him holding and soothing me. He let me know it was going to be OK, that I was OK and that he was OK.

In early stages of relationship with your parents it is sufficient to make sure our interactions are unpredictable. Unpredictability nurtures us and enhances our attention, predictability, which is the stuff of familial relationships, stifles us. Notice what your automatic response is and do anything else. If your mother says, “Oh, you don’t like jam,” then notice your response. Notice if you want to let her know you do like jam you just don’t want any right now, or you don’t like this kind of jam, or you don’t feel especially like jam this moment. If you want to set her straight, then shut-up. What does the bloody jam matter anyway? Mom wants to know who you are and she is afraid you won’t be enough like her, and that you might be too much like her. She is afraid you might be independent of her, smarter than her or happier than her. And she is afraid you won’t be independent of her, smarter than her or happier than her. No matter how you turn out she loses, especially if, as most parents do, she attributes the worst aspects of you to herself and the best aspects of you to you.

If you are visiting your parents forgive yourself in advance for being the way you are. Forgive yourself for not having a better job, smarter kids, less weight or whatever sort of wound you use to get your parents attention. Meet your parents as though they are new, open and available. Meet your parents as grown up friends.

Some of you imagine that when your parents die you will be complete with them. Those of you who have lost a parent know too well that it doesn’t change a darned thing–except that after the death of a parent it becomes more difficult to complete your relationship with him or her.

As you complete your relationship with your parents all your other relationships, especially with yourself will bloom. Another really useful tool in interacting with your parents is to change roles, and you don’t need their permission to do this. Interact with your parents as a friend, as a parent to them, as a grandparent to them, as their grandchild. Interact with them as their boss, as their equal, as their slave. Make interacting with them an unpredictable dance. Change the angle of interaction and you change the relationship. You also begin to enhance the flow of attention between you and them. Like your father better than your mother one moment, then in the next moment like your mother better than your father. In the next moment like yourself better than either parent. Get things moving, shake them up. Only when something changes are you inspired to feed it attention and only when you feed it attention are you yourself fed.

It is said that you can judge a society by the way it treats its old people. I say, you can judge a person by the way they interact with their parents. You can judge them by how quickly and how consistently they react with their parents. The process of completing your relationship with your parents is the fun. It is like a roller coaster. The point of a roller coaster isn’t to get to the end. The point is to enjoy, be scared, be thrilled and be present with the ride. The process of completing our relationship with your parents is the process of completing the second most primary relationship in our life: the first is with ourselves. A tiny step in the direction of completion is like a moment on the roller coaster, a riveting ride. Unlike the roller coaster, on this ride you never get off.

Teasing out the different facets and aspects of relationship with your parents, relating unpredictably, moving toward the present yourself, speaking when you don’t want to and being quiet when you have to speak will make your relating with your parents much more rewarding.

Chances are pretty good that he wouldn’t take the job, and not just because he died a long time ago.  Thoreau moved to the woods, to Walden Pond, retreated from what he saw as the self destructive, wild cultural demands of the industrialized world, and returned to nature.  He sought a refuge from the busyness of his day.  Imagine what he would think of the traffic, fast food, TV, kid transporting, cell phones, computers, and double shifts of today? I suggest it isn’t an accident we are so busy.

Why do you think everyone is so busy?  Why do you feel left out if you are caught up?  Why is cool to have a backlog?  This phenomenon is not an accident.  Though it seems there is so much to do, virtually none of it needs to be done.  We seek to never be in the position of having extra attention.  We simply don’t want gaps in our lives, in our business, in our relationships.  Vacations used to be opportunities for relaxation; now we are busier on vacation than we are normally.  Several years ago I wrote a book called, How to Win by Quitting.  In that book I offered ways to liberate ourselves from being so busy–from the lack of perspective that a lack of reflection always provides.

When I wrote How to Win by Quitting I didn’t understand that people don’t want more attention, though they seek it.  People don’t want “free time,” in fact they are afraid of it.  Waking up is not hard to do; I have been with many hundreds of people as they woke up during the forum of my workshops.  But living awake is tough.  Upon waking up you instantly became a member of a very small and exclusive club of people with much greater presence, attention, and ability, thus leaving your peers behind.  If you have ever been a drinker and quit drinking you know what I am talking about.  The consistent stupors and preoccupations of your friends who still drink just aren’t as interesting when you are sober.  Your drinking buddies, meaning well, just want you to drink again, to get back into their club.  Upon waking up you discover that nearly everyone else is asleep.  You also discover that it is a night and day difference between being asleep and being awake and that nobody who is asleep notices the difference. Part of the particular sleepy trance people live in is that they don’t know they are sleeping.  Only upon waking up do you discover that you were sleeping.

Attention, specifically attention focused on attention rather than on an object, is the key to waking up.  It is possible to jump start the process of waking up by doing simple exercises for a period of time while in the presence of someone who is awake.

What is waking up? That question is more relevant than nearly any question we ask.  The very act of asking that question is daring and useful. A simple answer to the question is that waking up is a shift from living as a reaction to expressing the very act of living as a creation.  Human beings are one of the only (perhaps the only) creatures on Earth capable of not having to react. Many gurus talk about waking up.  A few can provide you with the experience of waking up, fewer still can interact with you in such a way that you can wake up on your own or remain awake.  While not a guru, I have spent decades exploring what it is to wake up.  I have had people wake up in my presence consistently, and learn how to wake up on their own.  If you get a sense that waking up is of interest to you, let’s dance.  Let’s blend your willingness with my technologies and experience. May I have this dance?

Ever wonder how many of the average woman’s 7,000 words per day are heard by the average man?  Thankfully, perhaps, we have no way to measure how many words are heard, only how many are spoken. The average man speaks 2,000 words per day.

I recall a workshop I assisted at years ago.  It was called the Advanced Action Workshop.  In it Roger, the workshop leader, was exploring what really needed to be said, exploring the work of Fernando Flores in the process.  The workshop was full of very powerful people, movers and shakers, who were used to speaking and being heard and who produced a lot of action in the world around them.  My job in this workshop was to keep a written record of everything Roger said.  This job kept me awake even in the presence of the philosophical exploration of words.  The twenty or so participants in the workshop slept through most of the course.  They literally couldn’t keep their eyes open.  The material covered, all about linguistics and language, was so deeply dense and personal that it proved to be a sleep aid.  In this particular course, action my arse, the participants napped during the course and came alive and awake for the breaks.

For months after the course I spoke very little.  With my attention focused on language, I realized that few words really need to be spoken. Often, what passes for communication is an excess of words. Linguists indicate that less than five percent of any communication is the content symbolized by the words.

I remember my mother saying, “Mums the word.”

What needs to be said and what doesn’t?  Anything you have to say about that?

In the Action workshop, the precursor to the Advanced Action workshop, we learned that all human verbal communication could be boiled down to four types and that knowing what type you where saying sweetened communication much like boiling maple sap turns it into naturally sweet maple syrup.  The four types of communication are Request, Promise, Assertion, and Declaration.  Determining how all language fits into these categories and how request, promise, assertion and declaration relate is sufficient to produce effective human communication, and action. Exploring these phrases regarding your own internal, infernal, dialogue will lead to greater peace, exploring these phrases as you speak to others will lead to prosperity.

If you would like (request) me (declaration) to flesh out each type of phrase (assertion) and even give you some practice with each (promise), please let me know (request).

Answer: 150 blahs, and six other words in the box.