When We Heal Our Parents, We Heal Ourselves!

By Cosmo Heartbear

Cosmo Heartbear, who manifests an authentic healing presence, offers Deep Shamanic Journeys.

Who am I?" Zoe asks. She hangs her head. Then, softly, "I am afraid I am nothing." This question and fear, shared by many, lies at the root of much of our suffering: not knowing who we are, at a deep level.

Zoe's father when he is with her is a remote man. We are on a journey together, and now he is here, in my body, in front of her, for her to see clearly. His love for her is hard to see. He is hiding. Yet his shame and sadness is easy to see. And easy to grab onto. "This is all I know," she says. "If it's not there, then there will just be a big hole."

She begins to see herself connected to her father through a shared place of shame and sorrow. There is a certain comfort here, as painful as it is. They are connected. He slips further into his sadness, crying and curling up to hide in his shame. He is holding a ball of ripped cloth in a knot against his tummy. Then she sees it: it is not him, it is not her.

"Oh my God. Everything is built on top of this." Her judgments of him drop away, and she sees the beautiful boy that he truly is. "No!" she screams. "There is nothing wrong with you!" What she can't do for herself she can do for him. Her anger to save him activates and she pulls his ball of sadness and shame away from him. "It's not yours!" She holds him and tells him what he has always wanted and needed to hear: that there is nothing wrong with him, that he matters, and that he is lovable. For he had connected to his father in the same way she had to him: by carrying his sadness and shame. They are both crying, and his spirit is receiving what he had always yearned for.

"I love you," Zoe says. She has seen him, seen the truth of him. This bearing witness, someone to actually see him in his grace, is tremendously healing. It frees him to hold her, to see her, and to love her.

And it is not just any "someone" who can do this for us—to truly see us, to tell us who we are. It seems our parents are the source of us, before we can connect to a more universal, perhaps Godly, love. That is, it is only from them that we know who we are, because we are them. We can get stuck in a cycle that may be generations old, of waiting for someone in our blood spirit line to see our magnificence. We can get stuck, because we are lost and waiting for it, and so are our parents. Who will start? How can we tell them they are something when we believe we may be nothing? And the child in us says "Isn't it their job?!" We can because until we die (and perhaps after) there is always a glimmer of light in our hearts that has enough love to give to them, and so giving it, it comes back, and we begin a spiral back up to love. Often anger is the message sent to us from the part of ourselves that knows the deeper truth of who we are. The part of us that screams "Hold me!" and wants to break through to our sleepwalking or angry parents knows the truth of them—how beautiful they are way inside—more than our parents may know it. The anger in Zoe gave her the strength to stop the cycle, to begin to create a loving relationship.

And whether they are still on this planet or not, we can heal our parents, and transform ourselves out of our pain and limits into the love that we are. On another journey, Joey wrestled with his father, held in my body, begging him, "What am I supposed to do to make you love me?". His father answered back with the same, telling him how he felt he could never be enough. Then his father is crying, and Joey breaks down too, and for the first time they see each other, how they were hiding, always feeling they were never enough for one another. And seeing how beautiful and lovable and perfect the other is. Joey's anger dissipated. He forgave his father, and asked for his forgiveness. His father received the same. Joey ends feeling a love from his father and for his father he has never known.

But did he really heal his father? Well, the next day his father calls. "I miss you," his Dad says. He has never said that. The next day his father calls again. "How 'bout I fly up to San Francisco and we drive back to LA together?". Joey hangs up, his heart doing backflips. He calls back, suspicious that maybe his dad just needs to tell him something. "No, I just wanted to support you. I know you are going through some relationships stuff." They talk for 30 minutes longer than they have ever talked on the phone, usually hanging on just long enough to say hello and goodbye. Joey healed his father's spirit, and himself, and his father in his body got it.

The pain in our parents leads to confusion in us. Do I matter? Is there something wrong with me? Am I lovable? If they had been able to answer these questions for themselves in a life-affirming way, we would know them too. So to heal ourselves, to get what we need, to be able to ask these questions of our source, we need to heal our parents.

So when Zoe frees her father from the cage of her judgments, and the burden of his ancestors' shame and sorrow, she can receive the love she needs.

"So tell me: Who are you?" I ask Zoe.

A smile quickly spreads across her face. She breathes easily and deeply. "I am love."