Krishnananda (Thomas Trobe, M.D.)

There are many stages in our journey of recovering our real selves, of finding out who we really are and reconnecting with our essential trust, aliveness, dignity and lovingness. One of these stages certainly involves separating from our roots so that we can discover our identity apart from what we have been taught and conditioned. This is a physical, emotional and spiritual separation — a stage that requires coming out of the fantasies of our childhood, feeling the pain we are been through and rigorously questioning everything about how we were taught to behave, think and lead our lives. Prior to this, we often take our conditioning for granted, and until we separate, we cannot discover what is authenticly ours from what is a part of our family, and the culture and religion of our childhood. We live our lives as robots just following unconsciously in the footsteps of those who have come before us. Separating throws us out of the security and unconsciousness of the nest.

But there is another stage after this one, a stage which sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of our growth process. This is a stage of allowing the circle to come around again - of coming back to our roots and learning, accepting and embracing how much our destiny, our personality and our life is influenced by where we come from and who raised us. Sometimes, we may be "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" — rejecting our caretakers and everything they stand for without recognizing how much of our life is inexorably linked to theirs. If we do this, in some sense we remain separated from parts of ourselves and condemn those aspects which we do not like or understand.

Neither of these two stages is easy. To wake up out of the illusions of our childhood, to stop protecting our parents and to see and feel things as they were is painful. To separate - to question all of the beliefs we have been taught and to strike out on our own is perhaps the most courageous step anyone will ever take. It took me years to do it and several times it took strong kicks from different teachers I have had along the way. What does it mean to separate? Perhaps it happens differently for everyone. For me, it began by feeling at one point that I had to get off the train and do something very different than the intensive career agenda I was on. First, that led to meeting and living with people and in situations which caused me to question for the first time many of the beliefs I was raised with. Then I began to do individual therapy work and growth workshops where I started to connect with the shame and pain that I was carrying inside which had roots in my childhood. I lost the fantasy I was carrying of my "perfect parents" and began to recognize how much shaming and pain I had been through. I never realized profoundly and how subtley I was connected to the umbilical cord of my family and culture.

We are continually confronted with this same innocent blindness in our work. It is very common for adults to be living still with their parents without realizing the price they are paying. For instance, one man, aged 37, had never lived on his own and was so bonded with his mother that he had never had a relationship with a woman. Another 35 yr old woman was living in the building owned by her father together with her parents and all her siblings. She did not understand why she has so many fears about living. One 29yr old woman who was living with her parents had to lie about where she was going when she came to do a workshop with us for fear that they would not allow her to come. Halfway through the workshop, her mother called after tracking her down through a friend and ordering her to come home immediately. A man in his early 40's was having continual fights with his girlfriend because she complained that she felt the energy of his mother around him all the time. She bought his clothes, decorated his apartment and they spoke on the phone nearly every day. Still, he could not see why this was a problem or why it was disturbing his girlfiend.

These cases may seem extreme but I am constantly amazed how common it is to find people who have not separated and do not realize it. And I can understand because it was so difficult for me to separate. It is terrifying to separate. It is safer by far not to rock the boat. But when we are engrained in our conditioning, our thinking is narrow and exclusive. It is as though we are imprisoned in a village without the awareness that in other villages, people live and believe totally differently. It is comfortable and safe in our little village and we can continue living as we have always done without questioning or disturbing anything. But then we never learn how other villages live and worse, we never learn to think for ourselves. Still worse, the old connections to parents and family usually keep re-enforcing our shame, our negative self-image and our life-negative conditioning.

I come from a deeply enmeshed Jewish family. Jewish families, probably for survival reasons that go back centuries, insulate and isolate themselves with each other and with the "clan" and hide behind a subtle wall of superiority, judgmentalness and competition. Ofcourse there are positive aspects of this conditioning (at least in my case) — there is much love, support, and emphasis on learning and social consciousness. But my connection to the family kept me tied to seeing and feeling myself as in my childhood. I could only experience myself within the perspective of a very narrow mirror full of all the unconsciousness and limitations of my family.

To separate, we have to get away because until we get away, we keep re-enforcing our shame and we can't discover ourselves. There are no short cuts — we have to get far away. And we have to break the ties that link us to our family. That usually means we have to stop being financially dependent because financial dependence almost always demands a price of "keeping the faith". And separating physically still isn't enough. We also have to work on ourselves — to dig deep inside and challenge everything we feel, think and do. Usually that means being guided by a teacher or a therapist. Even once I began to see that there were huge limitations in the conditioning I received, I still needed help to explore and challenge parts of myself and my beliefs that I was unaware of. So much of our personality is affected that we often can't see it by ourselves and it has a greater influence of our life than we realize.

A small example. Last year, Amana and I were in Rome. All the shops were closed because it was a holiday but one was open by the Trevi fountain. Amana noticed a beautiful mens sweater in the window and told me to buy it. I told her that I didn't need any more sweaters. And anyway, it was too expensive. My conditioning says that any article of clothing over $100 is prohibitive and that one shouldn't buy anything which one doesn't need. But I am also a "clothes horse" so it didn't take Amana much to persuade me to buy it. But as soon as I left the shop, I got a massive attack from my inner judge. "You didn't need that! You already have too much weight in your suitcase! That was a terrible waste of money! You are distracting yourself from your spiritual search with so many material things!" and so on."

Not only do we have to leave physically, break the financial ties and expose ourselves to new and different ways of thinking, we also have to take big and little risks to challenge what we have been taught. We have to risk to behave in ways that go against the old rules. This may involve sex, our choice of partners, how we live and who we live with and so on... Perhaps the biggest risk is to break contact.

Separating is simply terrifying to our wounded inner child — to that part of us which is full of fears and insecurity. To venture into the unknown without our old rules and morality can bring total panic because this wounded child inside of us has such a strong need for belonging and approval. "What will they all say? What if they shut us out? What if they get angry at us? How can you betray the people who love you? How can you be so selfish and bad?" These are some of terrifying thoughts that can hold us back. And the attacks of our inner judge built on all the rules and morality of our conditioning can be devastating. Fear and guilt keeps us bound to the old. Yet as long as we stay tethered to our family and our culture, we never really grow up. Still, separating takes incredible intelligence and courage.

The process of separating is over when we no longer depend on the love and approval of those who raised us and when we have begun to find ourselves and our self-esteem independent of them. As long as we still need and want something, we still come as a child and we are still trapped in the same net. We will still come away feeling shamed and not loving ourselves. For years, when I went to visit my parents and family, I would lose myself. Each day, I felt myself less and less. By the third day, I was a "basket case". But in stages, I got stronger. Progressively, I could stay with myself longer and come away with less recovery time.

One powerful experience which I had with my father comes to mind. It happened two years before he died. Ever since I had begun to separate, my father and I had difficulty communicating with each other. (Probably before too but I wasn't so aware of it then.) I reacted to his rigidity and felt I couldn't reach him and I also felt hurt because I always believed that he had greater respect for my older brother. He felt judged and rejected by me and also hurt that I did not seek his advice as a father. (Which I didn't.) Over the years, we even had some quite heated confrontations. I longed to come close to him but we were in a kind of stalemate and I wasn't willing to be vulnerable with him. At the time of this visit, I was still living much of the year in a commune in India. After several days, feeling the distance between us, I suggested that we take a walk together. As we were walking, I asked him if he was judging me about anything. He told that he was because he felt that I was wasting my life in India, that I was not building toward having a home and a family and that I was forgetting everything that I had learned in my psychiatric training.

I took it in and thought about what he said and for awhile we walked in silence. Then I explained that actually I was using my training in the seminars that I was leading. Also, even though it was true that I had very little money saved, I was making a good living and when I reflected on what he had taught me, I was actually living much of it. He had always told us that money was not important. What was important to him was enjoying and being challenged by what you did, working to help people and to make the world a better place to live in. I told him that in fact that was how I saw my work. A few days later, he actually apologized to me for not understanding more about what I was doing.

After he died, though, I realized that I had missed something deep in relation to him and regret it very much. I had not been able to let go of my pain and my pride. And as a result, I had never been able to honor him. I was grateful for what he gave me but I was still holding on to my need to be valued by him. I was still focused on what I didn't get. I could not see him clearly for who he was. Ofcourse he could not fully value me because the direction I had taken seemed so alien to him. Unlike my brother whose path followed his much more closely. Also, I judged in myself (still do) some of the aspects of my personality which I felt I got from him — such as my irritability, rigidity, judgmentalness and deeply hidden emotionality. But what I have come to see is that this cut me off from myself because in so many ways, I am just like him and will always be. And much of it is admirable. What a shame that I could not wake up out of my old trance before he died and tell him directly and clearly how grateful I was that he was my father!

At a certain point in our growth process, the circle starts to come around again. In the first period, as we are separating, we rebel, we reject, we react, we argue, we complain, we judge. But the circle starts to turn back when we let go of the pain and deprivation of the past. Then not only do we begin to see it for what it was and the people in it for who they are but we also can feel enriched from it no matter how painful it was. It is a completion.

In many conscious and unconscious ways, our lives, our destiny and our personalities are deeply patterned around our parents. Once we have separated, we can appreciate that "the apple has fallen both very far and very close from the tree". Whether we like it or not or whether we are aware of it or not, we are carrying on the torch in many ways. I notice more and more how much I am like both of my parents. I find myself thinking, acting and talking like them in ways that I never realized before. We are like our parents in many ways that won't change. Some of these ways we may like and some we may not but in either case, it is part of who we are. This is true not only about our parents but also about the cultural heritage which we come from. The completion involves becoming aware of our heritage, accepting it and even finding strength and identity from it.

However, this process of burying the hatchet and reconnecting happens in its own way and time. We can't push it. In my view, the concept of "forgiveness",as it is often taught, can easily be a false process which instills a new morality and only takes us further from ourselves. When one "forgives", the "forgiver" places himself or herself above the "forgiven". But when we have completed our separation process what we gain is understanding. Then we may naturally drop whatever pain or anger we have carried. But sometimes the pain and the abuse has been so great that it is very difficult to let go of the anger or hurt. A friend of mine from Sweden who has been working on himself for years is still full of anger and pain from the wounds of his childhood. His father was a military man and his mother an artist. They ignored him as a child and gave his care to an unfeeling and disciplinarian maid. He was in so much shock that he didn't begin to speak until he was four. Now he is still full of mistrust and fear. It may take much more time before he is ready to let go of his anger toward his parents.

A part of this reconnecting process may also involve digging deeper into our past to discover more about our family history. There are often buried secrets from the past that are still affecting us powerfully in the present in ways that we are not aware of. The family constellation work of Bert Hellinger is very valuable in this area. He has developed a work which sets up representatives for significant family members in an energetic constellation which reflects the way the person who is working viewed how these people related to each other emotionally. Then he gradually rearranges the pattern to complete a healing movement of the family soul. His discovery is that this healing movement happens spontaneously and magically as the representatives simply feel the energy of the people they are representing. In my own experience with this work, it is particularly helpful when someone has done a good deal of his or her separating work already. Otherwise, it may be necessary to go back and complete more of the process of feeling the pain, anger and hurt of our childhood wounds.

With separation and reconnection, we complete the circle of our healing process. We have gone through the dark tunnel, allowing ourselves to feel from the perspective of the inner child, the wounds we sustained while we were small. And we have found the courage to separate from our roots in order to find out who we are. Having taken that part of the journey, we can go on to the second part and also discover the ways we are deeply connected to our past and embrace with gratitude what we have inherited. In this way, we neither reject the pain of the past nor cling to it. Then we are able to appreciate that what we have been through has only deepened and enriched us.

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