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Instructions at a Dharma Session
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Parents
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Part 7, Parents

Your interactions can be an incredible practice

Interaction with your parents …

You have to look at your interaction with your parents as one of the great practices you can engage in. It is a lifelong project and is an important source of wisdom in understanding yourself. Your relationship with them is fundamental to your identity on the psychological level. Much of the hidden dynamics of your personality that have a huge impact on you—including the feelings you have about yourself—originate from your interactions with your parents from a very young age.

In order for you to make any progress in your cultivation, it is essential that you completely understand and penetrate all the elements of that interaction—your relationship with them, how much you owe them and have taken from them, and how much of the person you are is due to your interaction with them. Unresolved elements will probably effect not just your cultivation but also your life in the more general sense.

How to put this interaction into practice …

Listening is a universal practice but when it comes to your parents it is an incredible practice. Not just listening but also stopping the hundreds of immediate reactions that have been built into your system from all the years you spent with them. A lot of these built-in reactions occurred at such a young age that you will not be able to detect how they formed. If you can be patient and practice restraint so that the self does not immediately react, but instead listen past that to the dynamics of what is coming from them, your relationship with them will slowly change for the better.