The psychological consequences of karmic problems are related mainly to our interpersonal relationships because our mental health depends largely on the quality of our relationships. It seems that harmonious relationships are the true basis for a happy life and that happiness is one of the basic factors that ensure good health, not only mental but also physical and spiritual health. Among the main principles of Hawaiian Huna practice, there is one that states, “To love is to be happy with.” So the key to happiness is love, and our relationships are the expressions of love. Therefore an individual who avoids relationships, or whose relationships are mostly bad, cannot be called a healthy person. Since relationships directly indicate the state of our mental health, their quality can be used as a diagnostic tool. To begin therapy aimed at dissolving the causes of a problem or reaching a certain goal, a person must have at least one relationship based on unconditional love. If this is not the case, that person will not be motivated to change. What is more, without a single good relationship, the client cannot actualize the new state of consciousness and the new dimension of love that was reached through the intervention. In this case, it is better to begin the therapeutic intervention by creating one healthy relationship and only then continue with other kinds of work.
If we look closely at what is called “life,” we may notice that it is an ongoing and continuous relationship between the people and beings that constitute the manifested universe. Where there is a relationship, there is life, and life without relationships tends to die out. And if we look at life from the spiritual level, there is an underlying connection between all manifested forms, both living and material. All mystical experiences have one thing in common – the omnipresent unity. There is only one consciousness, which is the very essence of all individual life forms. If there is no difference between the object and the subject in a spiritual experience, between the perceiver and the perceived, then we have a kind of relationship network amongst all existing beings and things. So, it seems impossible not to be in a relationship because just by existing, we are already included in this network. And relationships are not only possible between physical beings. Many individuals will find communication with spiritual beings to be a very important aspect of their relationships. In cases of spiritual devotees who live as hermits, for example, there is a kind of relationship enabling the hermit to proceed with his continuous development – the relationship between himself and spiritual beings or God. These people are only hermits when it comes to interactions with other human beings but not with spiritual ones. So, what matters here is that relationships inevitably exist and take place between all beings, whether they are physical, energetic, or spiritual.
Besides being an instrument for expressing the universal cosmic principle called “unconditional love,” relationships are also important as the means by which related beings realize their goals. No single objective can be realized through individual effort alone. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we should rely too much on others and their help; it means that relationships also serve as a means of achieving our goals, whether we want it or not. The help of other people – their guidance, cooperation, or inspiration – will enable us to attain both our everyday and our profound goals. Good cooperation leads to “synergy,” which denotes a new quality created by a number of people focusing on a common goal. So, the sum of five people’s energies, for instance, is not five but about seven. For that reason, joint efforts lead to an easier realization of personal goals.
Some may think that relationships are not important or that they even obstruct individual development, but my practice has proved otherwise. Although different people have different inclinations (towards individualism or socializing), everyone inevitably develops in two main ways:
- Through individual self-development.
- Through relationships with other people and the community.
All outstanding individualists need an audience to recognize and confirm their individual results. At the same time, all sociable people require periods of solitude to deal with their personal needs, to develop their practical skills, or to gain new insights about their lives. Individual development is checked, confirmed, and sometimes even directly encouraged by relationships. For example, problems that arise as a consequence of disharmonious relationships are the most common incentive for personal development. Many people come to therapy precisely because of problematic relationships, and others who come for different reasons regularly discover that the cause of their problem is an unsettled relationship and its unconscious dynamics. Since relationships can be considered a means of our development, the original intention of most relationships is to teach us a lesson. That’s why they may be connected with the three main goals of our existence as human beings. Some relationships help the first goal, spiritual enlightenment, others with our karmic purification and the third type helps with our creative realization.
Bearing all this in mind, it isn’t hard to foresee that interpersonal relationships will be the first and most problematic consequence of a traumatic experience. As each trauma is created by an outer influence, its consequences primarily concern our relationship with the outer world, and this “outer world” consists mostly of other people. Trauma directly threatens interpersonal relationships because a traumatic experience is primarily an emotional wound, even if it is caused by a physical injury. So, it is only logical that an emotional wound manifests itself through relationships because they represent the emotional aspect of human existence. That’s why any therapeutic intervention treating a trauma automatically influences the character of our emotional connections with those who are close to us, mainly our family members. It is impossible to work on one aspect of our being and expect it to influence only that aspect and to have no effect on our relationships. Therefore therapeutic intervention over traumatic experience as the cause of all karmic problems has to be supplemented with sorting out the relationships affected by the trauma.
Without the positive transformation of the accompanying relationships, we may face some serious difficulties in grounding our achievements or with the actualization of a new healthy state in our everyday lives. Since the aim of every integral therapeutic intervention is not only to induce a change in consciousness but also a change in lifestyle, treating the traumatic experience without including its most important and critical consequence can produce a large amount of chaos in our lives. Dissolving the symptoms and the trauma, and even discovering the meaning of a problem, is usually not enough; it is necessary to include the relationships which the trauma is reflected upon. Otherwise, we neglect the ecology of such work and create unnecessary chaos, usually expressed as an inability to harmonize our lives with the new level of consciousness. But the original goal of the intervention was to change us, and our lifestyle is very much influenced by the people around us. They sometimes have a decisive impact on our behavior, which is why these relationships simply have to be included in the intervention.
Here’s another way of looking at the importance of relationship work in any kind of therapy. When dealing with a certain problem or when trying to realize their goals, most people don’t have a clear idea of what it is that causes their problems or blocks them from reaching their goals. The causes are usually hidden, buried deep in the realms of the unconscious mind, and our imagination interprets them in many different ways, creating varieties of prejudice. Nevertheless, it seems that most of our problems and blocks to success come from one of the two basic needs we have as human beings. Both of these needs are instinctive and automatic; they are part of human nature and are impossible to avoid or neglect. If these needs are not satisfied or become twisted, we will have problems that will block our happiness, our success, and fulfillment. Therefore, the problem-solving process has to consist of methods designed to enable us to satisfy these two needs. They are:
- The need for connectedness in relationships.
- The need for wholeness, or to be who we are.
Being connected in a relationship seems to be our primary need. Humans want to be emotionally bonded with the people that are closest to them. The need for connectedness is so strong that most of us will connect to others in the worst possible ways just to satisfy this need. So the paradoxical thing here is that even the so-called “toxic bonding” is better than none. That is, the actual connection with the people we are intimate with goes through energy cords that link two persons together. Although of energy origin, these cords resemble physical organs, and it is better to have an organ that is sick than to have no organ at all. That’s why some forms of popular psychotherapy that are directed merely towards “cutting the ties that bind” are not complete and cannot give us the desired results. Toxic bonds definitely need to be dissolved, but afterward, we have to re-create healthy connections, not only with abstractions such as the “higher self” but also with the actual people with whom we were toxically bonded. The rule says – a healthy connection sets us free, and disconnectedness bonds us. As I have already mentioned, through healthy connections with our family members and the other people we feel close to, we express the most important purpose of our existence, which is the actualization of the potential to create completely fulfilling relationships with other beings and the world around us.
Together with connectedness, everybody has the need to be who they are and to be accepted by others for who they are. We want to be whole, and we want to express ourselves freely and openly; we don’t wish to be forced to give up some of the aspects of our true selves. If this, for some reason, isn’t possible, there will be a slowdown or a stop in our development. People become obsessed with things they are not allowed to do or be, and they cannot continue their development until the need to be who they are and to express themselves freely is finally satisfied. The need to be whole expresses the next important purpose of our existence, and that is self-love and the development of our own potentials. Besides self-realization through harmonious relationships, we have come to this planet to realize ourselves creatively. We are definitely not here to just be a cog in the artificially created economic machinery, or a robot without contact with the deeper aspects of its own being.
How did we become incomplete, and why did we create toxic bonds? Our need to relate and be loved is so strong that we try to realize it by any means. We want the people who are closest to us (our parents, partners, children, or friends) to love us and support us emotionally. This need was especially strong when we were small children. Even unborn babies living in their mother’s womb have this emotional need, although most people are not aware of this and think that the prenatal phase serves only for physiological development. If our parents are able to love us unconditionally, accept us as we are, and enthusiastically support us in our efforts, then our psycho-energetic connection with them is going to be healthy. On the other hand, if parents put conditions on their love and accept a child only if those conditions are respected, then the connection becomes unhealthy, burdening, and “toxic,” creating blocks to success and the inability to realize goals, both during childhood and later on when a child grows up.
Together with unhealthy connectedness, a child faces an identity loss of some kind because he rejects a part of himself that is not acceptable to his parents. For example, if there is a rule in the family that says that free thinking is not acceptable, then we shall reject, cut off, or forget about the part of ourselves that wants to be an independent thinker. If the rule says that expressing our emotions openly and freely is not desirable, then we shall suppress our emotions and forget about the part of ourselves that are able to feel. If creativity is not acceptable, we shall probably view creativity as dangerous and eventually forget about it. So, if parents do not accept a child as a conscious being and see him merely as a tabula rasa or a blank slate that can be programmed according to their ideas, then the child can make the conclusion that “to be who you are is not good.” And since our primary need is to be loved and emotionally connected, in an attempt to deserve parental love and acceptance, we shall reject, suppress, or forget about the part of ourselves that is not acceptable. Our connections with our parents then become a kind of sale contract based on strict rules – we know exactly what is allowed and what isn’t, what part of ourselves we need to keep hidden, and what mask we have to wear for the outer world.
However, in the same way as conditional love doesn’t diminish our need for bonding, cutting off a part of our true self doesn’t diminish our need for that part. The desire for the lost part is still there, but since it cannot be expressed directly, it finds other ways of expression, and those ways can sometimes be pretty destructive. The actual dynamics of that might look like this: if we have learned that a part of ourselves is not desirable or acceptable, we may try to suppress it; this could work for some time, but slowly we become obsessed (consciously or unconsciously) with it and may try to satisfy our obsession by creating some vice; later on we become addicted to that vice.
For example, in some families, it is not acceptable to be a strong person and to defend your integrity by confronting others in ways that may include anger or healthy aggressiveness. Those are usually families of victims who see healthy integrity as undesirable or even as tyranny. Our reaction to this could be to cut off our integrity or to lose the part of ourselves that has the need to confront those who don’t respect our integrity. But by doing this, our need for that particular part will not disappear; we are just not allowed to express it when appropriate. Therefore we may express it in some other situations, mostly when it is absolutely inappropriate. We may start drinking and become violent when drunk. We may occasionally engage ourselves in unnecessary fights with other people and justify it by saying that “it was their fault.” Some people take drugs in order to establish contact with “forbidden” parts of themselves. Some become TV or movie addicts, emotionally identifying themselves with the roles actors play, having no idea that by doing this, they are actually searching for the lost parts of their own souls.
All primary aspects of bonding become the role models for our secondary aspects of bonding. Primary aspects are the types of bonding with our parents that were established in the prenatal phase of development and in the earliest childhood. Secondary aspects are the ones we create through the relationships we consciously choose – those with our friends, partners, and children. For example, a child may have a parent of the opposite sex who tyrannizes him emotionally. Although parents have a duty to create rules and obligations for children, the parent-tyrant sometimes does not allow for the child to have even the minimum amount of free will. He or she makes every important decision and determines which school the child will go to, what he will do during his free time, and what kind of friends he will have. What this child learns from such a parent is how to become a tyrant. He may have a younger brother or sister and constantly tyrannizes them in both obvious and more sophisticated ways. He can behave the same way with friends and, later on, with partners. Sometimes this person finds partners who are able to love him unconditionally, but he is not satisfied with them. For him, unconditional love does not equal affection but tyranny, so he needs someone who will tyrannize him in order to feel loved. And these people eventually find tyrants for their partners. They become dependent on them, and although constantly complain, they do nothing to change or end their relationship. So, this is how primary bonding may affect the secondary aspects.
What happens when these people come for treatment? They usually decide to visit a therapist not because of “primary bonding problems” but because of some other difficulties that they face, which are almost certainly going to be the consequences of primary bonding. For example, they might be unable to realize themselves professionally, so they may say that “something is blocking them” from finding an adequate job, but they don’t know what. Although their psychological profile may show a potential leader, the influence of an authoritarian parent may have completely confused them. All they know about the causes of that block are their feelings of uncertainty and insecurity that come from an unknown source. They may try to satisfy their professional needs by accepting jobs that push them into the second row, but they always lack something – the job may be paid well, but they cannot be creative, or they can be creative but cannot get paid adequately. Often they are neither paid well nor creative; they work for an authoritarian boss who misuses them in almost exactly the same way as their parent(s) did. So, what is this “something” that blocks these people? Is it their boss, destiny, or bad karma? No, it is precisely that: the toxic bond with their parent(s).
Should we think of these people as unhealthy? I think not. They do the best they can under the given circumstances. Losing the part of their identity that would otherwise confront the parent-tyrant was probably the only possible way to stay mentally stable in the crazy environment of their early childhood. As I have already mentioned, being connected with one’s parents is the primary issue for a child, and the same goes for having a perception of our parents as sane and good. The worst thing parents can do to a child is to make him see them as evil or insane. A child will fight this perception and do anything he can to interpret his parents’ behavior as good and positive, as being motivated by love. That’s why toxic bonding is still a healthy reaction to unhealthy, or even insane, family influences. The good news here is that this kind of bonding can be transformed into a positive and healthy kind. The methodology presented in this book gives the possibility of the transformation of unhealthy connections into healthy ones, together with the re-integration of the lost part, its emotional maturing, and its integration into everyday life. In this way, we also have an opportunity to solve our problems permanently because we take the role of the active subject of our change. This finally enables us to learn from our own experiences because learning the lesson hidden behind the problem was the underlying reason for its creation.
KARMIC TIES
Popular New Age terminology has introduced the term “karmic ties” into systems of personal and spiritual development. This concept is used to describe very different types of relationships. Sometimes a karmic tie is considered to be a relationship that has special depth and strength, independent of its positive or negative character. Sometimes it is about a happy and fulfilling relationship that is realized without too much effort. Sometimes a karmic tie imposes specific obligations and duties that are not easy to accomplish. The most extreme form of a karmic tie is a very bad relationship that heavily burdens a person, producing huge problems and apparently offering no constructive solution except for long-term suffering. All these forms of karmic ties share a common denominator, which is a strong intensity, either positive or negative. However, I will use the term “karmic tie” to describe a relationship burdened with negative mental states and actions which, according to the law of karmic retribution, cause the equivalent counter effects. A karmic tie is loaded with samskaras and unnatural forms of bonding, which were transferred into a current incarnation from past lives. The reason why some negative experiences do not get released at least during the purification period a soul goes through between two incarnations, is in the lessons which lie behind such experiences. Unlearned lessons are carried into future incarnations so that we can finally master them.
We have to bear in mind that all relationships are a means for expressing love – they are love in action. Therefore, the real background of karmic ties is love, which is not fully realized. It sometimes turns into hatred, lust, pain, jealousy, resentment, or other forms of love deviations. However, the essence of all interpersonal relationships is love, pure and unconditional, and it will strive to realize itself in its purest and most authentic form, especially when it comes to relationships with people we are intimate with. If someone is burdened with traumatic experiences and toxic bonds, it will be hard for him to recognize unconditional love as the true nature of all relationships. But there is still hope for him because relationships can be transformed. We can change both the inner and the outer aspects of any relationship by transforming its psycho-energetic aspect first and then our behavior. Sorting out relationships that become inharmonious is one of the hardest life processes because emotional immaturity is probably the biggest problem that the human race faces at the moment. That’s why this field requires special attention.
FAMILY KARMA
Family karma denotes the set of unchangeable and changeable karma of all family members. Pure, unchangeable karma cannot be transformed, whereas changeable karma can be, or even must be, overcome. The best example of unchangeable karma is our basic family structure because we cannot replace our family members with new or different ones. Although the circumstances under which we were born were definitely the result of our choices made on the soul level, even before we were conceived, those choices were largely influenced by our former actions. So now we find ourselves in a family we have karmically attracted, and that’s it, there can be no turning back. All we can do is accept what we have and live with it the best we can. What we actually can change is the kind of relationships we have with our family members and the personality traits we have inherited from them. Changeable family karma is, therefore, manifested through the negative character traits of the parents, which are passed on to the children either in conscious or unconscious ways. Thus the essence of the process of purifying a family karma is to discontinue inheriting the negative features of our ancestors.
Besides creating undesirable mental states, negative character traits attract undesirable life circumstances and cause most family problems. The younger family members become shock absorbers for negative family karma, so in some ways, they are the victims of their families. If they decide not to be the victims, then they have to break the chain of negative actions and failures in their family. If negative karma is manifested through a tyrant-victim game, the child will have the task of disrupting the karmic chain by taking responsibility for his own life and creating it according to his own wishes. His karma is actually to become a person of integrity and not to continue the family chain of victim-like behavior. As negative karma is manifested through our negative features, programmed mostly by our parents through the upbringing process, we have to identify and change those features in order to avoid repeating our parents’ mistakes.
Along with the already mentioned methods and some new ones I am about to present, there is an easy way to detect and reprogram the negative characteristics taken over from our parents. The following method comes from James Redfield and his Celestine Prophecy book[1] and although being only the first layer that needs to be peeled, it is very useful. First of all, we should find out what the most negative personality traits (weaknesses) of our mother and father are. It is absolutely certain that we, too, have those characteristics, probably not expressed in the same way but essentially identical. These traits should be dissolved and reprogrammed by creating the positive ones that are their opposites. Then we should focus on our parents’ professions. The negative aspects of their jobs should also be dissolved and positive ones created using the creation method described in chapter nine. We should, by all means, choose a profession that will represent a mixture of our parents’ professions, at least at the beginning of our professional careers, but on a higher level. In this way, we will honor our parents’ positive aspirations and, with this, really do something useful for them. They actually expect us to do something for them all the time, but that something is not the realization of their unfulfilled ambitions or the continuation of their destructive life paths. It is taking part in breaking the chain of negative family karma, although our parents are usually not aware of this. This is basically the only constructive and positive thing we can do for them.
For instance, if our parents are a medical doctor and a language teacher, it would be best for us to start realizing ourselves in medicine or in the healing professions and write about our work, teaching others the methodology we use. Our way of healing may take a more subtle form, so maybe we can become an energy healer. Remember, we have to overcome the negative or undesirable aspects of our parents’ professions and bring the positive ones to a higher level. We should move a bit further up the ladder of the goals of their professions, a step closer to their original positive intention. That’s what I did. Although my father was an MD and had a Ph.D. in the field of general practice and family medicine, I am also a researcher in the same areas of medicine, but on another level and outside the restrictions imposed by official institutions. He was a university professor who wrote textbooks for his students, and I do almost the same, but again on another level. And people say my writing is good; could it be because my mother was a Croatian and English language teacher? I translate my own texts into English, and people say I do it well; not as well as a native speaker would do, but well enough so that a native-speaking editor doesn’t go out of his or her mind working on my texts. Was I defined by my parents’ professions? Of course, I was; it was inevitable.
The third thing to do is to concentrate on our parents’ highest values in life and to imagine a person who would represent a combination of all those values and live accordingly. Our parents’ goals will most certainly be our goals, too, so by using these procedures, we become aware of what we are to do, what positive characteristics we need to develop, what jobs to take, and what processes to undergo in order to compensate for the negative family karma and disrupt the family karmic chain. And once we do this, we may even create totally new fields of personal realization and have the freedom to develop in a completely new direction, liberated from all the influences of our past. So, family karma does exist, and nothing will be achieved by denying it; we can only analyze it precisely and then reprogram it. Since one of the main goals of human incarnation is karmic cleansing, which basically consists of breaking the chain of negative family karma, this process surely is an integral part of the plan our soul has created for our earthly life.
Family karma is certainly our karma as well, so we cannot pretend that we have nothing in common with our families. Where else would karma manifest itself more directly than through our families? All family problems reflect our actions from past lives, but this doesn’t mean that we should suffer and do nothing – we need to solve them actively. Many people view their family situation as a curse they need to run away from, but where can you go? I know a person who ran from his father to another continent. There he got married and was forced to live for some time with his wife’s parents. And her father was, of course, the spitting image of his own… We carry our karma as a sort of energetic bag full of tasks we need to undertake, so it will follow us everywhere. The only (and the best) thing we can do is to face our karma, dissolve it properly, and learn from the process.
The parent-child relationship
It is very important for this kind of relationship to be exactly what it is – the relationship between a parent and a child. First and foremost, a parent should be an adult ready for the role of a parent. He/she must have the identity of a parent. The father must take over the identity of a father and the mother that of a mother. The mother’s main identity should be – a mother. She can also be her child’s friend or playmate, but the mother’s main identity cannot be that of a friend. It can only be one of the other identities, but not the dominant one. A child expects his or her parents to be parents. The role of a parent is, therefore, very simple – a parent must be a parent.
According to Martyn Carruthers, a parent is the person who draws limits and decides on the rules the child will obey as a person, as well as on the rules between the two of them. A person with the identity of a parent must also have a good relationship with his/her partner because a good parent doesn’t need a child to replace a partner. A parent has a child because he/she wants to have a child and not because he/she needs one. A parent also does not need a child to realize his/her own goals through the child. It is a person who continuously works on his own goals and has his/her own social life, friends, and social responsibilities. A parent leads a fulfilled and interesting life and does not need a child to live his/her life through the child. Such a parent is able to give the child unconditional support, is the source of positive energy and fulfillment, and an ideal showing the child that it is possible to be happy and that happiness is a natural thing.
Only too often the role of a parent is not fully accepted and not well played. Sometimes it is accompanied or replaced by other unsuitable roles. Physical (biological) parents are two extremely important figures in a child’s life, psychologically speaking. Their main functions are protection and security. A child must feel physically safe, and his/her survival must never come into question. Furthermore, parents are the source of unconditional love, symbolizing God and God’s love. They accept the child for what he/she is, give support, encourage the child’s independence, and inspire creativity. Whether they want it or not, they are their child’s positive or negative (sometimes both) role models. The child will try to further develop their qualities, but will also carry their shortcomings inside. The child will also tend to repeat parents’ mistakes. For that reason, parents must continually work on improving themselves.
When parents are not fulfilled individuals, they have a tendency to project their unrealized aspirations onto their children. In all such cases, their relationships with children will be disturbed. A child must never become a means of compensation for one or both parents’ unfulfilled ambitions because they will not be able to live his/her own life. If the child is denied their own life, he either accepts the given role and becomes the person that the parents want him to be or withdraws from the relationship (cuts the energy cords) until the parents accept the child for what he/she is. There is a third possibility, too – the child can be stuck in a conflict between these two models. Parents must, therefore, continually work on their own goals and not expect their children to surpass them or to realize whatever they fail to realize.
The relationship between parents and all their problems is strongly reflected in children. We shall take family secrets as an example. They can be a source of great suffering for all family members because secrets continue to live in the children, although they seem well concealed. If one of the parents is having an affair, for example, this secret will start living in the child. The child can, for no apparent reason, start having bad results at school and hide it from the parents. Once they find this out, they will be surprised and fail to understand what has interrupted once open and sincere communication and caused the child’s problems at school. If parents grow a distance between themselves, the same will happen with their child and his/her friends, for example. For that reason, parents must continually try to improve themselves and their relationship. A family secret can slow down a child’s emotional development, causing learning disabilities or deviations in behavior. Therefore, the liberation from the negative influence of the family secret can result in a number of positive changes. It is the process of connecting that can lead a family member to a strong inner urge to say openly what has been suppressed or to stop doing whatever the person has been doing secretly.
Martyn Carruthers mentions a very interesting example of a family secret not talked about much but having a strong influence on family relationships. It is the secret of abortion. If the mother has an abortion or the father is having an affair with a person who has had an abortion, and if this is kept a secret, the secret will start living in the child. If there are more children in the family, the secret will live in the youngest or the most sensitive one. The child unconsciously identifies with the soul of the aborted child. This identification will live inside the child, manifesting itself in different ways. The child can develop a tendency towards dark moods, melancholy, depression, or withdrawal from relationships. The child can sometimes become obsessed with death and less interested in creative activities filled with positive energy. Such a child develops weak immunity and is often ill. The child is usually not aware of the identification or its cause but projects it strongly into the environment seeking justification for its own negative condition by accusing the outer world to be the cause of its problems. The parents, in turn, are surprised and fail to understand what these changes are about, sometimes becoming aggressive towards the child. Such a family suddenly finds itself in a lot of trouble. This is one more reason for parents to work hard on improving their relationship.
Children are the shock absorbers of all their parents’ suppressed mental content. They reflect all the difficult family relationships, even those between their parents and grandparents. For example, an unresolved conflict between the father and his mother, who died in the meantime, is transferred to his children. All the emotions parents suppress are passed on to the children. If one of the parents plays the role of a victim and suppresses aggressiveness, it is very probable that the child will be aggressive. The child feels the urge to express aggressiveness, although it is not his. It is the aggression of one or both parents who withhold their anger. The bonds between members of the same family are very strong, although they are usually not aware of it. Suppressed energy will, therefore, find its vent somewhere else. If not within the energy system of the person in question, it will manifest in another person, usually one closely connected. The strongest connection, of course, is with one’s own child.
The causes of some family problems completely lose their mysterious dimension here. Parents withhold the truth or their negative inner states, which then continue to live in the children. The unresolved family conflicts are passed on to the children. Bearing in mind the fact that relationships and connectedness inevitably exist, it is completely natural that this kind of transference is not only possible but that it happens regularly. If adults have children, they are the closest human beings to them. Where could the energy of a family secret go at all, if not into the subconscious of the person we are closest to? Everybody should, therefore, try to sort out their relationships and not suppress their family problems, thinking naively that they will somehow disappear.
The importance of improving family relationships lies in the fact that they represent the basis for all the other relationships a person enters in life. Educating people about family ties and relationships will probably become the key for improving all types of social relations, from personal and business relations to political. A society based on harmonious family relationships will not need authoritative presidents or political parties. It could be founded on the freedom of the individual and society’s joint efforts in encouraging each individual to realize the best of his/her potential, which will also be beneficial for society as a whole.
As we do with the living, we can enter a connecting process with people who are no longer in their physical bodies, i.e. with family members who have passed away. After leaving the physical level, a soul continues to exist in more subtle spheres. An individual’s objective existence is not diminished by the death of the physical body. On the contrary, the person who has left the physical body continues to live with increased intensity, consciousness, and energy. Connection with such a person will have equally positive effects, as though the person is “alive” and in the physical body.
While connecting with a deceased family member, one should pay attention to some very important processes that might have taken place at the moment of the person’s death. We may have identified with the person if his/her death was traumatic for us or if we did not manage to sort out our relationship with that person, which made us feel guilty. This identification is manifested as holding on to the negative kind of attachment, not letting the dead person go and taking over his/her “sins” or negative characteristics. We, in fact, identify with the fragments of the person’s astral body, i.e. with the astral entities the person has left behind, which later moved into our body. So, while connecting with a deceased person, we should check if we have connected with the “astral garbage” the person left behind at the moment of his/her death. All the negative characteristics we identified should be dissolved, and all the entities within us should be cleared. Only then can we start connecting in the same way as with any living person.
SORTING OUT FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
Family relationships form the basis of every individual’s life. For that reason, they represent the starting point of every therapeutic intervention. There is nothing mysterious about sorting out the family relationships. It is about creating relationships that should be based on healthy connections between family members. In my experience, instead of breaking off the connections, as is the case in some therapeutic systems, the independence and maturity of family members are attained by a healthy and natural connection. Breaking of family bonds is often followed by an eager striving for “independence” and “self-sufficiency,” only disguising a strong need for family affection. However paradoxical it may sound, connecting is liberating. Negative forms of connections should, of course, be dissolved, and then the process of connecting should be initiated. The way of solving most problematic family relationships is the process of connecting family members through energy work, forgiveness, and open discussion.
The basis of all family bonds should be unconditional love. If we cannot realize unconditional love anywhere else, there is always our family. This is exactly what family is meant for. Unfortunately, our family relationships are not always characterized by unconditional love. Instead of accepting our family members for what they are, we tend to criticize them mercilessly. Of course, criticism only reflects what we think of ourselves, but we are usually not aware of this. We tend to feel too possessive about some members of our family. We do not let them live how they want but meddle in their lives, thinking we know what is best for them. We are sometimes cold and reserved towards other members of our family. We project our unrealized ambitions onto our children, terrorize our partners with jealousy, and blame our parents for our shortcomings or unfulfilled goals. And so on.
But, however uninteresting or difficult our family members may seem, we should bear in mind we have chosen them ourselves. The experiences of my clients show that, before being incarnated, our soul chooses our family, as well as the family we are going to form later. Members of our family will inevitably be souls we met in previous existences, and we are closely connected to. People belonging to our closest family are not just anybody. They are people we have chosen to have a relationship with, a bond filled with unconditional love, even when it seems impossible. Obstacles to the realization of such a goal are bound to be rather large. When some of our family bonds are burdened with negative karma, they will more often seem like damnation rather than an ideal of unconditional love.
What are the characteristics of unconditional love? They are accepting another person for what he/she is, giving full support to his/her personality, goals and independence. Besides the understanding and warmth, unconditional love is sometimes manifested through abandoning a strong attachment, which can even lead to an estrangement. Unconditional love can be merciless or ruthless, but only if we look at it superficially. If a family member is not ready to accept our love or is even in conflict with us because of our love, we should resort to the tactics of standing aloof. Aloofness should never be the result of our being hurt, which is a negative intention but a reflection of merciless love manifested as non-love or inactive love. A number of family ties are realized, in a positive sense, as inactive love because the differences between characters and levels of consciousness of family members do not allow anything more than that. People we have broken contact with because we refused to take part in a negative type of relationship sooner or later do get the message. Non-love then usually changes into openly expressed love.
Family relationships can be seen through the model of the Living Systems Theory. Each family forms a system composed of a number of different elements mutually connected and having the same goal. Every family member represents a little fragment of the mechanism called the family. Therefore, a change in the life of each family member affects other members, as well as family relationships. It means that any kind of changework creates a new reality for a person, which will first be felt by the members of the person’s close family. Sometimes, family members react positively to the changes they have noticed or felt instinctively, but at other times, their reactions are negative, even when changes are exceptionally positive. The new level of consciousness and new goals a person now has will directly influence his/her family members.
When our family members do not like our change for some reason, they will try to force us back to the old reality. If we do not allow it, we shall have to bring them into our new reality, which is sometimes impossible. The third option is leaving the family and becoming independent. It is the connecting to our family members which can be used to improve our relationships with the family members or to avoid most family problems caused by our personal transformation. It is, therefore, advisable to make our connections with immediate family stronger each time after working on personal transformation. This has a number of positive results, such as:
– reviving halted or superficial communication,
– sincerity,
– openness,
– understanding,
– tolerance,
– acceptance,
– support,
– letting go,
– liberation,
– forgiveness,
– co-operation,
– positive influence (inspiring changes),
– healing physical and mental illnesses.
The connecting process
After having worked on the cause of a certain problem, the person connects with his/her higher consciousness and observes if the traumatic experience has disturbed the relationship with a member of the immediate family. Maybe the starting point of the intervention was sorting out a family relationship, and then the person already knows which one is disturbed. After clearing the symptoms of the problem and the traumatic experience as the cause, the person continues intervention by working on establishing a connection with the family member. The process involves connecting energy cords from one’s own chakras with the chakras of the family member. The connecting process is carried out through all the aspects of our personality symbolized by two aspect chakras (the ones that have a front and a back aspect). The person visualizes a cord of light coming out of his/her second front chakra and going towards the second chakra of the family member he/she is connecting to. All the other chakras, from the second to the sixth, are connected in the same way. This is completed by sending a cord of light from the first chakra to the Earth’s center to ensure that the person is properly rooted. The seventh, crown chakra, is connected with Heaven, the spiritual world, to ensure connection with one’s own source. This type of work has many different origins. It probably comes from the Hawaiian shamanistic practice called “Huna,” which was a resource for many contemporary healers and therapists. In this particular form, it is also used by Barbara Ann Brennan, a spiritual healer, who has described her treatment in the book Light Emerging, which is a classic work on energy healing.
The energy work described above has certain consequences. Some people connected themselves with a family member they had not communicated with for years, only to get a phone call from that person the following day and talk to them as if nothing had happened. A participant in one of my courses connected in the morning part of the program with his father, who lives in New Zealand and whom he had not heard from for some time. After having had lunch, he found a message from his father on his answering machine. Since the course was taking place in his flat, I and all the participants witnessed the effectiveness of the connecting processes. It was only the first step, of course, but connecting has to start somehow, and establishing neglected verbal communication is always a good start. Not every connection has this kind of consequence. Some people have a quarrels with their family members after connecting. Sometimes a grudge or a long-lasting dissatisfaction with somebody’s behavior is brought out in the process of energy connecting. Such frankness and openness can result in a temporary conflict, but in this case the conflict is a healthy process leading towards re-establishing the relationship, and not towards ending it.
This kind of therapeutic intervention may seem superficial or oversimplified to some people. However, besides treating some mild cases of alienation or dependence, connecting can initiate healing processes even in very difficult family relationships. The things that make the relationship negative come to the surface during this process. In that way, it precisely indicates the character of the relationship problem. Connecting brings out family secrets, projections of parents’ unfulfilled personal aspirations into children, and all sorts of conflicts between the parents. The connecting process first changes our perception of ourselves and our perception of the family member we are connecting to, thus preparing the conditions for direct and concrete sorting out of the relationship. It means that we are introduced into a state of universal love towards the family member we are connecting to, creating positive conditions for future work.
After dissolving the traumatic experience as the cause of the problem and having done energy work in the form of connecting, the person has to face the family member in question. Then a conversation must take place, and through open communication, the relationship is brought to an aspect of universal love. How one achieves this depends on one’s personal will, ability, and skills. In some cases, a therapeutic intervention can replace direct contact, but in most cases, it cannot. The only help one can get (apart from the preparation made through work on the causes and the process of connecting) is the information from the higher consciousness. It helps in choosing the best communication model one can use in sorting out a relationship, which precedes direct contact.
©Tomislav Budak, April 2000