Parenting Our Children

 I have recently been reflecting on the relationship between parenting and 'childing" or the act of being a child. I often see myself as a child, mainly because I never was a parent, and it seems that my roles as a teacher and facilitator position me closest to that of a parent--not to mention my roles in training at work. Many modern psychologists focus on the wounding that people received as children, in addition to how we can heal those wounds before we can be fully available to others. We can characterize such psychologies as "child-centered" in the sense that they locate the pain in the world back in the child, rather than looking at the ways adults and parents have their own unique burdens and sufferings. But I wonder if it's precisely our wounds that become gifts to others, in the sense that they help us develop compassion and the ability to heal others.

   Buddhism emphasizes how we should meditate on those who have benefited us. Our giving can come from a sense of honoring those who have given to us, from this perspective. But honoring requires slowing down to see that we were always standing on the shoulders of others, and this is not easy. If we are always picturing ourselves as in battle or competition with others, the idea of having depended on others seems belittling or even demeaning to our sense of personal identity.

 I think the most apt metaphor to describe benefiting others is that of a kind of wounded healer. We are negatively impacted by the ways we may have been dropped or abandoned in the past, yet we use all the emotion that accumulates from that to raise others up. The principle, at the end of the day, is that everybody is really doing their best. If there were things that our benefactors didn't do for us, then those gaps are the things that we can fill for others, since our recognition of those gaps means we have a seed within ourselves that can fill them. Suffering can complete us; it can help us to become more three dimensional, if we practice non-resistance to it, but also try to get as much help as possible to support our frailties.