The concept is that when you’re young, if you parents were emotionally neglectful or abusive — they’re sometimes the same thing, whatever the case — if your parents, you know, did not have the emotional capacity to take care of you properly and they had their own agendas or their own problems, yet they were presenting themselves as good parents — “I love you, I care about you, I’m worried about you”… whatever — the underlying emotional reality of who they were was detached or jealous or whatever their personal trip is, you’re going to absorb that as a child. So, as a child, you need to believe your parents are good, because they’re your parents. So, that’s in place. They’re good. But the emotional cues in place don’t match that. So, you feel awkward and shitty and self-hating, or uncomfortable, or whatever those feelings are. And the only thing you can do at that young age, because your parents are good, is blame yourself. So, what happens is as you get older, the way you self-parent is by maintaining those negative thoughts about yourself because that’s where you live. And that is actually honoring what your parents really might have felt about you. And you get into relationships that are based on this fantasy and you never get out of that loop. It disables you from being able to be intimate because if you were actually to get intimate or get close to somebody, it would threaten your entire structure of self.

We are not meant to stay wounded. We are supposed to move through our tragedies and challenges and to help each other move through the many painful episodes of our lives. By remaining stuck in the power of our wounds, we block our own transformation. We overlook the greater gifts inherent in our wounds — the strength to overcome them and the lessons that we are meant to receive through them. Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.

Make it a habit to ask yourself: What’s going on inside me at this moment? That question will point you in the right direction. But don’t analyze, just watch. Focus your attention within. Feel the energy of the emotion. If there is no emotion present, take your attention more deeply into the inner energy field of your body. It is the doorway into Being.

There are two kinds of suffering. There is the suffering you run away from, which follows you everywhere. And there is the suffering you face directly, and so become free.

How beautiful the world was when one looked at it, without searching… just looked, simply and innocently.