Linked to what our parents are

“One of the first teachings I heard was that we are linked to what our parents are […]”

My name is Simon, I’m 24. I started practising when I was in high school, invited by my mother. I had a pretty turbulent adolescence and the relationship with my parents was rather tense.

One of the first teachings I heard was that we are linked to what our parents are, that there is a legacy. Needless to say, I didn’t like it at all! But after attending my first meeting and hearing the sutra for the first time, I saw that my father and I looked alike when we were angry. It is pretty tough for the ego of a teenager who has neither close nor real relationships with his parents !

Furthermore, I had a quite conflictual relationship with the school system. However, one of my family’s characteristics is obedience (even in contradiction with our instincts, our will or happiness). My mother, for example, was mostly raised in a very strict boarding school. So I complied with the obligation to go to high school. One of my first experiences of practice was to realize that I was enormously suffering from this situation which engendered self-destructive behaviour. So I decided to drop out at the start of the 11th grade.

Unsurprisingly, the reactions in my family were pretty wild. But for the first time, I was confident, mostly because this decision was motivated by my practice. However, to my surprise, my mother was mainly concerned about whether I was doing well and what we could do. Many solutions finally appeared…

Four years later, I was about to leave for Romania as part of the Erasmus project. In my backpack I had my family posthumous name, a Sutra and the desire to educate myself and progress in my life with the Teaching. So I started to recite the Sutra for all the people whose paths I crossed, in a country that wasn’t mine, whose language I didn’t understand… I spent six incredible months there and I am still very happy with the links I have created.

[…] I had identically reproduced some of my parents’ functionings during their professional careers […]”

I returned to France, finished my internship and found an awesome, unexpected job in the music industry, in a recording studio. Enthusiastic, I fully gave myself to it so much that I got completely exhausted. I resigned and came back to live with my parents. At that time I was livid and I was pretty far from the practice. I then heard from my elders that my homecoming was an opportunity to develop gratefulness for my parents. In fact, what I realized quite quickly, especially at the Youth Group seminar, that despite our differences, I had identically reproduced some of my parents’ functionings during their professional careers, which I had suffered from in my childhood. The anger and resentment I felt towards them immediately melted when I realized that.

From that moment on, the relationship with my mother, who is my direct elder, changed completely. It used to be difficult for her to differentiate between her mother’s and her elder’s role due to the fact that she herself had suffered from the absence of relationship with her own mother. But being able to express to her the feeling of abandonment that had been mine, and being heard, really changed everything. I began to have a taste of the peace that we hear about in the Sutra. Nothing has been completely solved but I am really happy to practise and I wish to share this teaching.

Simon