So welcome everyone.
And thank you.
Thank you for listening.
And thank you for being here.
So there is a sentence that gets said in therapy rooms and at kitchen tables.
And add funerals.
And it is nearly always said kindly.
And it nearly always makes things worse.
They did their best.
And the difficulty is not that this is untrue.
In most cases,
It is entirely true.
They were doing what they could with what they had.
In circumstances You may only Be beginning to understand now.
You may not even know the full circumstances.
The difficulty is what it does to you when you wear it.
Because you already know it.
You worked that out years ago.
You can list their circumstances.
What their own childhood was like.
What they were carrying,
What nobody held them with,
The money,
The era,
The fact that there was no language for any of it.
So you understand them.
Possibly better than they understood themselves.
And you are still hurt.
And something in you is still angry?
And every time somebody says they did their best.
The anger gets a little bit louder.
A little bit more hidden.
And considerably heavier.
So you end up in a bind.
If they did their best.
What right have you to be still carrying this?
And if you're still getting it.
Are you being unfair to people?
Who were doing what they could.
That bind is where a great many people live for decades.
Quietly.
I want to spend this time showing you.
That this is not a bind at all.
It only looks like one.
Because we are trying to make two different parts of you agree.
And they were never going to.
Let me start with what.
Is actually operating.
Because it is not what people think.
When we talk about the beliefs,
Somebody holds about themselves.
We tend to imagine opinions.
Things you concluded.
And could therefore reconsider.
This is not what these are.
What forms in a child is closer to a set of expectations.
It's more predictions about how things will go.
If I need something,
This is what will happen.
If I'm upset,
This is what will follow.
If I take up space,
This is how they respond.
And they are not arrived by thinking,
They are arrived by repetition.
The same sequence hundreds of times in a small person who's doing what small people are built to do,
Which is just to work out the rules of the place they have landed in.
Now,
John Bowlby.
Who did more than anyone to establish this.
Call them Internal Working Models.
A template of what to expect from other people and what to expect of yourself.
Lay down early.
Operating below awareness.
Carry it forward into every single relationship you will ever have,
With or without you knowing it.
Here is the crucial part.
It explains almost everything about why this is so hard to shift.
So a great deal of it forms before you have the language.
Before you can construct a sentence,
Before you can hold a proposition.
Before there is any machinery in you.
Capable of considering something?
And deciding whether this is true.
So it is not stored as a belief.
It is stored as a way things are.
As the temperature of the world.
Which is probably why you cannot find it by looking.
So you do not walk around thinking I'm not worth much.
You walk around in a world that has the fact built into its architecture,
The way a fish does not have an opinion about water.
And it shows up not as a thought but as a certainty.
The certainty that you are about to be found.
That the silence means somebody is annoyed.
And that the correct move here is to make yourself small and keep quiet.
Nobody taught you those.
You worked them out correctly when you were 4 years old.
And the word correctly.
Is the one I want to press on.
Because this is where most people are unfair to themselves.
People talk about these as limiting beliefs,
Faulty beliefs,
Distortions,
Negative thinking sometimes to be identified and corrected.
They were not distortions.
They were accurate readings of the conditions you were in.
A child who learns not to knead things in a house where kneading produced irritation or absence has not made any error.
They made a correct observation.
And adjusted their behavior to it.
That is intelligence.
A child who becomes extremely good at reading faces.
In a house where the mood determines their safety.
Has developed a genuine and difficult skill,
That too under pressure.
A child who decides that the fault must lie with them has done something even more sophisticated.
Because for a small person,
Entirely dependent on the adults around them,
There are only two available explanations when their needs are not met.
Either the adults cannot or will not provide.
Which is unsurvivable information for someone who cannot leave.
Remember.
Or there is something wrong with the child.
In which case there might be a solution.
Be better.
Try harder.
Be less treble,
Treble stay small.
The mind takes the second one every single time,
Not because it is stupid.
But because it is the only one of the two,
That leaves a way forward.
So I am saying today,
None of this is a defect in you.
It is a set of adaptations made under real conditions by somebody small who was doing rather well.
The problem is that the conditions changed,
But the adaptations did not.
You're not four now,
You're probably 41,
But the adaptations are still there.
You are running the operating rules of a house you left 20 or 30 or 40 years ago in an environment where they no longer apply.
And sometimes these things come with a cost.
They do not update on their own.
For a reason that is almost elegant in its cruelty.
To find out that people can be needed safely.
You would have needed somebody.
And which the model prevents so no contradicting evidence ever reaches it and it sits there like a perfect unbroken record now the thing that frustrates most people frustrates me as well sometimes and i also hear it constantly I know all this.
I understand exactly where it came from.
I could explain it to you in detail and it has still changed nothing.
So that is not a failure of your insight,
First of all.
It is a fact about how the mind is put together.
See,
Knowing something and feeling something run on different systems.
So there is the kind of knowledge you can state.
Facts.
This happened to me.
That happened to me.
Explanations.
The account of your own history you have assembled over years.
That's a verbal system.
It is late developing.
And it is the one doing the work when you've read a book about attachment,
And then you say,
Oh,
That explains a great deal about my life.
Then there is the other kind,
Which is not stated at all.
It is the kind that holds procedure and expectation and bodily state.
It has no language for sentences.
It just produces reactions.
And it does not give you any notice or consult you before coming up.
The second system is older,
Faster,
And does not take instruction from you or your conscious mind.
Which means.
.
.
You can know with complete confidence.
That your friend is not annoyed with you.
And still you feel the drop in your stomach when they reply short.
So both are happening and neither is wrong.
Two systems reporting separately.
One of them has read the material.
So apply it to your own situation,
Any situation where you see this.
Please stop concluding that you have not understood it well enough.
You have understood it perfectly.
But understanding was never going to be the mechanism.
Which brings us to them.
And I want to be careful here,
Because this conversation can go two ways.
And both are wrong.
It can either become a prosecution which is neither accurate nor useful.
Or it can become a rush to excuse.
Which is what most people do.
And which is why they stay stuck.
So Here is the honest version.
You cannot give a child something you did not receive.
You cannot give a child something you did not receive and that is not a moral claim.
It is closer to a mechanical one.
The capacity to soothe another person is not knowledge.
It is a pattern that gets built into you by being aware.
Soothe it yourself thousands of times.
And if that did not happen for your mother,
She did not have it to give.
Whatever her intentions were.
So you can want to give something you do not have,
But you cannot actually give it,
Even if you want to.
And when you look back a generation from your parents,
You usually find the same story.
Generation before that.
And back beyond anything anybody remembers.
Wars,
Hunger,
Immigration,
12 children,
2 rooms,
A country with no language for their inner life,
No money to help,
Abuse,
Assault,
Torture.
Other things.
Nobody in the line was a monster.
Almost everybody in it was short of something.
Which we may or may not know consciously.
And here is where I part company with how this is usually taught.
This explanation is for you.
This explanation is for your conscious mind.
It is not a message to be delivered to the hurt part of you.
This explanation is for you.
It is not a message to be delivered to the hurt part of you.
Because what happens over and over is this.
A person does the work.
They understand now the generational picture.
They understand their parents were doing their best.
They arrive at genuine compassion now for their parents.
And then turn that compassion inwards like an instruction.
I am not allowed to be mad at them because they were doing their best.
I am not allowed to be mad at them because they had their own pains.
Now that I understand this,
I should be finished with this.
And then there is somebody that says,
Oh,
Just forgive them.
Maybe some therapist,
I don't know.
And the part of them.
That is still hurt does not and will not accept the memo.
It never does.
And then they conclude that they have failed at forgiveness.
And they add that to the pile also.
The understanding is real.
It was just not addressed to the right person.
Now this is the whole of what I'm offering you today.
And it is simple enough to say in two sentences or three There is the you of here and now.
There is the U of Heron now.
Grown,
Informed,
Capable of holding an entire generational picture in your head.
And able to see your parents as people who were themselves once small and short of something.
Then there is the one inside you who was actually there at the time.
Who is 4 or 7 or 11.
Who couldn't care less about the generational picture,
Who would not understand it anyway,
And who is not required to.
The adult can understand them completely.
The child is under no obligation to be reasonable about it.
The adult part of me can understand this completely.
The child in me is under no obligation to be reasonable about it.
Both of those are true at once.
And they do not need to be reconciled.
Every attempt to force them into agreement is what has been costing you.
Let this settle now.
There is an idea in the Buddhist traditions of two truths.
That there are two levels at which something can be described.
Both are entirely valid.
And they do not compete.
Now let me offer you this.
At one level.
Two people doing what they could with what they had.
Inside a history that shaped them.
At another level A small child who needed something and did not get it.
And for whom that was,
At the time,
The whole world.
So how about neither of those cancel the other from today?
Neither is the more grown-up you.
If you insist on holding only the first.
The second will not disappear.
It goes underground for a while and then it comes up much louder.
I could be arguing in my own head.
My parents were doing their best and I have anger in my chest at the same time.
And I'm doing my best not to feel the anger and it's not working.
It's just an example.
So,
Practically that means something quite specific.
Your adult self does the understanding.
And it does not hand that understanding down as an instruction.
It goes to the younger one with something entirely different.
Which is not an explanation at all.
Let us do rather than talk about it.
Let's see what we can do with this information.
And there is one rule for this practice.
And it is the whole practice.
So I will say it clearly before we start.
You are not allowed to say or explain anything.
No context.
No,
But they were doing their best.
No,
But granny had it worse.
All of that is true,
But we need none of that.
We don't need understanding,
Analysis or information at all.
We are simply going to spend some time with the body see if we can meet,
Find or sense that part which may have been hurt at some point in your childhood and just be present with it let it feel exactly how it feels for a while Eyes open or closed.
Just settle now,
However you are.
Taking a few long and slow breaths.
Every breath in.
I'm dropping a little bit of my awareness,
A little bit of my attention into my body.
I'm aware of my feet,
My calves,
My knees.
My spine,
My hips,
My hands,
My fingers,
And my breath.
The you of here and now.
In a room.
With the life around you.
And a body that has been through decades since.
This is the one that already understands.
That work is done.
And it does not need doing again today.
Now in this space,
Let the other one be present.
A part of me from my past,
From my younger self,
That may have been hurt,
Unhealed,
Stuck.
And wants to show up today in this space is now welcome.
Whatever age arrives,
Whatever sensation arrives.
Welcome it.
See it.
Don't go into any stories.
Just let them be there.
As they are.
Now just receive these words What did you need that you did not get?
What did you need?
That you did not get.
Let it come in whatever form it comes.
It may be words.
Maybe an image or a feeling.
Or simply a location in your body where somewhere tightens.
Now the answers are usually very simple.
To be noticed.
To be believed.
For somebody to be pleased to see me.
Or maybe just to feel safe in the house.
Notice now the urge and it will come and it will feel like kindness the urge to say But she was exhausted.
But he had his own troubles.
But they were doing their best.
All of them are true.
Not for them.
What it does to somebody that age,
It takes their complaint and it returns it with a reason attached.
And the child learns again.
That their herd is simply an inconvenience.
So for today we are going to say something much simpler You were right.
And you are allowed to feel like this.
You were right and you are allowed to feel like this.
You were right.
And you are allowed to feel like this.
And now simply stay there for a minute.
There is no next step.
Simply stay there now for a minute.
Now if you'd like to stay in this space for a bit longer.
You are very welcome to pause this meditation.
If not,
We're ready to come back.
Very slowly,
Very gently.
Take your attention now to your feet.
Calves,
Your legs,
Hips,
Stomach,
Chest,
Shoulders,
Arms,
Hands.
Then to the back of your eyes.
And welcome back.
Now there is an idea I grew up around and I want to leave you with it.
Because I think it might settle something that Western therapy leaves open.
Now I grew up in the Indian tradition.
And there is a concept of depth to do's that came before.
And it is taken very seriously.
The recognition that you did not make yourself.
That you were carried by people at considerable cost.
And that something is genuinely owed to them.
And the striking thing about it to me.
Is the direction of repayment.
You do not repay it backwards.
There is no arrangement by which you settle the account with your parents.
You repay it forward.
To those who come after or to the people around you now.
So the depth is real and it is discharged in the other direction entirely.
And I find that enormously clarifying.
Because a great many people are trying to settle this account.
Backwards.
Waiting for an acknowledgement that is not coming.
Being an endlessly understanding towards people who are not asking for understanding.
Managing an elderly parent's feelings about a childhood they do not remember the way you do.
Or it's the opposite.
Waiting to be released from a loyalty by somebody who has died and cannot release anybody now.
None of that is where the account is settled.
You honor what you were given by what you do with it.
Not by carrying what they carried.
Not by pretending it was enough.
You take the life that was handed to you.
Incomplete as it came.
And you turn and face the other way with it.
And there is something in the older traditions nearly everyone I know of.
About the difference between honoring and obeying.
You can honor where you came from without agreeing it was alright.
You can honor where you came from without agreeing it.
Those were never the same thing.
And somewhere along the way we collapse them.
No.
To leave you with this,
Somebody will say to you again.
At a table at the funeral in an ordinary conversation about your childhood?
They did their best.
And you can agree,
You will not be lying.
You just do not have to hand that sentence down to the one inside you who's still waiting for somebody just to see them,
Just to say the other thing.
They did their best,
And it was not enough.
And a child noticed,
And adjusted,
And has been running that adjustment ever since.
And none of that requires anybody to be a villain.
Two truths held apart.
Neither one asked to apologize for the other.
You were not wrong.
To want what you wanted.
You were four and you needed something and you noticed it was not there.
So that is not a fault in your character.
That maybe was the first accurate observation of your life.
On this note Thank you.
For joining me.
For taking this time out for yourself.
Go gently.
And until next time.
Namaste.
