How to Deal with Difficult Family Members | Eckhart Tolle

Is there another question that has not dissolved?

It only has partly dissolved.

Partly dissolved.

Hello, Eichert. Moin. Moin. My question deals with parents, with practice and presence. I felt love for them after many years, not feeling love and feeling guilty for that. But I still have huge problems to meet them. When I meet them, if they are in the same room, even if I try to be of my breath and my inner body, after a while I have huge pain body attacks.

Is that triggered by something they say or.

I can't even say that sometimes it's the way I manage to go through the meeting quite fine and my mother leaves the room and I break down and yeah, I don't know what that is.

German parents can be difficult. I know American parents too. So on one level, there's already an acceptance of them. On a mental level, the acceptance of who they are, the acceptance of their limitations. They behave the way they behave. The pain body is still there inside you, of course, and the pain body reacts. It may also be that the mental level, the mental acceptance is not yet complete either. To see that they act the way they act, speak the way they speak, not because of who they are, but because of their past conditioning, which is their mental emotional conditioning is speaking through them. They can't help that if there's not enough presence. Everybody is controlled by their mental emotional conditioning. They can't help it. They are afflicted by that disease, which is identification with unconscious conditioning. I'm not the only one who calls that disease. Even in the ancient teachings of Zen, they sometimes call it the disease of the mind. And there are some Zen teachers who have said they are here to cure that mental illness. That's what Zen is about. It's curing that mental illness. So you need to. On the mental level, as you sit with them, you need to know that continuously that what you are observing is not who they are. You're observing form of mental conditioning. Underneath that there is the being, the. And you may sometimes get a glimpse of it. My mother was very much identified also with her mind. And occasionally I looked into her eyes and suddenly there was a light shining through when she stopped talking for a little while. In other words, the mind catching a breath after talking for 10 minutes incessantly. And then for a moment you say, ah, there's their being. Her being was shining through. And they have one or two photos where her being shines through. And then of course, it gets obscured again. And then you get the same, get the suspicions, the complaints, the accusations, all the stuff associated with unconscious thinking. So on the mental level, you need to know that, be present enough so that you don't forget that what you're observing is not who they are, but you're observing the past in them, the conditioning. And then comes the emotions that you feel. Because there's your past, the past, the living past in you from your childhood. All the things they did or failed to do because they couldn't help it. There wasn't enough presence to change it. So that's something for you to find acceptance as you accept them. You accept what you feel at that moment. Whether you can even label it, we don't know. Is it sadness, is it anger, is it heaviness? Or mixture of all of that, A feeling of wanting to run away, a contraction, whatever it is, that's all there. You don't need to even analyze it. You just need to feel the entire energy field of that. And it doesn't feel pleasant. And it's the past in you. So there you're observing the past in them, acting out. And you experience the past in you. And so what do you do with two pasts? You have the past out there and the past in here. Only presence can dissolve the past. So you need to access the power of presence in yourself. And how do you do that? A quick way in a situation like this is the acceptance of whatever arises inside or outside at this moment. You accept this is what you feel. This is what they do or say. There's the acceptance of the inner and the outer, because it is already happening, why you have to accept. Or you suffer in a way, if you don't accept, you suffer more. If you don't want to feel what you feel, that's more suffering because you're resisting acceptance does something that I could describe as, let's say, here's the emotional field and. And it doesn't feel good. And acceptance means just you say, okay, there it is. I can feel that I'm verbalizing. Acceptance doesn't even require. After a little while, you don't need words anymore. You can just see what is, be with it. And at that moment, a little bit of space opens up around that emotion, a little bit of space. That space comes from your acceptance. The acceptance gives it space. And that's already a tiny bit of freedom. You've given it a little bit of space inside yourself when you say, yes, this is what is, and that's the beauty. You've given both them space externally to be, and you've given yourself space internally. And then as you notice that actually that feels already a little bit better than before because there's space around the emotion. And then you go into it more deeply and you accept even more, continue to accept. And that space grows a little bit around it. And then you encounter the strange phenomenon of an emotion that is not pleasant, existing in a spacious field, so to speak, that surround it. And then you realize that who you are is. You are that field. And you can allow the emotion to be in that field. And you can allow your parents to be there and say what they say and do what they do. They're repeating the past. Space comes in. So acceptance brings space. And space is the transcendence of conditioning. Space is the transcendence of the past. The transcendence, transcendence of the personality and the person and it's freedom. Space. That's the practice. And so the best place to practice is with your parents. There are many other places where you can practice. But the ultimate mastery you will achieve when you can practice with your parents. That's the graduation, you graduate. It's the PhD in presence. Don't jump into it too much. If you say, okay, I'm going to spend a week with our parents now, too much, Too much. Give yourself short time periods at first. Say, I'm going to come for coffee and cake. That's what they like to do. At least my mother did. I'll come for coffee and cake and I'll stay for an hour. Or, you know, if you can. I don't know how that works practically, but. And then you practice. You give yourself one hour to practice and you know it's only an hour. I have to be present for an hour. And it's your spiritual practice. So the. As you know, I've written the quote in a book. Ram Dass said, if you think you're so enlightened, spend two weeks with your parents. Two weeks. The ultimate test. So happy practice. Thank you.