Eckhart Tolle describes how his relationship with his angry father shifted after his spiritual awakening. When he stopped trying to change his father and listened without judgment instead, his father's behavior actually changed—"chunks of his ego broke off." Releasing the desire to fix others can paradoxically catalyze real change.
If you have an issue with your parents, if you're a grown up person, or vice versa, allow them whatever behaviors they manifest as part of their learning process. I had experienced a wonderful liberation with relation to my father. Until I woke up or awakened, I felt a lot of antagonism towards him. He was also capable of loving, but that was continuously interrupted by extreme bursts of anger, usually directed against my mother, not me. But that was bad enough. And after awakening, whenever I visited him, talk about angry stories, about politics and say, these politicians, and I was just able to listen and was quite pleasant. I gave up wanting him to behave differently. And then he even changed quite a bit. Chunks of his ego broke off and he was more in some areas of his life, became almost enlightened.
Why alcohol feels like relief, and what it is really giving you | Eckhart Tolle
