Dr. Shefali argues that parents unconsciously raise children from scarcity and fear because of how institutions condition us toward conformity. She says the real work is healing the split between mind and heart through therapy, not just managing material things.
Chapters
Every decision you make, if unaware, if unawake, which is most of us, is made rooted in the parched soil of scarcity and impoverishment. It is made out of fear. All parents here know what I'm talking about. None of our decisions or wishes or caring for our children is rarely rooted in abundance. It's mostly rooted out of fear of their future. A fear because we, you see, are not grounded in our present reality of abundance. It's because we grew up with the same medicine with the same toxicity. It wasn't medicine for the soul. It was medicine to just assuage the split. And you can't put a band aid on the split. You have to go beneath the split to discover what's at the core. You have to scrutinize the fear and the lack that we've been conditioned by and uproot all that has been blossoming underneath. Uproot it all, Weed it out and begin again. Renew and awake. So the question is not whether you're willing to be awake. The fact that you're here, you are. That's not the question. The question is how willing are you to be deeply awake. Awakened. Not just awake on the surface, but deeply rooted out of the slumber of the conditioned reality of fear and lack. That's the question you have to ask yourself. Am I truly ready to excavate, let go of all archaic and arcane and antiquated institutions that the world hides in since birth? Look at the institutions you've been in since birth. They carefully designed these institutions, you see, to allow for conformity because the fear is anarchy. The fear is the rising of the individual spirit. So look how brilliantly engineered this dimension is to sever from truth. It's so precise. Parents with children as young as two months fall into the seduction. But Dr. Shefali, how can I not put my kid into the institution of endless hobbies when everybody else is? Or how can I not put my child into the institution of over scheduling ad nauseam? How can I not? Everybody else is. I want my kid to have a fair chance. How can I not train my child to fit in and belong and be validated by her peers? But what will happen to her? So you see how brilliantly executed. Generation after generation, institution after institution, education or maybe religion before education and then more education and then the marital institution and then the monogamous institution and then more religion and then more, and then the institution of stopping old age. And it just goes on and on. It's one institution after another. You think you're Living an individually unique free life. But you're not. You're just stepping one to the other. Some doors you close because you're brave. Yes, you're a maverick. Whether you like it or not, the next institution is waiting for you. You have to see through the structure of this society that we have called Earth and see how it's designed to carefully constrain the masses. And if you see and penetrate the madness of this reality, then you touch liberation. But for that, your mind has to be free, you see, because these institutions now have created barricades in your own mind. They've severed your own heart and mind from each other. They have made sure the split is not integrated because it serves a purpose, you see, when we live split lives, because then we all live in fear. And then all corporations benefit from this fear. It's the greed and the way of it. So it's up to you to decide that, you know, you don't need to live here. You can live in a different place. So the material world in its dense form, base, institution, rigidity, linearity, successive progression, the bag of goods that we've all embarked on needs to be broken. And then, if you're very, very lucky, like those of you here, will enter the second realm, or what I like to call the second realm, away from the material and into the psychological. Here you begin to ask, well, am I co creating this? Is there a me here? Is there something called the self? And the self begins to whisper. If you dare to go from the material to the psychological, here you go for therapy. You realize just how screwed up you are. And it will probably take the rest of your life to undo what has been done. But you're brave and you're daring to go from the material to ask, who am I? Am I just a slew of patterns regurgitating ancestral legacies without even realizing or can I possibly dare to be a me? You ask a therapist, and she smiles benevolently because she knows it'll take a long time. But we have time because time is eternal. Kirkhart said that the core schism that he saw in on this dimension is our impossibility of reckoning our infinite potential with the finite of this earth. Between our eternal bliss and capacity and. And the temporal nature of this very myopic existence between that which is absolute liberation and our right to it and that which we have to do as a necessity. You see, it's the split, right? I tell my parents that, you know, the parents who come to me, your children are a spark of the particle of the universe. They are resonance. They are a mirror to your essential divinity. And they look at me and go, yeah, but okay, but I need to get them to eat the green beans. It is this pull and push between the eternal and the temporal, between the liberation that we all desire and the form of this world. And this is where we get caught up. We get so confused. This is the duality of this earth. Seeking that you master it, seeking that you realize that it exists in every moment. See, if you don't even know what the sacred task is, then you will just live moment after moment, sure, but not understanding what is being required of you. What is being required of you is at every point, at every precipice, at every juncture, to see the split between mind and heart, between doing and being, between greed and generosity, between acquisition and altruism, between acquiring and letting go, between more and detachment, between noise and quietude, between following and stillness, between chaos and presence. Every juncture, you get to make a choice in your life. But you have to know that this is your sacred choice. And as you do, make the right choices, moving toward the abundance that you are, the split within you will heal. And what will emerge will be your authentic self. Sa.
