by
Jennifer Hoffman |
Jun 17, 2018 |
2018,
action,
ascension,
blog,
Boundaries,
determination,
June 2018,
Karma and Destiny,
Life Mastery,
Love,
past,
relationships,
transformation |
Father’s
Day was June 17 in U.S., a day when we celebrate our relationship with
our fathers. Some of us don’t have a lot to celebrate, as our fathers
may have been absent, unknown, or so emotionally distant that we cannot
find a reason to celebrate our relationship with them. My father has
been dead for nearly 30 years and while I spent much of my life being
angry with him and wondering whether he cared about me at all, I now
understand so much more about him and can actually be grateful for the
gifts he gave me instead of focusing on how he ignored so many
opportunities to show how much he loved and cared about me. (the photo
is of my father and me, taken quite a few years ago!)
Fathers mirror our lessons in power and love, often through their
limitations instead of their abilities. My father was, as were many of
the men of his generation, emotionally damaged. Orphaned during WWII at
age 4 and adopted by strangers at age 7, much of his life was lived with
the question of what happened to his family and why he wasn’t worthy of
being with them. He was quiet, withdrawn, and emotionally disconnected.
Yet, there were a few times, like the first time I was rejected by a
boy I liked, and he comforted me, told me that I was beautiful and would
one day find someone who loved and appreciated me, that he was loving
and supportive.
I wanted him to be strong and powerful, to protect me and to show me
that he loved me so I could know that I was lovable. But he didn’t love
himself or feel worthy of love, based on his life experiences, so he
could not give that kind of love to me.
My father, like so many men of his generation, was consumed by grief,
anger, sadness, powerlessness, and had no idea how to express his
emotions. For their generation, emotions were for women, and ‘big boys
don’t cry’. What I now know is that he couldn’t give me what he didn’t
have and although he may have wanted to, and I think he did, he simply
did not have the skills or knowledge to be emotionally present for
himself, so he couldn’t be there for me either.
I feel that I know my father better now than I ever did before, and I
am at peace with the person he was, instead of being angry at the
person he was not or, as I have learned to accept, could never be. It
took me a very long time to figure that out. I had many expectations of
my father and was very angry because he did not meet them. I could not
appreciate his pain because I wanted him to fix mine, to show me that I
was powerful and worthy of love.
He lived with me during the last few months of his life and that gave
me an opportunity to see the depth of his emotional suffering, the
feelings of unworthiness, the deep hurt at having been separated from
his family, the grief he held within him, and how closed his heart was.
In the moments before he died he told me he loved me, that he was proud
of me, and apologized for not being a better father. It had taken him
over 30 years to say that to me and it was the healing and proof of love
that I needed.
It was also a choice point for me and I could accept it and move on
or be angry and reject this gift because it was too little, too late. I
chose to accept it (not right away though), grateful that he loved me
enough to find the courage to say it, even if it was in the last moments
of his life. I now know, with the understanding that comes from
experience, wisdom that comes with age, and compassion from being a
parent, that my father’s emotional limitations were his gift to me. I
could choose to be like him, or I could choose to be as emotionally open
as possible and to end the legacy of grief, hurt, anger, powerlessness,
and emotional distance that was the legacy of that generation.
We choose our parents, even our distant, hurtful, absent, or wounded
fathers, so that we can heal ourselves. The belief that fathers should
be or should have been ____________ (fill in the blank) puts the burden
of our healing on them and limits our ability to learn and heal from our
shared journey.
Whether they were horribly abusive or lovingly kind, there was a
reason we chose them and when we can be compassionate and forgiving with
them and ourselves, we can release lifetimes of anger and
disappointment and accept them for who they are, human beings doing the
best they can with what they were taught and know. Whether you were well
or poorly fathered, your father is part of your soul group, an
important aspect of your healing journey and another mirror of your
healing.
Father’s Day usually happens in Solstice week, which is a
celebration of the longest day of sunshine and the sun represents the
father in astrology. It’s one more reason for us to re-align ourselves
with a higher perspective in all of our relationships but especially,
the ones which we struggle to understand or come to terms with because
we feel that they were lacking in so many ways.
There
is another aspect to consider as we decide whether we are going to
spend our lives resenting our fathers for their poor parenting and
emotional skills or move beyond those emotions and view them with
compassionate kindness and understanding, and that is the awakening of
the Divine Masculine energy. We celebrate the rise of the Divine
Feminine, after eons of suppression, which was part of our Atlantis
Legacy and which I write about in my book, The Atlantis Legacy, which
you can purchase on Amazon
at this link.
The Divine Masculine energy represents the rejoining of the masculine
to its heart center, which it has been disconnected from for as long as
the Divine Feminine has been disconnected from its power.
Through countless centuries of war, death, domination, and control, the masculine energy has had its heart broken and is consumed
by the grief which is a by-product of its trauma. It is now time for it
to be reconnected on a heart level, so men can be whole and complete
once more, reunited with the unconditional love that is part of their
divine blueprint. We see it in today’s younger generation of fathers who
are caretakers and providers to their children in ways that fathers in
my generation never were.
By forgiving our fathers, we release this old energy and can open the
portals for a profound energetic rebirth to occur to bless future
generations with parents who are equally loving, compassionate,
supportive, and aware of their power in ways that allow them to express
all of the love in their hearts to everyone in their life. And in doing
so we can end the masculine paradigm’s legacy of grief which has been
such a powerful limitation to the reconnection of ourselves to our own
divine center, and to each other.
Here is a Father’s Day exercise for you — What one thing do you wish
you could have received from your father? Is it acceptance, praise,
approval, love, validation, respect? Write it down as a sentence – – The
one thing I wanted from my father was _______________________
Now give yourself that energy for the next 7 days. Whatever you
wanted from your father (that he did not give you) is something you need
to give to yourself. Be gentle with yourself as you give yourself that
energy that you have waited your whole life to receive, often from
someone who could not give it to you. This is one of the lessons of our
soul groups, what we most want from them is what we must learn to give
to ourselves.
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