Life is still crazy, and it’s been a while since I’ve had much of a chance to write anything Landmark Forum related or otherwise, but I saw a recent Landmark review that I thought was notable in the comment it made about our parents.
As anyone who has taken part in the Landmark Forum knows, getting ‘complete’ with and being at peace with one’s parents is a key part of the course, in that it’s hard to have a great, free life if one is trotting around a lot of baggage and resentment towards those who are responsible for you being alive.
This review/share of Landmark discusses a particular moment in her course I found moving:
“Jan asked everyone in the room age 25 or younger to stand up. Perhaps a dozen of the approximately 100 people in the room stood up. ‘These are your parents when you were born,’ he said. In my head, walls fell down, lights went on, my heart broke open. I ‘got’ it. These people looked like children to me.”
The reviewer goes on to share how she reached out to her parents after decades of estrangement. I think the point is very powerful: we think our parents made careful decisions about how they raised us that reflect their feelings about us, when in many cases they were young kids who had no real idea what they were doing. If you let that sink in, it makes forgiveness for supposed slights much easier.
The full review at Sojourner in the 21st century.
