A Word About Family...

I spent Christmas and New Year with my family and it made me reflect on what Jack Kornfield in his book "After The Ecstasy, The Laundry" said:

"It is one thing to offer a multitude of prayers for the sick and the poor, or to undertake loving kindness and compassion meditations for thousands of sentient beings everywhere. It is another to bring these same practices to our own family and our closest community.... You can't teach the truth in your native town. They only know you by your childhood names."

Family becomes the true testing ground of how far we've really progressed on our path and how aware we are. Family is the ultimate to bring out the demons and in that respect family is one of the most cruelly honest mirrors of ourselves. For me, it's about the small wins. The moments I can catch myself going into old dynamics and reminding myself that this is not true for me anymore. If I embody the change I've been working on, my family responds subtly differently. If I'm pretending to have changed, old patterns and wounds emerge within less than a nanosecond. It's small changes that matter. The moments where we can be vulnerable and open rather than hurt and reactive, where we can see our wounds and choose to act differently and where we can hold our family and ourselves in our hearts.