Allowing Others Their Hero's Journey

In order to fully experience our own hero’s journey, we must allow others to walk their own sacred path. As a mother, wife, teacher and generally concerned member of society, focusing on my own stuff and leaving others to theirs is not always easy to do.

My children are adults now, and it takes a great deal of talking to myself to remember that when they’re having money issues or health concerns, or whatever else it might be, they don’t need me to jump in with all of my motherly advice. It’s amazing how hard it is for me to stop myself in those moments. I feel literally pulled to help, and to fix, because I don’t want them to hurt in any way.

As much as I see them as smart and infinitely capable human beings, and know them without question as perfect expressions of God, still, in my forgetting, I feel pulled to intervene. Honestly, I do this a lot, at home and at work, with family, friends, and patients.

When I look back over my own life’s challenges, I see without exception that getting through the biggest ones made me who I am today, and nurtured in me the things that I am most proud of. Each of us creates just the right obstacles that we need to move us along on our soul’s purpose of knowing God within us.

I know that my forgetting is a part of me that is separated from truth, and mistakenly believes that my loved ones, or anyone else, can be separated from their highest good. It is a part of myself that mistakenly believes that I can run things better than God can, or that somehow maybe God forgot just this one thing, and needs my help. Silly, I know, but that really is the heart of it.

When I jump in and try to impose my opinions onto someone else’s process, I am making the assumption that they are unable to handle it on their own, and I am helping promote that belief in them also.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Directing another’s path not only perpetuates the false belief that they are unable to manage on their own, but it keeps me from my own path as well. Sometimes we use staying busy with other people’s issues to keep us from being fully present and responsible for what we’re creating on our own hero’s journey. I’d much rather be here for my own life.

So once again, in my remembering, I choose to release my concerns for anyone else’s creations, and allow them the space to walk their hero’s journey in grace. And I give myself permission to be joyfully present and engaged in my own.

May this tool be a blessing. . .