Choosing Our Parents

In my twenties I first read Illusions by Richard Bach.  In it he says: "Every problem has its gift" and other pieces of wisdom that suggest we are in charge of our own life experience, not passive victims to it.  I recall taking the worst event of my life and saying:  "Ok what is the gift of that?"  And strangely I could see it, and I could feel it shifting something that had lived in me as a sort of “victim oh poor me” story.  Something in this same exploration suggested to me that we in fact choose our parents.  About 7 years ago I finally read the Celestine Prophesy.   In this spiritual novel he also suggests that we choose our parents; and in fact he suggests we come to earth with a spiritual purpose and that the parents we choose provide certain lessons, for good or for bad, which help shape us for that spiritual purpose.  He calls this our “evolutionary question” and says we each have one.  He somewhat lays out a method for figuring it out (which I have further developed and have done with numerous friends.)  In the last few years in reading various books by Neale Donald Walsch and then most recently Inspiration by Wayne Dyer this idea has again been repeated that we choose our parents.  (This belief does fit best if you believe in reincarnation and karma.) 

In a previous post: God the Father/God the Mother, I talk about the idea that our concepts of God are often powerfully shaped by how we experience our "all powerful" parents during our childhoods.  These two ideas seem to go hand in glove: that we choose parents that provide a certain spiritual (or not) experience that then shapes our spirituality and the tools and concepts with which we pursue our spiritual task on earth.  This has powerful implications for both how we relate to our parents and our experiences with them, but also for those of us who are parents, how we parent.  Do you see your child as a soul that you have a sacred trust with?  Do you nurture not just their body, mind and emotions, but also their spiritual nature or their soul? 

What are the healing potentials with your parents (alive or dead) if you consider that you actually chose them?  For someone who was treated abusively or hatefully by a parent this may seem a fairly repugnant and nonsensical statement...at first glance.  But keep looking.  I think for example of a friend of mine who was beaten by his father during his childhood.   He says it taught him to question authority and to be strong and to be centered in his own internal sense of truth.  He has been an activist throughout his life and this has served him well.  I think of another person whose parents were not religious at all, but has a deep love of beauty, and how that prepared her to create art which has been a path to mysticism.

For myself, despite believing that we choose our parents, I have been mystified for decades trying to understand why I would choose a mother, a good mother, who would die during my childhood?  It has finally come to me in doing Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects, that I have learned how to be present to grief and loss unflinchingly and unwaveringly....and that in this time of so much loss on this planet, that those of us who fight for peace and for justice must be able to be present to the pain of the world.  As Joanna says:  "Be willing to have your heart be broken open to the pain of the world; it is what your heart was created for...to connect you to life." So I commend to you the question:  Why did I choose my parents?  How have they, for better or for worse, prepared me for my spiritual purpose in life?