Student Comment: One thing I remember that helped me free myself from my parents was remembering that it is my karmic responsibility to let them go, and that I hurt their karma if I cling to them or play the roles that they need me to play in order to fill up the lack that they can’t see.
“Exactly. It’s our responsibility not to fill the lack in the parents, or in any other—so that they will feel the pain of that lack and fill it with God,” reveals Shunyamurti, the director of the Sat Yoga Institute in Costa Rica. “If you try to fill it, then you keep them unhealthy. You act as a crutch that keeps them from being able to truly find their Real Self.” And by being bound to the biological family this keeps us unable to help the larger families. “And we have to recognize that the world family needs our help now. . . . Don’t think that the biological family is the only family you belong to; it’s only the practice family from which we come so that the real families can emerge.” Recorded on the evening of Thursday, May 6, 2010.