Calling your lessons to you
QUESTION: Masters, I have been on a spiritual journey now for the past few years. After many tumultuous life experiences, I now understand that I am a soul growing through lessons learnt in my physical body. I now have one major stumbling block to my search for spiritual fulfillment and that is my volatile relationship with my daughter. I love her very much but she is generally rude and abusive to me and I react badly to that. I find it drains my energy living with her. She is 19 and not about to leave home. I would like to resolve the issue of so much negative energy being generated on a daily basis between us, but I am at a loss as to how to deal with it. ~Diana, New Zealand
ANSWER: When you have worked through most of your life lessons, you bring to yourself the next ones you wish to work on. Your daughter is there to let you work on responsibility concerns, anger issues, self-worth and self-image perspectives, and energy vampirism—taking your positive energy and replacing it with negativity.
You still feel responsible for your daughter even though she is an adult. She wants you to feel that responsibility so that she does not have to deal with such issues. When she is rude and abusive she is testing her power over you and what you will take—the limits of your lack of self-worth, which allows her to treat you the way she does. Her behavior would not be able to affect you the way it does unless you thought you deserved such treatment or were not worthy of anything better.
You react badly to the abuse because you hate yourself for not sticking up for yourself. What someone says or does to you can hurt only if you accept there is truth in what they are telling you. If you don’t know yourself, you have to rely on the rest of the world to tell you who you are. This is what your daughter is doing.
Wouldn’t it be easier to know who you are so others had no control over you? The first step for you is to rid your life of negativity. Any time a negative thought creeps in, a negative emotion rears its head, or you feel anything other than total positive energy is the time to act. Begin by replacing anything negative with a positive thought or emotion. If your daughter gets rude, remember her as a sweet baby in diapers. If you start to lose your temper, think of the most pleasant thought that occurs to you. Start each day with the affirmation that it is a beautiful, fantastic day.
Once you live in positive energy and refuse to let negativity in, you will see what actions of yours allowed your daughter to take the upper hand. You will see that you do not deserve to be treated with disdain, because you are as worthy and beautiful as all unconditionally loving souls—which is who you are.