Dear Mom & my wife, on Creating My Reality

Dear Mom and my wife,

I’ve written you two letters individually. This letter is for all three of us to give us space for us all to find healing and bring us back to integrity. I have not been a master of timing in the past, often prone to share my revelations before others are ready to receive, so forgive me if this falls upon deaf ears. I ask that you revisit this letter when you feel centered and respond in kind. I love you both so dearly.

The first thing I want to establish is that I am really finding my voice to lean into my purpose: to be a healer and spiritual teacher. Primarily, I am committed to embodying my Inner Truth — based in love, peace, and Oneness — to really practice what I get to preach. Secondly, I intend to follow my intuition and to constantly guard against hubris. I ask your help to lift me into humility through drawing my awareness to moments of my revelatory self. This letter is an act of this voice and my purpose. Thank you so much in advance for helping me manifest this into reality. I am truly grateful.

Secondly, and most importantly, I love you both incredibly and accept what has happened as a gift. We all have different forms of expression and each form is equally valid and necessary. As I shared in my letter to you, Mom, my form of releasing the pressure valve of my resentments is through a form of passive-aggressiveness. I believe that you have this same mechanism. My wife’s tends to be more explosive. I say both of these without judgment because each is a projection of our soul’s desire to heal… we just have different ways of projecting. So much like a hammer is no more good or evil than a knife, the quietness is no more good or evil than the loudness. It just is, and if we can move beyond the form factor of our message, we can get to the heart of the message itself.

This is where I will focus my attention.

To Mom

Just as I shared with you that your judgments on my wife were a reflection of my own, I will share that my wife’s anger is also a reflection of my own. Anger is a very valuable emotion because it helps us realize where an injustice has been committed. When I say “injustice”, I do not mean a slight against society, but rather of ourselves against ourselves. When I am angry, I am really angry at myself for violating my own integrity in some way. Thus, I believe that my wife was releasing long-held anger that she suppressed in service of a stalemate sort of harmony between all of us. I am grateful that she found the opportunity and courage to release this.

You see, Mom, I am also angry because I have also sacrificed my integrity in appeasement of your steadfast moral judgments. In the book “The Way of Integrity” by Martha Beck, the author shares that being in integrity is not only about not telling a lie, it’s about telling the truth where silence might live. I have sat in silence so many times as I received your judgments on my wife and me, instead opting to preserve the peace. But this is a fake peace. It is not a maximal existence because we do not get to honor each other’s Inner Truth. We only get to love at the surface of what is truly available, which is a true connection of our souls that lies at the intersection of joy and safety.

Instead, what I should have said so many times is, “Mom, I love you. I accept you for all that you are, including your judgments. But I also want to express with love in my heart that I do not share your judgments. That instead, I am living a life to release myself of the prison of judgments, including yours, and that everything you shared that my wife is doing is a gift.” Or, what I could have shared if I really penetrated deeper into the core of my Truth was to share with you the letter I wrote you earlier where I took my responsibility instead of silently casting my wife as the villain.

I am so grateful for the opportunity to share this with you, now. As they say, better late than never, and so I am so thankful that I have this opening to free myself from the suffering of withholding my being from my mother in its fullest, deepest Truth. I want you to know that my wife is my soulmate in this journey into Consciousness. For every judgment you have placed on her, you can often equally place it on me.

As I unravel more and more of my fears and barriers to experiencing all that life has to offer, one of the last and most challenging bastions is my relationship with sex. As you know, I was sexually molested as a child. I also grew up with being introduced to sex education very early when you showed me Playboy magazines when I was a child. I’m not sure when this happened, but there was some point where I began to feel that you were beginning to be ultra-conservative in sex, especially in how a woman should present herself.

Sex is confusing for me. At once, I am a very sexual being. I also feel a great deal of shame and guilt around it. As I crave a deep understanding of myself, I have also done so much sexual exploration and am at a pivotal, exciting place in my journey to discovering the final pieces to this puzzle. In the past, this manifested as dating rampantly and sleeping around; now, I have a beautiful and lovely partner in my wife to explore this with. I have challenged myself to love my body, jumping naked into lakes, pools, and hot tubs around others whenever I can. I have played with groups of friends that have hosted safe, accepting, and exciting sexual parties. I have explored non-monogamy (being with other women), and plan to explore it further with my wife.

I say all this to share with you that I am human. I am human with human desires, and I no longer wish to live with shame, suffering, or hiding — I accept myself and love myself for all that I am, knowing that every little cell of mine or choice I make is neither good nor bad… it’s just pure and capable of being filled with love. I love and accept my wife in this same vein, because we are One just as you and I are One. I love and accept your judgments because they are projections of your soul’s desire to heal… and I am on this Earth to be your mirror, just as I am my wife’s mirror, to offer you clarity on your path to peace.

When you create a judgment, you create your own suffering. What would your life be like without judgment? What would it be like without the suffering? This is a very powerful question because I can tell you what I am experiencing when I commit to non-judgment with absolute certainty: it is full of peace and love. You may experience peace when you are alone in your home, but you cannot experience love. Or, you may experience love when you are hugging your son, but you do not get to experience the limitless depths that peace has to offer. You can only experience pure love and peace with acceptance and releasing expectations. You can only experience this when two people feel so safe with each other that they can expose the breadth of their necks and expect a kiss instead of a cut. This is what unconditional love is. Mom: this is the space where I — the inheritor of your wisdom and spirit — can elevate to become the purity that I am meant to be.

This is also my gift to you: that I love you, that I accept you, and I do not expect anything of you. You are perfect as you are, and forever will be.

To My Wife

My dearest love, I am so grateful to walk this path to peace with you. I marvel at your ability to return back to center. You have an extraordinary intuitive sense of justice. I am constantly surprised by your ability to help me see where I can be better. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I know that you are your worst critic, and so I want to start by saying: Thank you. I love you. Please forgive me. I forgive you. I know now that the rage I witnessed this past week was a build-up of long suppressed emotion, made manifest in your journey back to inner integrity. You have said all that was lodged deep in your heart, both in the passionate expressions of anger as well as the conciliatory expressions of guilt.

I know that you still wrestle with why this is all happening for you. I know that you will find the reason. My role is to hold myself as a mirror for you, just as I do for my mother, so that you can quicken your journey out of suffering. I will only say that this is all happening for a reason, and that my mother and I are figments of the simulation of your reality to give you opportunities to heal. There is something so much deeper than expressing your pent-up anger. There is a deeper truth available if viewed from the lens of how and why you created this reality.

Please know that I am also on my own journey, seeking further and deeper into the horizons of my soul to discover all the little bits that are not yet being love. So please forgive me my trespasses, just as I pray you forgive yourself yours. Please forgive my mother for being herself. As Ram Dass says, you can’t be mad at traffic. A city is just going to be a city. My mother is on her own journey and also doing the best that she can. You know as well as I do that she is good. We are all seeking love and peace, and inherently desire to manifest love and peace. Mom believes that she is helping save her son from suffering. And indeed, she is: by giving me the opportunity to return back to my integrity, made manifest in these letters.

There is also a gift from my mother to you. Her judgments are a gift. At the surface level, they have helped you be angry and liberate your anger. At a deeper level, they helped you see that you are not where you expected to be, which in itself has so many layers of expectations and identity. If we are to remove our own judgments and accept Mom as she is, we can see that she is just a medium to help us heal, both as individuals and as a partnership. Just as a city is going to city, Mom is going to mom. She will always be who she is, and our release of expectations into full acceptance is also our opportunity to release suffering and fully embrace love.

And so, everything I wrote my mother about judgments above can also be turned around and delivered to you. I see you suffer, I see her suffer, I see myself suffer, and I say: what would it look like if we did not suffer? How would this family be? We are manifesting this strife ourselves, each and every one of us. We are collectively creating this fear-based reality. We are also creating this opportunity to love each other, to say “I forgive you”, and to commit to showing up with as much patience, acceptance, and love that we can muster to try and try again to be the best we can be.

I invite you to always be in your integrity, which will often mean not succumbing to Mom’s or my judgments and expectations. I invite you to liberate your anger before it becomes rage, and to express your authentic self in its fullest capacity. I invite you to engage every moment with love in your heart, and if you find that you cannot, to lean on me so I can support you with my love. Finally, I invite you to forgive yourself: you did nothing wrong, just as you did nothing right. You are not wrong, nor are you right. You just are who you are, and I love you for all that you are.

To My Loves

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading these letters. I have learned so much from this past week and I imagine I will learn so much in the weeks to come. This is not an easy journey. I know that we will each be tempted to revert back into separateness and suffering. When you feel this pull, I invite you to ask yourself: “Why are we separate when we are really one? Why do I create my own suffering?”

I know that you two are in my life for a reason that is becoming more and more clear to me. To my wife, I choose to be your husband. Mom, I choose to be your son. And I choose to love and accept you both for the perfection that you are.

Sincerely,

Your Son and Your Husband