My Father’s Legacy

Two nights ago, I drank Ayahuasca for the fifth time. I started this journey in a very positive frame of mind. I wasn’t very tired despite having slept so little. An hour and a half in to my first cup, I didn’t feel anything and started to feel some frustration for wasted time. I decided to drink a second cup knowing that this would make me feel sick. Indeed, it made my digestive system very uncomfortable.

After purging, I still didn’t feel physically well. I realized I was not present. I laughed at myself because I was having the beginnings of a “bad trip” after claiming to Chuchu that I can’t have one. I laughed because I was humbled by the idea that I haven’t transcended myself at all. I haven’t cracked my own code, yet.

I felt tired. I felt spiritually drained from flexing the muscle of my consciousness so much and so frequently this past two months. I felt an overwhelming desire to pause my mind… to take a break from soul searching. And so, once again, I was out of presence. I was not surrendering.

At some point, I decided to take my own advice: I said, “well, fuck it”. I gave in to the “bad trip” and allowed myself to just play with memories, wherever it would take me. The beginning was pleasant. I vividly remembered playing video games in my head. I remembered how much video games was a part of my childhood: Counter-Strike, World of Warcraft, and Starcraft. Before that, Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Marios Bros, and Commander Keen.

I started thinking about playing games in the bowling alley arcade near my home when I was 8 or 9 years old. I remembered the coin jar that my father hid in the garage on Andy Street. I would steal silver dollars to feed the arcade machines. I remembered him giving me money when he would see me years later from a bad in the trunk of his car. I remembered feeling love through his money.

Most importantly, I remembered his lack of love. And so, the first epiphany hit me:

I feel an incredible well of grief from the lost opportunity of feeling my father’s love.

I will never get this back. I cried so deeply thinking about the final days I slept in his home in Shanghai after he passed, on his hard bed. I remember the smell of his clothes in his closet… clothes that he would never wear again.

I finally received his love in the end but it was just too little, too late. I needed him to hold me as a child. I needed him to give me his fatherly care. I needed him to be present with me while in my presence.

We would call on Skype once a month when he was in Shanghai and I was in my twenties. We would conclude each call with “I love you.” It felt forced from both our ends. We didn’t know how to love each other. I see now this is the base of my fear around being a father and how I treat children even now: I fear that I do not know how to love children.

I asked myself: where does this lack of love come from in my father? I dove deeper into memories of my father’s stories. I saw that his love for money came from the stress of having to survive when he was raised in a poor Taiwanese village. I envisioned him scrounging for every penny to buy morsels of food. I imagined his father toiling in the fields under the hot sun just to make just enough to feed his family. Anecdotally, I realized that this is where my propensity for efficiency comes from: it’s from the legacy of my father calculating how to save every penny. I laughed again because I always assumed that this intelligence of mine came from my college-educated mother, but instead it was really from my uneducated father.

I saw the thread of my father’s survival stress passed down to me. Stress is familiar down to my bones… or rather, down to my “genetic memory.”I realized that we bear the remnants of stress for all time, passed down unconsciously from parent to child. In that context, I realized:

The cost of stress is too extraordinary to bear.

Stress affects so much more than me: it becomes my children’s burden, and my children’s children. We pass stress down with our pain body. It becomes such a familiar part of your life that it would be strange to not have it.

I felt deeply tired again. I knew that I had to unwind all that stress in my life so that I can break this dragging cycle of my lineage.

I remember thinking: “how fascinating that I never explored my dark side” after finding this pearl of consciousness. It turns out that I needed a bad trip so that I could discover and confront my pain body. I thought: “wow, this darkness within me comes from my father.” The thought seemed a bit unfair, so I explored this further in my trance.

I started to focus on my mother. I searched into her the memories of her soul and realized that she has the same pain body that I have. I remembered memories of her crying at her father’s grave, whispering forgiveness into the wild grass that grew around a silent headstone. I didn’t understand it back then but now I see: my mother feels the same well of grief that I do at her father’s passing because she will never get back the lost opportunity of feeling love from her father.

Thus, I hit upon my second major epiphany:

My mother was unconsciously fated to be with my father, a man that she never loved.

My mother’s parents arranged the marriage for them so my father could get a green card. In reality, all four participants — my parents and my mother’s parents — were unconsciously drawn to each other through the familiarity of how they felt love (money) and the absence of love. My father’s non-loving, materialistic relationship was familiar to her as it was familiar to my grandmother. My father was an unconscious projection of my grandfather’s own will. I saw that my darkness comes from both sides of my family, crafted by the blind hands of unconscious pain.

At that moment, I wanted to hold my mother as if she were a baby. I see how much she needs to feel love the way I want to feel love: to be protected, nurtured, and cared for unconditionally. I recently wrote a line in a poem, “I see the child in your eyes.” Now, I finally see this in my mother.

She is incredibly loving and nurturing, always telling me that I’m special and gifted. Finally, I see that she is also yearning to be told the same. I saw her as my mother-as-child. I saw the continuation of my father and her father’s legacy in how distance I have been from her over the years. I see that my own path towards healing begins with healing my mother. It begins with showing her and myself that I’m not my father. This was my third and most important epiphany:

I will be ready to be a father when I can prove to myself that I can consciously dissolve the legacy of my own father’s suffering.

I have a roadmap now for healing. I feel overjoyed that I do. I know what I have to do. I have to show my mother real, genuine, unconditional love. I have to appreciate every facet of her, from her beautiful smile to her big belly. I have to make her feel like the precious, beloved child that she never got to feel so that she can feel self-love. I need to carry this forward with all my relationships. I need to be present and giving and nurturing with my love. I need to be empathetic instead of pushing my world-view on others. I need to be vulnerable so that others feel the permission to be human.

Even the strongest among us still yearn for safety and embrace. We are fathers and mothers; we are also children. Healing the child within repairs the man I will become. I’m so grateful for this realization. I’m ready.