Episode Transcript
My name is Ken Hanneman and this is my wife, Dr. Anne O'Hear. We both work in healthcare and have been meditating for many years. We also enjoy a happy and fulfilling marriage. Come, listen, and see how to demystify spirituality and bring it into your home, your hearts, and in all your relationships. We will share our experiences and how we use these principles in everyday life. Welcome to the spiritual relationship. Hello everyone. Welcome to this podcast, the Spiritual Relationship. My name is Ken Hanuman and this is my wife, Dr. Anne O'Hare. The topic today is child, parent relationship, and as you know, we will be you, we'll be looking at this to a spiritual perspective. But also we'll share our experiences too. So it's like, it's both 'cause we're unique, so we're sharing our experience, but we also are gonna share a little bit about, uh, the spiritual implications of the relationship. Yeah. Like what does it mean from a, from a spiritual point of view? Yeah. Like I was gonna say from a karmic standpoint. But that is s But that is spiritual. That is, that is spiritual. Spiritual, yeah. Good. You know, we are being, we born and we are born into a family. So did we choose it or good question. Maybe we did. Um, from a comic standpoint, we would say probably we did the thing though, about being in a family or in any relationship, in all relationship. What is very unique to human experience is that relationship can provide so much of support and, education, the shaping of character happiness. Your belief in humanity seems to be validated or you feel so great being alive based on the experience you have in relationship. And I guess the most powerful is the one between child and parent. So I'll ask Ann to, give her perspective. But I think it's a very important topic because in these days as challenges are increasing in our life, there is financial pressures and other things. Sometimes these relationship can be tested. And this is why some people will talk about a good relationship or a toxic relationship. So we will try to, to discover what these are and how we could, make it better. Yeah. Very good. I remember one time, Ken, you said that the parent, parent-child relationship is the most pure relationship that one can have. And I think I agree with that because there's no prior uh, circumstances, there's no prior memory, there's no prior anything. When the child comes, it's literally a fresh start. I think that's why everyone's so happy when somebody says they're gonna have a baby, everybody rejoices. There's some sense of newness, there's some sense of purity, let's say, innocence, some life being breathed into the family. You feel like there's a blessing to the family. And most people, again, not in the extremes, obviously there's extremes, right? But normal, middle of the road, normal people. Are happy when they find out they're pregnant. Yeah. And they're like, wow, this is great. And I know that there are other circumstances that can be happening in terms of the relationship, but let's talk about like if you have a stable relationship, the mother and father are stable and they get pregnant. Okay, great. Everybody's happy, because now there's gonna be new life, there's gonna be a new start, and everybody's excited and there's a sense of anticipation. I can't wait to meet the new person. And it's like really a beautiful, fun time. Then the baby comes and the baby is a hundred percent dependent on the parents. So what happens there, and again, I'm going right into the karma. Every relationship you have an opportunity to experience and fulfill a potential Yes, yes in you. And I think that the parent relationship, the parent side, now you get to fulfill selfless love. Selfless care. You get to understand what love is and you get to understand and be in a position to get over your own limitations. Let's say, I could say selfishness, but it's not always selfishness. It could just be, you know, overwhelm or, you know, you're not able to handle the pressures of the thing. It could be a function of just not having the power or not feeling. Strong enough to manage the circumstances, and then of course, the child feels the result of that. You may not be consciously thinking, well, I don't care about my child, but you may be dealing with circumstances. Like you, you're feeling strained, or sometimes or you feel a little bit overwhelmed, or sometimes you worry about the future of the child or, you know, so you're not truly 100% enjoying it. Right. But it should be a time of great joy. It is. And I think that even though it's mixed sometimes what can be helpful is to be reminded of the power of that parent relationship. And I'll share my experience. So in my experience, and maybe that's the reason why I just said that, because that was my experience. I have a son who's now 17, and I'm very happy. I was very happy to have him, and I'm very happy to be a mom and everything else, but I was in a relationship that was, you said, toxic. You know, I don't like to put labels on things. Right. But if I have a choice between what, what did you say? Good and toxic. Good. What did you say? Yeah. If I have a choice between good and toxic, I would've called it toxic, and I don't blame the other person. There's no blame. That's how it felt to me. So I was in kind of a turmoil for the beginning of my son's life. Now that didn't take away from how I felt about him, or I did my best. You know, you hear that with parents, and we're gonna talk in another episode in a couple of episodes about caring for aging parents. And that's the opportunity for the child to now step into the selfless love role. Exactly. With the parent. So as a parent, you gotta get over yourself with the child let's say. You have to get over yourself 'cause you have to take care of the child. The child can't take care of themselves. And however you fall short, maybe I'm not blissfully happy the whole time, but in my heart I'm definitely, you know. Working to take care of, fulfill that obligation. So what I wanna share is after that relationship ended, the dad is still in touch with my son. No problem there. But the relationship ended. Ken and I got married years later and now, now there's a spiritual situation here, and now the feedback coming. From him, his support and whatever, and my own feelings is, look, you now have an opportunity to now fulfill the parts that maybe you weren't able to do before. Now it's time to, let's say, do more discipline. Now it's time to pay more attention to this. So what I wanna say about the parent relationship or any relationship. Let's say any relationship. Any relationship. This is the spiritual relationship podcast, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Any relationship. The secret. Here's the secret. You have to find a way to give as much as you possibly can to fulfill your role in that relationship, your part in that relationship. You want to fully fulfill it. So as a parent, I can say in my experience, that regret may happen later and maybe you could, there could be like a negative way of looking at it, like the kids are not grateful or whatever. But from a spiritual standpoint, I'm gonna say that the regret will come because I did not fulfill fully the obligation and the possibility and the potential and the responsibility of that relationship. And I can tell you now that I take that very seriously now because it's about me. So here's the karma thing. This is why we talk about karma. Karma is really about you. Yeah. It's not about other people. At the end of the day, we have to face ourselves. We face ourselves all the time really, but we're not really aware of it. 'cause we're thinking about other people, but relationships, different relationships are opportunities for us to fulfill that karma and learn about ourselves. Yeah. You know, if you can envision coming into this body, into a family, you're coming from somewhere, there's a saying, you come alone and you go alone. But in between, you are here with other people and there is a purpose to that. And the purpose is to be happy. And what is happiness? Happiness is really for human being. All human beings. It's about learning. It's about creativity, it's about contributing, it's about being part of something, a creation, you know? So in a family, it's the unit of all society, country, whatever. Everything starts from there. So whatever we do for each other has such an impact on each other and also extended family, community, country and so on. When you look at it from that standpoint, it's amazing in a family that the things you do to build respect. To handle power in a responsible way to allow space for people to be themself and to grow, rather than being smothered Right. Or ignored. Or ignored, or being told to be this way or else. There's a karma. within family is that each and every one of us, we come in here with a unique personality and we are also building something. And the thing about it is that no matter how many siblings you have, each and every one of them will be absolutely unique. And no matter how much you as a parent, you try to change that or think it shouldn't be that way. You try to be even or something. Yeah. But they're all unique and different. Yeah. So if you examine it carefully, you'll see in any relationship, you have to see what is your relationship with yourself, what is your self value, your principles, your integrity, your honesty. Things like that. This is the kind of thing that if you share that and if you are an example of you will see that you will get a lot more out of that relationship. The beautiful thing about a child and parent is that a child you get a chance to, contribute, shape their life, shape their life. If you shape their life, um, in a good way or a good influence. You're talking about them influencing their friends, influencing their family or their children and and it, and it keeps a ripple going. So can I just interject one thing I was talking about, like fulfillment of an obligation or relationships, the karmic part, but the blessing part is that you get to, you get to experience the best of yourself and give the best of yourself to your child. Yeah. And maybe that's the child's part. The child's part is to receive that. And I wanna say that child, the child is a blessing to the family. Child is a bless blessing. The family, you know, the I, I've seen this say, sometimes we say that mother gets a child. Yeah. But your first child makes you a mother or makes you a father. That's right. The child makes you a parent. Yeah. A parent. Yeah. And then the parent, that role gives you the opportunity, you said to have power, to give yourself, to be of your like what a blessing. Right? What a blessing. Yeah. And the child allows you to do that. Yeah. The other thing about relationship is that. You only spend a certain amount of time with each other. That's true. You come in, you're married, let's say for I don't know how many years. And it varies with everybody. And then we move apart for whatever reason, that whatever the thing is, that whatever you give, whatever the give and take is, that is what we're taking beyond we are going with. So I would like, like in my case, my parents passed. My mother passed. I was 16, my father later on. But the memory that remains is a wonderful thing to have a great memory of people, you know, to, to have gratitude or respect and regard, because I think that is the blessing that you give because every single human being. They, they wanna be happy and all of this is part of happiness. Happiness is not just about being excited and dancing and drinking. It's more about all of these things. I wanna say that in my generation, I know that there's a bunch of people that grew up like me, so I'm sharing this side of it. If you feel like family is a, is a source of pain. Yeah, we may feel that way. Yeah. Enduring. Enduring. Yeah. So I, I wanna talk about that because we may be talking about all this and there are people out there that may be like, I don't relate to that at all. So we were talking about it from a karmic standpoint and the possibility of what it should, I don't wanna say should be, but the potential, yeah, the potential of this kind of relationship. I wanna acknowledge that maybe for whatever reason, these have relationships have been in such a way that I feel pain. Whether in remembering them or being with those people or whatever feels pain. I wanna say that spirituality can help us heal that. Heal it in myself, and transform the relationships. Actually, yeah, in real life, you can actually transform the relationships. It takes a while, doesn't happen right away, but I wanna acknowledge that because if you do have pain in your family, it doesn't mean something's wrong, right? There's lots of people that have pain. This is the way the world is right now. I just, I wanna say this is the way the world is, so I don't want anybody to feel ashamed or feel bad about the way things are. It's okay that it is the way it is. We are here to say, from a karmic standpoint, this is the way it could be. And spiritual practice meditation, studying spiritual knowledge, creating environment for yourself to heal. Getting in touch with yourself and healing can help transform that situation. And then you can start to fulfill the potential of those relationships. Yeah. Parent or child. And we go into other relationships later, but definitely. Yeah. But it is reciprocal. It is a, a relationship that child gives joy to the parents. When the child grows up, then that child, let's say, becomes, helpful. You find that the parent benefits from that. It's a wonderful relationship. The things you experience as a parent and as a child. You can't get it from any other relationship. Other relationships can be with friends, can be with, in a workplace or something like that. But nothing will be the same as in a family relationship. So before we go towards the end of this, just like we'll do like rapid fire. So I'm going say the best, one of the best memories or best thoughts I have about being a child and one of the best things I got outta being a parent. So I, for me, one of the best things I got out of being a child, I'm gonna say that, my parents were very supportive of me being independent, outgoing, very, self reliant. And I really appreciate that they valued education very much. They wanted me to know that I could take care of myself, which was very good. And also they encouraged creativity. They encouraged that. And also my mom especially was a very good role model for me, for my career. My mom was a nurse and I'm a nurse and you know, it was a nice role model. Nice to, and my dad's a nurse too, but that was a second career. Yeah. But to be able to follow in the career of the family, that was also a blessing that I got as the child. Okay. As a parent, I, we were in the car yesterday and I said, wow, you know, I think I'm a good mom, right? Like, and Ken said, you know, yeah, you're a good mom. So I am proud of myself and it's interesting 'cause I'm not gonna. Qualify this based on Joey. I'm actually gonna qualify it based on how I feel. I actually feel like I'm learning how to support somebody without controlling them. How to be loving to somebody without suppressing them or having demands on them to encourage growth. Also allow for independence and their ideas and whatever. Like there's, there's no need to control. I can offer, now he's 17, right? It's different when they're little. You gotta be a little bit more involved. But I feel, I feel proud that, my relationship with my son I feel is very good, and that he feels independent and he and I check in sometimes, like, are we all right? I wanna make sure that he's okay. I want, I said, you know, you can, you know, whatever you need. He goes, I know mom, like he's okay. So I really feel proud about that and that I feel like I'm fulfilling parts of myself that I'm able to be like that with people, with others. So I'm really happy for that. Yeah. For my parents would, from very, because I was the eldest child, right? So they, they said it so many times, they drum it into you that. Any one of you who get ahead, meaning like you do well and you're independent, that you will help the others. 'cause we come from a poor background and maybe it was good that they did that because when my mother passed, I realized how much responsibility you have. Even though you might be at 16, that was suddenly you become adult. Like it or not. So this awareness of that, okay, I could go off on my own and be okay and they can, no, I couldn't, I just couldn't do that. And not that I have much control, but gradually, slowly, like I passed my exams and I was able to get a job. My father was working, but he couldn't manage everything on his own. So I grew up having that kind of, an attitude, a feeling of being not only a big brother, but also like a parent. And, you have some responsibility to that. And what I got from that personally now that I'm all that is passed, everybody, they're adult, they have their own families and all of that. One thing I find when I look back at my own life and how I feel about myself, I feel that karma has been fulfilled. And if I were to do it again. I would like to be in a position where I do contribute something like I feel there's a part of me that likes to give rather than receive because it makes me feel bad about myself because there was a period in time I think, growing up as a teen, and I guess most people have this, that you feel, insecure. Insecure, or, yeah. They call that low self-esteem, or they call that, inferiority, inferior, complex and all kinds of things. But as you, as you take on responsibility and as you fulfill that, it builds it. And, it teaches, what it taught me most is to have humility when you have power, have a balance of humility and power, and you will gain more and you will hurt less. Beautiful. You know, you wanna say something about your own children? 'cause he has two children. He actually is a parent too. He has two children. Yeah. And they're all grown now. But, um, you know when children are growing up and you're trying to do the best for them and sometimes you say, I want you to become the president of America or whatever, we have the hardest thing. Didn't really work out that way, nowhere close. But, I still want to be part of their life, but I have to change the relationship. Not as being the one who gonna criticize or tell them they should do this. I have to allow them to make their own decisions and, and, uh, maybe face a consequence. But I'm their backstop. I'll be there. Mm-hmm. And, that's what she teach you, that in their growth, you have to change your perspective. You, you have to become detached. Yeah. And still loving. You have to find a way to be detached and loving. Which is spiritual by the way. Right. Which is spiritual because the ultimate aim in all relationship is that you should leave it or in retrospect, when you look back at it, there's a good taste in your mouth. There's a feeling that I enjoyed it, that you did give something that can be remembered with fondness. And that others are naturally expressing goodwill and gratitude to you. You know, like everyone should feel that, you know, you're naturally feel grateful or you na you feel natural in the relationship and you're, you have gratitude. Like, I think that the parent-child relationship, maybe we'll leave this here. I think that the parent should be grateful to the child and the child should be grateful to the parent. I think that they both are giving, both are giving and both are receiving. In the, in the other episode when we get there, we're gonna talk about, taking care of your parents. Yeah. That's another whole scenario where you gotta switch, right. Everybody's gotta switch again. But I think that to, to keep in mind that whenever we get into this burden thing, 'cause sometimes we can get into this overwhelm or this burden thing with life, just sit quietly for a second and remember these relationships are a blessing. They're helping me. Like I don't wanna hurt the relationship, you know? Mm-hmm. Like, I don't wanna hurt my relationship by being, um, irritable or being overwhelmed or being abusive or being controlling. I don't wanna hurt that relationship. I wanna protect that relationship, whatever it is. But certainly, parent child is one of the most important relationships, I don't think anywhere, any other relationship. You have more power or you're more able to receive. Yeah. Like in both sides than a parent child. Yeah. So should we end there? Yes. Okay. All right. Well, thank you all for listening. I hope that gave you something to think about, and we will see you next time. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. When you walk into a room, life gets little sweeter. When I look at you, I see you are my, you are. My life. My life. My life.
