In the last blog, we looked at gift giving as a heart-based visualization process for changing negative feelings to positive. With the people closest to my heart, gift giving did not work; the pain and sorrow kept coming back over and over again regardless of how many gifts I gave them. My heart was broken. When it came to these relationships, I had to seek another way of healing my ego so that my heart would be free to command and heal the core of my wounded inner soul.

Pain from powerful bonded relationships involve huge neural constructs containing intense emotions and feelings. They form a complex safety net of rules and regulations agreed upon and imposed on each other by our fragile egos. These constructs can become unhealthy thought and behavior patterns. We can become hooked into expectations and roles that we play for each other rather than being true to our inner self. When we allow our egos to control our relationships and our sexual orientation, we create impediments for the heart. Our relationships can become twisted and destructive. This often leads to thought and behavior patterns involving deception, evasiveness, mistrust and disappointment. The ego then becomes desperate in trying to resolve these issues and maintain these relationships that have become part of our wounded identity. We have to burn the contracts that we have made with people we love through our egos, so that we can be free to love each other unconditionally from the heart.

In a healthy person with healthy relationships, the heart is in control and can allow the ones it loves to enter and leave according to its own wants and needs. We do not want to remove our parents, spouses, and children from our inner souls but we do not want them to stay there all the time as part of our identity. We want them to come and go in positive interactions so that both our souls can be enriched by each other’s presence. If we can remove the pain-filled patterns, we can continue to experience them and their precious gifts inside our inner soul, not as part of our identity, but as part of our network of love. We need to be free to live our own lives, to come and go out of each other’s inner room by mutual consent, so that we enrich each other’s lives.

Contracts with parents evolve naturally with the development of family roles and responsibilities. They seem to become a part of our identity and sense of self. Any attempt to alter these contracts will be met with fierce resistance. One of my prime contracts had been with my mother. I had never experienced my mother’s unconditional love. According to the contract I had written, if I was the perfect son she would have to love me. However, she, too, had a badly wounded soul. She was a single-parent mother with nine children and a husband who had abandoned her before I was born. She could not fulfill the expectations of my contract.

During my year in Costa Rica, sitting on my patio on my volcanic mountain, I went over all the aspects of my relationship with her. I wrote up all the benefits that I had enjoyed from our contract and thanked her for each one. I then looked at all the negative aspects, including her twisted view of sex as “the real apple” (poor Eve), and her attempt to push me towards becoming a priest. I tried to see the reasons for each clause, acknowledged that she had done the best she could, then thanked her for trying to do her best for me as she saw fit as a mother.

I then examined the role my mother had played genetically and socially in shaping my bisexual orientation and then thanked her for that gift. In the process, I realized that I had tried to hide my orientation from her and that a large part of my shame was feeling that I had disappointed of even betrayed her. I then forgave myself and acknowledged the heroic struggle I had gone through to be true to her while being true to myself. I then dealt with my role in the contract and realized that I too had done the best I could under the circumstances. After bringing the contract to the conscious level, I realized that I had outgrown it; I no longer needed the security it had provided. I was even able to thank my ego for the contract realizing that it had been necessary for me to survive.Then I burned the written contract in a real fireplace as well as the visualized contract in the fireplace I had created in my inner room. As I watched the last sparks fade out, I felt a quiet peace flood my soul.

But there was still something missing; my heart was still not involved. Now that the contract was gone, I had no platform on which to rebuild my love for my mother. Now that the false self with its false identity was gone, my heart seemed lost and confused. During the summer in Canada after my first year in Costa Rica, I consulted a spiritual therapist. She put me in a state of relaxed consciousness through hypnosis. She took me back to that moment just after my birth when I lay nestled in my mother’s arms. It was not until that moment that I felt just how much my mother had loved me. My mother had died four years ago, before my mental crash. I had not shed a tear. I visited her grave. I sat there until I finally felt that bond that I had never known, but had always existed. And then the tears finally began to flow. I stayed there all afternoon, just receiving my mother’s love and loving her back with powerful sobs of grief mixed with joy. I wept for all the moments we had had and yet did not have.

I let this love for her and from her flow into my inner sanctuary and heal the broken heart of the child within. While I allowed myself to grieve, my heart led me to the truth which had always been there. I suddenly realized that my mother and I had always been connected through the power of love, but our damaged egos had prevented us from immersing ourselves in that love. I realized that our love bond was real, had always been real, and was still real. I now know that my mother and I have always been, and always will be, connected through the power of love. My connection with her is different now, but it is still very much alive. The love between a mother and her son knows no boundaries, not even death.