The Beginning Transcript
Liz: So today we're talking about the beginning, and I'm not talking about the beginning of the world. I'm talking about specifically the beginning of our spiritual lives.
It's not anything new. A lot of people have heard of angels. Or people who are really into mediumship believe that they have dead relatives with them and others believe that some spirits, some somebody who once walked this earth plane who is no longer is with them. In my practice, we call them guides.
For the sake of today's podcast, it doesn't quite matter to get into the specifics of them. Right. What matters though is that you can somehow understand that part of our existence is unseen and some of what we call sort of connection to another realm or another vibration is having these guides.
So when we're born and up until about the age of 17, we are under our parents' guidance umbrella. They take on their parents’ guides, your energetic parent. Right? So the one you're living with.
Rhea: Okay. And what happens if one of the parents have died?
Rhea: Even, even if it's adopted?
Liz: Absolutely.
Rhea: That’s so interesting. So you don't have the guides of your birth parents.
Liz: precisely. Now, what happens though is that in order to begin the process of spiritual maturation, a child must separate from the parents. And this happens around the age of 17 but it can be as early as 15, and you know this is happening often because that's when you start to see your teenager start to go a little off the rails.
And they can sometimes enter a somewhat dark period.
Rhea: So the separation is. Kids becoming themselves, not just children of their parents.
Liz: Exactly. When you were a kid, when you were going through it, it just felt natural. You're angry. You're angry. If you're sad, you're sad, whatever it is you're doing, you're not sitting there and thinking, well, I'm just trying to individuate and become myself.
You're just doing it
Rhea: because then you get your own guides.
Liz: Precisely. Some people haven't recovered from the trauma of that separation.
Rhea: I have so many questions.
Liz: Okay.
Rhea: What you call getting your own guides and starting your own spiritual journey. We call becoming an adult. Yes. It's that change from being a child and being ruled by your parents and standing on your own two feet.
Liz: Well, we see it from that very human standpoint of this marks a step into adulthood. From a spiritual point of view, it's not spiritual adulthood at all. It's actually sort of the early stages of one's spiritual life. So that's why, even in your late teens, you're still very young and things are still very new and you're still very sensitive.
Rhea: So what did they do to like one years old, for example?
Liz: Cause they're not capable because the first, the first stage when you're under your parents' guidance umbrella, it's all about functioning within that family unit and learning love and learning positive behaviors and growing in a very safe environment.
One would hope. That's the ideal. After that though, so begins that process of, Okay, well, I have to understand what it means to be me now, who I am. You know? I was never somebody who liked to be told what to do. I was only gonna do what I wanted to do, not what anybody else thought I ever had to do. What I didn't really realize until much later.
Part of that was really just my individuation process. That was part of my separation from my parents, and that separation does occur usually around 17. And for you it was when you went off to university.
Rhea: So if you can remember the moment where you stopped being the child of your parents and became an individual between like 17 to 19ish, it would have been a shift, at least whether it was an easier one or whether it was a more dramatic one.
Liz: What you'll know is when it's finished, you'll see your family differently. I remember at some point just realizing, just waking up one day and sort of thinking about my mom and thinking, well, she really pulled off something really difficult, raising three kids, mostly on her own.
The moment I could see her as an individual as opposed to just my mom was when I had achieved that level of separation because I could see everything more objectively. I could regard my family more objectively.
Rhea: They stop becoming just your relationship with them. They become their own people.
Liz: Exactly.
Rhea: I just remember I saw the world differently going from school, being a bit of a little princess. To standing on my own two feet in the middle of fucking nowhere. I didn't want to change. I didn't want my life to change.
Liz: There's no fighting in this process. It happens for everybody. If you start it coming from a dark place, it will plunge you into even greater darkness.
And that's what we see with some young people. And so it can be a very difficult experience for many young ones, especially those who are highly sensitive, which is why we just see, young people doing very silly things or going off the rails are really losing it is because that separation, has just become too hard to handle.
Rhea: And they're not ready to do that?
Liz: Correct.
Rhea: Everything is meant to be a certain way. Why would they make that so difficult?
Liz: I don't think it was ever meant to be that difficult. We've made it very difficult because it used to be young people had a lot of responsibilities, and we've taken a lot of freedoms away from them, haven't we?
We've helicoptered and lawn mowered our children to the point where they have never been able to stand on their own
Rhea: Because they didn't feel independent at all, when they are energetically independent, it's such a shock
Liz: And a lot of them, they don't trust themselves. Nobody's allowed to make a mistake
Rhea: One wrong tweet, social media post, your fault for everything going to shit.
Liz: We've begun to take life so seriously to such an extreme, we've now taught our children, You cannot be wrong. We've just spread our fear to another generation.
Rhea: So what do we do?
Liz: I don't know about your culture, but Filipinos love keeping the family together.
Rhea: Oh yeah.
Liz: At all costs. But it's to the detriment of the kid. And it used to be that the served the family unit, right? We needed these multiple generations for our survival. It really doesn't work anymore. It doesn't matter where you're from, what corner of the world you are from. That inhibits the person's growth.
As ironic as it sounds, that to be able to live in oneness, we all need to be able to individuate spiritually in order to come together in a collective consciousness,
Rhea: in order for us to live in harmony with each other. We have to truly know ourselves.
Liz: Yes.
Rhea: So the more in which we stifle our children's growth into individuals, the more we create differences between us.
Liz: Yes.
Rhea: Because only a true whole person can appreciate someone else as a true whole person as well.
Liz: Once you become a parent, you remain a parent. Even if you're not actively parenting, you're going to love your children as much as if not more than you did from day one.
Rhea: Okay.
Liz: And you don't stop loving them just because of the separation.
You respect their freedom and their choices. When our kids individuate, their experience is not our experience anymore. How they choose to live is not a reflection of us anymore. We need to go back to the beginning. And understand what it will take to prepare children for it.
Rhea: So basically understand what it's going to take to prepare children to be individuals
Liz: and we're coming into it. It will take generations of awareness to sort of come to that point within the family dynamic to really respect and honor everyone's individuality.
Rhea: and you know, a lot of our season one has been about finding out who you are and connecting to that person and loving that person and honoring that person inside.
This episode of season two is do that for yourself, but also allow those around you to do it too. Get them prepared specifically your children, to do it themselves. Because the more prepared you are for standing on your own two feet, the less uncomfortable it’s going to be when you have to do it and at some point everyone has to do it.
Liz: So we've been in this wave for a past couple of decades of trying to become more conscious parents, and that's when you started to see the helicopter parenting more and more. Or the lawn mower parenting.
Rhea: What’s lawn mower parenting?
Liz: Oh, a parent will mow down anything that's in their children's path so they face no obstacle.
The attitude behind it, it’s well-intentioned one, but it's a damaging one because first of all, we haven't honored the fact that our obstacles and struggles have shaped us and made us resilient people.
Rhea: We have this amazing opportunity to allow our kids to not have to do what we did—which was search for our truths—but to prepare them to find it earlier and support them when they do, but also give them the space to make mistakes.
Liz: What's important to really just understand is that as children, especially from the age of 13 onward, as they approach this process of individuation, it's our duty to prepare them for it. To give them some freedom and independence and allow them to work through the consequences of their actions
Rhea: so that it's not a shock when it happens.
Liz: Right.
Rhea: But they can work through the consequences of their actions with us supporting them.
Liz: Exactly.
Rhea: We're really focused, this episode, on how to parent in a way that leads to separation, but actually quite a few of us are still facing the fallout from that separation. We're all still traumatized.
When I came back from university, what I noticed, there was always this worry somewhere inside of me that I'd been forgotten, and that's something I still carry with me. And that's also part of the separation is that like, I am now my own person. Do I still matter to you because I'm not part of you?
I found what was really useful working through a lot of my issues with my role that I had created for myself within the family unit was putting up boundaries and almost complete the process of separation at 30. And I read something somewhere and it's the one thing that's kind of always stayed with me is that the only people who protest that your boundaries are the ones who took advantage of them not being there in the first place because life isn't as you know it anymore.
Liz: And I'm doing that as a parent with teenagers.
Rhea: If you are now an adult, and the separation into becoming an individual was very traumatic and you still haven't recovered from that without knowing it. So whether those experiences contributed to your fears.
Liz: Yeah.
Rhea: How do we help them? There will be some people listening who are having kids and wondering about that, but I think there'll be just as many people listening going, Oh, I remember that time when I started really rebelling and I am still living in the fallout.
Liz: Yes. Well, first of all, I would say forgive yourself
Rhea: And then?
Liz: And then as you said before, boundaries, not walls, but boundaries. Walls, I think they're there to sort of protect you, keep people out. Boundaries are really just to respect your space.
Rhea: And I guess the ultimate thing really is to say here, no matter what your deepest, darkest worries, fears, or little voice inside of you are saying, it is your destiny to be an individual. And whilst that means that you coexist with your family and you can enjoy them and they can bring you joy and all that other stuff, now as an adult, it is still your destiny to be an individual. And so having boundaries, listening to your own judgment, relying on yourself, telling your own stories, not just parroting the stories that you've been taught . . .
Liz: Coming into your own truth.
Rhea: [Yeah, I mean, it's your destiny, but you also owe it to yourself. To do that and it's okay and you have full permission to do that. Cause I think a lot of people still feel guilty for separating. I did. I do.
Liz: Until you become your own person, you cannot live your purpose
Rhea: and you cannot live alongside others cause you just become a shadow or a mirror of who they want you to be rather than who you are
Liz: when you're around them, then sort of becoming the person that they see you as opposed to owning yourself and feeling guilty for that separation. I felt that way for a long time.
Rhea: You know, I have been very lucky in a lot of ways to have experienced a lot of change in myself. Rewriting my stories, rethinking about how I feel about my body, how I feel about relationships, how I feel about work, how I feel about love.
How I feel about everything has changed in some ways, some by a huge margin. And so when I'm faced with comments or reactions from people who treat me like I was before with derision, I get utterly frustrated because that's really not who I am anymore in a very fundamental way. Yeah. I also sometimes have to just accept that they aren't going to see me as anyone other than who they want to see me as.
And a big part of that is because they would have to change themselves in order to see me differently.
Liz: And it's also recognizing when you're in situations and instead of reacting immediately because you think that that person isn't getting you. It's scary when somebody you've known for a long time has begun a shift.
Rhea: Funnily enough, this is the absolute right episode to start season two with. The whole first season was about finding yourself. Now, this episode, in part is ensuring that our kids just find themselves faster because it's already a painful process becoming a young adult.
Liz: Yeah.
Rhea: We can encourage them to be as individual as possible from a younger age so it's less painful. But the biggest part of this is almost that second piece, which is all right after this, in season one, you found yourself. Now that's not feel guilty about it. Once you've found who you are,
Liz: You're at the beginning.
Rhea: A lot of the stories we create, a lot of the patterns, we perpetuate all ones that we've picked up from our family.
And when I say family, I don't necessarily just mean blood relatives either. I mean, the people that we grew up with and became our extended family became our tribes. In finding ourselves, sometimes you find that those people no longer fit or you find that those views no longer fit. As you become more whole, you are effectively getting through a second separation in some ways.
So it really is the beginning. So the beginning is quite a few things in this instance. It's the beginning of your spiritual journey. The beginning of your adulthood.
Liz: Well, it's beginning of another phase of your spiritual journey.
Rhea: So it's kind of the beginning of discovering who you are, and of our generation, it's almost doing it again.
Does that make sense? Because sometimes without knowing who you're not or what beliefs you've been fed, that you internalize that you actually don't agree with, you can't find out who you are.
Liz: Right.
Rhea: So once you've gone through the process of reconnecting to yourself, it's the beginning in itself as well, of a new you.
And actually side note to that, every time you have one click, that's again a new beginning, right? And then on a kind of more personal level, I guess for us, this is the beginning of season two.
Liz: It is.
Rhea: There are going to be many beginnings. From the micro level of every day as a beginning to the more macro level of every life change is a totally new beginning. And just the moment before the new beginning is the moment of total potential. So embrace it. Now that you figured out who you are and you are starting the beginning of your next chapter, use that experience to help the teenagers starting their beginning, have a smooth as transition as well, and use the compassion of your experience to help them get through theirs.