Who Do We Belong To?

We belong to ourselves.  We must remember if we are to be real and true, we belong to ourselves, to nature and to truth—not the limits of our upbringing.

Despite the common thinking of the world that argues we belong to our parents, our families, our culture and its values and traditions, this is not true.  We do not belong to limited people or systems that would confine our growth and damage our spirit.  We belong to ourselves and to universal principle and must leave the limits of our upbringing to live true.

But there is a struggle.

There is great pressure from our families and the conventional world to stay behind and honor mother and father and their world no matter how limited, dysfunctional or cruel and it takes an unusually gifted soul to leave it.  We were born into this world and our departure has a heartbreaking aspect to it since it is hard to see the failures of our first loves, mother and father and face the limits of our culture of origin.

Those who did not have the courage to leave will always resent those who do.  In fact those who stay behind will work hard to shame, guilt, withhold love and even shun those who escape the snares of a closed, cultist family system.  This is a sad and cruel manipulation.  Those who stay behind see those who leave as a threatening reminder of what they failed to do—become themselves, true people.  The free spirit of those who left reveals the closed prison of those who took the easier path of conformity and stayed behind.

But the troubling manipulations of the family to return to their world do not work.  Those who have tasted freedom and belong to life and its mystery do not return to the prison of safety and convention.  Rather these free spirits soar to higher realms of consciousness and wonder, unknown to the average.