Episode 15: You and Me

How relationships can serve us... no matter what happens

In the last episode, I spoke about my time with my mother and how my interpretation of her actions towards me kept me stuck in an endless cycle of resistance and frustration. In the course of many, many hours of reflection on that relationship, I’ve come to understand the vicious circle, wherein our beliefs determine our experiences, and our experiences confirm and validate our beliefs.

I realize now that the story I told all those years about my relationship with my mother not only served to justify my actions and feelings but also served to perpetuate the “difficulty” of the relationship, the power struggle I couldn’t win and didn’t even manage to identify as such.

As time went by, after my mother passed, I sought a “better” answer, a more satisfying and empowering way to think about our relationship. I was reminded of yet another idea I took from Juan Matus: the idea of the “petty tyrant.” According to Castaneda, Matus said that the world itself is the Tyrant, because its reflection back to us of the description into which we live our lives is inexorable and unyielding. From that point of view, there seems to be no getting around the fact that whatever story we tell gets reflected back to us, and the conditions of our lives will not change until we tell a different story.