"My current best pitch for parent relationship work is: come for the suck reduction, stay for the most powerful spiritual practice and contact with the divinity I've come across thus far. My work with my mom has simply been by far the clearest and most powerful path to connecting with sacredness, divinity, and grace. It's filled a hole in my heart.Easiest thing to point at is a 95% reduction in harsh inner critic and just completely believing that I am not. My parents have been the most obvious vessel of divine love and grace in my life. And I doubt I'm unique in this experience.What feels powerful about this is that at no point have I needed to put faith in anything. I trusted my trust and distrust. What do I trust about my mom's dad? How much do I actually believe she loves me? How much did her parents love her?"These powerful tweets from Johnson captured my attention over the past few years, along with his heartwarming shares about conversations with his mother. He touches upon something deeply powerful here - the relationship with parents as both a source of potential pain and an opportunity for profound spiritual growth.Even for those with decent relationships, vulnerability with parents isn't easy. And as Ram Das famously said, "If you think you are enlightened, go and spend a week with your family." Parent relationship deepening remains vastly underrated and under-discussed as a spiritual practice.Some people admirably dedicate their entire lives to certain spiritual practices, bringing immense rigor and determination to their development. What if we could bring that same rigor, drive, and sense of the sacred to deepening our relationships with our parents? Johnson's journey exemplifies this possibility, which inspired this conversation.

May all beings be immersed in boundless love.

In our personal journeys, we have experienced some beautiful synergies between meditation and parts-work. And the goal of this conversation was to explore these synergies. We started with discussing the limitations and potential pitfalls of parts work. We then delved deeper into the relationship between parts work and meditation, exploring how the wisdom of traditional mediation teachings can help us overcome the limitations of parts work. And then we also go into how parts work can greatly augment spiritual and meditation practices.

This is part two of our conversation about parts work, following up on the part one — Intro to Parts Work

Timestamps:

We (Theo and Pranab) recorded a conversation talking about our "parts work" journeys — how we see parts work, what makes it transformative, how we got started, what helped us, some insights, practical tips, and more.

Mykola Bilokonsky runs the Public Neurodiversity Support Center, with an aim to develop it as the single best resource on the internet by and for neurodivergent people.

Here, Myk beautifully and intensely talks about his life story as an autistic individual and then outlines his theory of Autistic Identity Trauma using The Matrix film series as a map.

This was less of a conversation and more of a performance art. I felt honored to hold space for Myk's expression.

"Core Transformation is about altering a deceptively simple pattern with large ramifications.  The pattern is that when you desire something, you make a contract with yourself to suffer until you get the thing."  — from Romeo's blog post on Core Transformation (http://neuroticgradientdescent.blogspot.com/2019/07/core-transformation.html) 

If you're curious about Core Transformation and want to get a taste of it, check out my website (untanglingself.com) and reach out to me on Twitter (twitter.com/nowtheo)