Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
meeting. I’m like one of those guys that never should have been a
dad or something like that.
WIZARD: You're a good dad, you're a wonderful dad.
TRIP: [Laughs] I think it is fear, Jeff.
WIZARD: You love your kids.
TRIP: Short word fear.
JEFF FOSTER: Yes, it's fear, we always try to hold up these
images of ourselves, the things I'm supposed to be, a good father,
and everything that means to you, and everything you've learned
about how a dad should be, how a father should be, and how I
should treat my kid, and blah, blah. In a way I always find that the
image that ends up coming between us, we're trying to live up to
an image and somehow we never really can, because what you are
is beyond all images. I'll tell a quick story, I think it's relevant. I
was speaking to a man recently and he was in a similar situation
actually, he would come home from work every day, and his kids
would be, it's slightly different, his kids would be misbehaving,
and he was trying to control them, and they just wouldn't listen to
him. And then he would sigh, but then he just ended up exploding
with anger. And he would scream at them and really say some
horrific things to his children, I hate you, I wish you were dead, I
mean things that afterwards he felt so awful about. He had tried
everything, he had been to every therapist, and every behavioral
program, and he had been to every spiritual teacher, and
everything had worked for a bit and nothing had really ended his
suffering. Nothing had really helped.
So he was on a retreat with me, and so we started to explore and
we started to look at what was really going on; what was really
happening when he was exploding with rage. What it came down
to really was he would come home from work and try to get his
kids to behave and they wouldn't. And what started to appear for
him in his present experience, this was when he was really honest,
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