There are teachings that only land when life ripens enough to receive them.
In my twenties, living in the ashram, motherhood was not part of my horizon. I did not imagine children in the biological sense. If anything, I imagined what I then called spiritual children, students, practitioners, souls met along the path. My devotion was oriented upward and inward, not toward family, not toward lineage, not toward continuity through blood.
One of the teachings we received then felt distant, almost abstract.
Once a man and a woman become parents, the teaching said, their evolution is no longer their own. From that moment on, they evolve through their children.
I remember understanding it intellectually, recognizing the service, the responsibility, the ethical weight of raising another human being. I understood devotion, sacrifice, moral integrity. But something in me resisted the premise. If evolution is individual, inward, self-realized, how could it depend on another? How could my path be shaped by a role?
I carried that question quietly for years. Life, of course, has its own pedagogy.
Today, as the mother of a fourteen-year-old, that teaching no longer lives in my mind. It lives in my body, in my breath, in the way my nervous system responds to a look, a silence, a tone of voice across the room. Parenthood did not dilute my spiritual path. It revealed it.
Because children are not mirrors in a metaphorical sense. They are mirrors in the most visceral way possible. They perceive us before language, before explanation, before justification. They feel coherence and incoherence instantly. They know when we are aligned, and when we are not, long before we are willing to admit it ourselves.
This bond does not require interpretation. A glance is enough. A pause is enough. A shift in the air is enough.
The medicine is immediate.
Being Micael’s mother has been a continuous initiation. Not because I am shaping him, though guidance, values, and presence matter, but because his being reflects me back to myself in ways no spiritual practice ever could. Through him, I have been asked to soften my sharpness, to listen where I would normally assert, to notice how my words land rather than how true they feel when spoken.
There are moments when he gently corrects me, not with rebellion, but with clarity. Moments when he shows me how intensity can wound, how truth can cut if not tempered by care. He has made me aware of how my own way of seeing and speaking, so precise, so piercing, so convinced of its necessity, can overwhelm the field rather than serve it. A true harmony between my Sagittarius sun and my mercury and Uranus in Scorpio.
And I listen. Because when the mirror is this clean, resistance dissolves.
What humbles me most is recognizing the virtues that live in him independent of my parenting. His kindness. His sense of justice. His devotion to what feels right. His quiet discipline. His generosity of spirit. These are not achievements I can claim. They are qualities I am asked to protect, not possess.
To support without invading. To guide without imprinting. To love without shaping him into an extension of myself.
This, too, is evolution. Slowly, I understand what the master meant. Unconditional love is not sentimental. It is revelatory.
To love a child this way dissolves the illusion of separation. It teaches, not philosophically, but somatically, that we are all held within the same lineage of origin. That beneath our differences, defenses, and projections, we are all children of the same source, shaped by different conditions, longing for the same safety and recognition.
When I see the world through the eyes I use to look at my son, something in me relaxes. Judgment softens. Patience expands. The impulse to dominate or convince gives way to the desire to understand. If I were to meet every being as I meet him, the world would feel radically different.
Perhaps this is the deepest initiation of parenthood | not raising a child to face the world, but allowing a child to re-educate us on how to meet it.
This is not about perfection. It is about coherence. About living what we speak. About becoming trustworthy vessels of the values we claim to hold.
And maybe, quietly, humbly, this is how evolution truly unfolds.
Not upward alone. But outward. Through relationship. Through witness. Through love that refuses to remain abstract.
Beyond Parenthood…
This teaching, I now know, was never meant only for mothers and fathers.
Parenthood is simply the most undeniable initiation because it removes all abstraction. But the mirror it offers is not exclusive to biology. At its core, this is a teaching about relational evolution, about what happens when life asks us to become responsible for a becoming that is not yet fully formed.
We can all meet ourselves in this way.
There comes a moment in every life when we are asked to turn toward ourselves not as a project to fix, but as a being to accompany. To learn how to mother ourselves without indulgence, and father ourselves without rigidity. To offer containment, patience, guidance, and care to the parts of us that are still learning how to walk in the world.
When we begin to relate to ourselves like this, something profound shifts. We stop demanding premature mastery. We stop shaming our immaturity. We stop abandoning ourselves in moments of confusion.
Instead, we listen. We attune. We correct without violence. We guide without domination.
And in that relational field, a new version of the self can be born. This is why the teaching applies to everyone. Because whether or not we raise children, we are always in relationship with our own becoming. And evolution, true evolution, requires the same qualities that conscious parenting asks of us | coherence, presence, accountability, tenderness, and devotion to what is still unfolding.
Perhaps this is what the master was pointing toward all along.
That to evolve is not to ascend alone, but to learn how to love what is emerging, within us, and around us, until it can stand in its own integrity.
And when we learn to do that, life itself becomes the lineage we serve.
