Dancing in the Light by Shirley Maclaine Page A

acting as catalysts for one another’s learning process, it was my mother and father. They had a kind of George and Martha Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf relationship. They couldn’t live happily with each other, and they couldn’t live happily without each other. From my very first memories, I felt there was a profound experiential drama going on between the two of them. They could push each other’s buttons more effectively than anyone I had ever witnessed. But then they were my mother and father. So of course I would be affected as intensely as all children are by their parents. Surely the human drama with our parents (or the reverse, a total lack of it) is the most influential element in our lives? The drama within the family unit had to be the underpinning for the way we regarded life in the world from then on.
    Yet, if the purpose of life was to experience, the better to appreciate the growth and understanding of the soul, then everyone we met, to a greater or lesser extent, was a means to that end. To realize oneself fully meant the necessity of experiencing all the possibilities available to the human condition.
    The lessons in living which triggered our most profound reactions dealt with our feelings toward authority, helplessness, loss of control, material comfort,survival, manipulation of fear, restriction of freedom, attitudes toward possessions, attraction to the opposite sex, attraction to the same sex, closeness of living, passion, violence, and love.
    What better place to learn those lessons than within the family unit? The family constellation was a microcosm of the overall human family. Work out the problems within the family and you might very well have the capability, training, conditioning, and tolerance to work out problems on a global level.
    Families are all about karma.
    Therefore, one’s karmic requirements began at birth within the association of parents and siblings. Within the family environment was every human conflict that could ultimately lead to a willingness, or a nonwillingness, to wage war. Most attitudes of, and toward, violence and hostility are spawned in the family. Just as attitudes of love and compassion are. No one knows better than parents and children how to set off the trigger points in each other. Feelings of suspicion, fear, and doubt are a direct result of family attitudes. Those who “brought us up” to know ourselves chose to help us with life’s lessons. Nowhere could a teacher be more effective than in the body of a parent. If the parent and the child chose to make it so.
    The reverse was true also. Don’t we learn as much from our children as we ask them to learn from us?
    Ideally, parents and children could help each other with their self-realization. What we would do then, out in the world, would be an extension of that realization. In actuality, too often the pattern gets skewed or dulled, so that growth and the ability to cope with one’s self and the world don’t develop.
    Mother brought two wet martinis and a glass of milk from the kitchen.
    “I know he’ll go sneak some Scotch anyway.” She shrugged. “So he can put it in the milk.”
    I took a sip of the martini and watched my mom and dad as I would a good situation comedy. Moreand more I saw them from the karmic perspective, but when I was growing up, the intense emotional environment in the home had had several effects on me.
    First, I was the amused, sometimes astonished and confused, child witness to their dramatic and theatrical human interplay. Often I didn’t understand the intricacies of their scenes, or the meaning of the outcome, but I learned on a subtle level to read their emotional tones and their detailed shifts in mood and expression.
    Unconsciously, I was receiving an exquisite education in the nuances of manipulation.
    Therefore I believe it was inevitable that I would, later on in life, put this understanding and knowledge to work in an art called performing.
    Second, the spectrum