Feelings for the departed
QUESTION: Master I lost my biological father last year and he never acted like he loved me even once. Before he passed out to the spirit world I did all his toiletry work in good heart. He never said any word of encouragement to me and I want to know why? Why did he treat me bad? Even when he knows he is responsible for my chronic bronchitis and I just can’t forget about it? I am not happy with my late father. ~Lucky, Nigeria
ANSWER: You have just listed a number of the life lessons you chose for this incarnation. You wanted to deal with various types of love, betrayal, lack of self-worth, the need to be needed and recognized for who you are, being able to forgive yourself and others, and the fact that each soul makes its own choices.
Your father was a man who in this life feared everyone and everything. He put up a front of being in charge but aloof from those around him. This prevented others from engaging him in conversation that he felt would show his fear. He also feared your self-confidence and forthrightness. He stood behind the wall of fatherhood to assume a place of superiority and control.
Your father did not know how to carry on a conversation with others, particularly those he thought were better than he. He felt if he seemed to ignore people that they would just leave him alone. This was one of his first lives in human form and he was working on very simple lessons of fear, insecurity, and lack of love.
He did not know how to be a father so he stepped away the role and just watched from afar. His soul did not intentionally hurt you but did allow you to experience the lessons you had chosen. You felt his inability to love, and your choice was: to hate him for it, to know it was his lesson alone, or to explore what love was. In seeing love as the energy that exists for all in nonphysical form, and to which all return when they leave their body, you could love both yourself and his soul for choosing this uncomfortable Earth task.
You still have to work on understanding your lessons of forgiveness – to him for the human way he acted, and to yourself for holding on to this negativity for so long. Your sense of betrayal was just his not working on his life lessons, giving you a sense of being insignificant and unworthy. You know that is not true, and those feelings will recede as soon as you let go of the identification with them.