My mom used to feel like my greatest adversary.

I was so resistant to her way — to who I believed she was — that I would literally get thicker in her presence; my body's sophisticated defense system building up physical walls to her presence.

Several years ago, one of my many teachers guiding me home — observing me in the throes of my frustration one afternoon that I felt unloved, unchosen, unseen, unheard, undesired, and no longer wanting to feel that way (so SICK of feeling that way, actually, literally) — suggested I start considering her a benevolent adversary instead.

The notion of a benevolent adversary was totally new to me at the time. I remember looking up the meaning of each of the individual words in the dictionary multiple times as a means to try to understand what she was pointing to, because considering such a thing felt so totally foreign to me.

Can adversaries be benevolent? Is that a thing?

At the time my relationship to my own faith was fleeting at best. I intellectually felt surrendered to god when things went my way, but when they didn't...well, I didn't. At all.

But I was also sick of thinking about my relationship to my mother and instinctively getting defensive. Even when she was nowhere in sight.

And so I decided I better give this mindset shift a shot.

That was seven years ago.

I called her up one evening and declared to her that I was committed to repairing our relationship. I had no idea what I was talking about or what that was going to look like and I was so uncomfortable saying it that I pretty much hung up the phone as soon as the words left my mouth.

Both of us were pretty dumbfounded.

And then I got to work. And by work, I mean, continuously, repeatedly, exhaustingly at first, turning toward love instead of hatred.

In action.
In behavior.
In thought.
In energy.

I didn't expect my mom to change a thing. I was in it for my own liberation, not hers (I still had some spite left in me!). If she decided to come along for the ride, cool, but that was not my motivation for doing this.

My motivation was to no longer be crippled by my own resentment. I wanted to be unbound in all of my relationships and I knew that if I was going to be successful I needed to actively pursue repairing my relationship to the people I felt the most impacted by, first.

Keyword: "my" as in, how I perceived our relationship, and them, and interpreted that perception in my own body.

It went slowly at first. We were both awkward in our interactions. I messed up a lot, but I stuck around for the do-over. Each time I instinctively started to hold back I talked myself into relaxing, opening, sharing things with her I had never felt safe to share before.

We didn't process our past at all. That was not a part of this particular journey. I knew that wasn't required.

As the saying goes: you can't unring that bell. I knew history wasn't going to change by drilling it into the ground.

One of the super powers I had in my back pocket as I embarked on this journey was a healthy dose of perspective to consider: WHAT IF my mom had the same feelings I did? Maybe she also felt that I was her adversary; that she was unloved, unseen, unheard, unchosen by me.

Did you know most stalemate conflicts are rooted in two people carrying polarizing expressions of the same core belief system? (go ahead and apply that to every divisive thing you see on the internet and let me know what you see).

Understanding that I couldn't go backwards and that I was in this for the long haul, I considered what I needed on the presumption that she needed the same thing.

(I needed compassion. I needed to feel heard. I needed honest, loving, feedback. I needed to know that conflict would not result in disconnection. I needed to be in consent to my experiences. I needed healthy boundaries.)

And then I did that. With her.

A couple years later we found ourselves on a phone call for three hours one day (unheard of in our earlier years as mom and daughter) just chatting about life and suddenly we were both crying. I felt so loved by her. She felt my love, too. It was so viscerally present in our conversation. And she told me something I will never, ever forget: "I just didn't know how to reach you, Antesa."

Protecting myself from her because I believed she was my adversary made it impossible for her to prove me wrong. And of course that was the idea! But it hadn't occurred to me that she WANTED to reach me, either! Oof, that was humbling!

A couple years after that — the days of our awkward and trying conversations long history — I had this thought that maybe my mom had been enlightened all along and I'm the one who had been carrying around all those bricks all on my own.

I don't actually need to know the answer to that (she'd probably tell you that's true!), but that I considered it at all is a testament to how free I got.

What's important now is that I love my mom and I know my mom loves me. That's actually all that matters.

Over the years, she has become one of my greatest spiritual confidantes. (If you had told me when I was 30 that that would be the case I would not have believed you! But here we are.)

We talk casually about god and the universe and frequencies and karma and intuition and hearing with your heart and my goodness what a blessing she is to my life.

Talk about full circle. Benevolent indeed.

I can't imagine where I would be today had I not first turned to love with her all those years ago.

The hilariously irony is that at the time I thought that was the only time I was going to need to do that. Like, okay, I'll walk through this ONE portal god (SHEESH) and then experience utter bliss forever and ever amen.

Nope. Not how it works.

The invitation to turn to love lives in each moment as it's unfolding right before you.

But that unending, bending, meandering, liberating, razor sharp, enlightening path almost always begins with investigating your view of and opening your heart to the people you abhor.