How our culture impacts our beliefs (video)

Hi, it’s Shelly Lefkoe, co-founder of the Lefkoe Institute. I’ve always been fascinated with culture, and when I started helping people eliminate beliefs 35 years ago, I realized how much our culture impacts our beliefs. Recently, I was traveling to Vietnam to lead a parenting workshop, and it was a business trip, so I was in business class. In the seat to my right was a very old woman, and everybody on the plane was Vietnamese except me. And I watched the stewardess bring her food and she bent down and she whispered something to her, and then she began to feed her the soup.

On American Airlines, we are very lucky if the flight attendants are even kind to us, no less feeding us, but what I realized in that moment was how much that culture reveres the elderly and it really touched my heart. And when I got to Vietnam and I was leading the workshop, I spoke to a few people and one of the men in the workshop said to me, “I’ve always wanted to travel, but my parents are getting older and I know that I’m not going to be able to leave because I want to be here to take care of them.” And I said, “How old are your parents?” And he said, “60.”

Now I’m a lot older than that, and I live alone. I totally take care of myself. I travel, I play pickle ball. I have a very full life. And it made me pause to think about what is healthy about that culture and what is not. So I would never want my children to give up their lives to take care of me. That would be horrible for me, but I looked at how I treated my own mother who passed eight years ago, and she was an angel. My mother was pure love and I wasn’t always loving to her. And it’s one of those things where I wish I could have a do over.

So given the fact that the holidays are coming and some of us are going to be with our family, and some of us find our parents hard to be with, and for some of us, our parents are hard to be with. And what I’m going to implore you to do is to look inside and see how can I be kinder to my elders? Because they may not be here forever. And when they do leave, it would be so wonderful to be able to know that we did our best, we were loving no matter what. And I think the best way to do that is no matter what they say or do, dissolve the meaning. Remember, what they say or do has no inherent meaning, and if you can hold onto that and keep practicing that, you can be loving and treat them in a way that actually might make their being here a little easier. That’s it for today, and I’ll be back again soon with more thoughts. Have a beautiful day.