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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Retire Your Family Karma, March 6, 2004
It has been said that every journey begins with a separation- that one must leave somewhere to get somewhere else. Drs. Bedi and Mathews, authors of the book "Retire Your Family Karma" provide the reader with a road map for the journey to psychic individuation, autonomy, and freedom by psychologically separating themselves from the generational legacies that interfere with self actualization. They use the Hindu concepts of karma, maya, and chakra as the metaphors for the understanding of the unfinished "psychic business" of previous generations (i.e. grandparents). Importantly, they note the impact of the unconscious on relationships, choices, and actions and their subsequent consequences in peoples lives. Clinical vignettes are especially helpful in illustrating and integrating the material they write about.
Throughout the book the authors provide outlines for journal exercises that can help the reader develop awareness, understanding, and responsibility for retiring the bad karma while honoring and empowering the good karma; a process that may enable them to develop a narrative of their lives that is not just fragments but a narrative that is coherent and leads to the cohesion of ones self.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Review from a Clinician, June 26, 2004
Doctor Bedi is an artist. By this I do not simply mean that he's an excellent writer. Just as the great artists of our time had made us look at life and see it in a way we never imagined, so does doctor Bedi cause us to look at our patients with a fresh eye and a new perspective. Psychotherapy is a little like teaching -- one must have endless amounts of energy, hope, and enthusiasm that one communicates to one's patients. Hence a fresh outlook is invaluable.
In this, his second little gem of a book, doctor Bedi teams with Dr Matthews to teach us how each of us has the opportunity and challenge of a working on our ancestor's unfinished tasks as well as our own. In other words they try to show us how we can resolve the problems with which our ancestors struggled, while actualizing our own innate potentials and gifts.
With lucid clinical examples they define such basic themes as "what is karma?" They explain how karma is basically a combination of action and consequence and how in reality karma may span several generations- which is what they call family karma.
Doctors Bedi and Matthews have outlined three sources of karma each of us must address to reach our true potential -- individual, family, and past- life karma. If we do this we can "retire" the karma that we have generated or inherited.
There is a chapter that illustrates family karma in ancient and modern legends. The authors quote examples that range from Greek mythology to the modern-day Kennedy Dynasty. They show how to explore family dynamics and relationships, and describe in detail how exactly we inherit the family karma. At the end of every chapter there are journal exercises that illuminate, with great clarity, the questions and tasks that we need to ask ourselves and our patients.
To make sense of our pathway to our souls and our life's journey we have to comprehend ultimately our own roots. They liken this to a river -- the only way to ultimately understand a river is to examine its source in the mountaintops and to follow it to the valleys and springs and marshes. This to me is the essence of the book. Our understanding of ourselves begins with the little rivulets that lie deep inside our psyche.They are often fed by waters that originated many years before we were born. We have to examine these streams as they gush forth into the open and become wider and ever more forceful cascades that ultimately shape the bedrock of our personalities and carve out the canyons and valleys of who we ultimately become. This book gives us the key.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Retire Your Family Karma, February 29, 2004
Retire Your Family Karma by Ashok Bedi, M.D. and Boris Matthews, Ph.D.Karma is a Hindu concept that emphasizes the consequences of the choices we make. This book applies the concept of karma to the family matrix. It shows how we are affected by the choices of previous generations of our ancestors and how the choices we make in our lifetime will affect several generations after. It emphasizes the concept of responsibility to ourselves and those who follow us. Ashok Bedi, M.D. and Boris Matthews, Ph.D. (both Jungian psychoanalysts) have put together an ambitious 171 page book that is a blending of Jungian psychology and Eastern spirituality . It is well written and contains a wealth of information. Their book illustrates many concepts, drawing from clinical cases, the bible, mythology and history. They cover such concepts as maya, karma, and dharma along with the Chakras of Kundalini Yoga and morphogenic fields. Numerous Jungian concepts are also delineated including archetypal patterns, complexes and dream analysis. Finally, there is a chapter on constructing family genograms. The authors clearly illustrate how we may subconsciously carry on patterns of family karma which ultimately get in the way of actualizing our full potential. It is emphasized that we must become conscious of these subconscious patterns to understand ourselves better, leading to more informed choices. Only then may we free ourselves and those who follow us from maladaptive generational patterns. This "retiring" of family karma leads us closer to our true calling (dharma). Several sections may require more than one reading for a deeper understanding, as the authors attempt to cover a lot of ground in this book. (One might refer to Dr. Bedi's book, Path to the Soul, for further elaboration on certain topics.) The reader may struggle with various concepts, as I did, such as past life karma and certain aspects of morphogenic fields. Ultimately though, the authors define a way of understanding individual and family dynamics in a broader psychological and spiritual context.
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