Love and Responsibiity
Letting go of fear, letting go of something! Letting go of everything! Most of what we call love is emotional attachment, rather than the experience of true love, which is true responsibility, experiencing true responsibility. So most of our attachment to our families is an emotional thing, and we call that love.
When you love, you let people be exactly as they are, whether they're your family or not. Please notice that with a family, especially your own children, you're trying to help them, and you're trying to get them to be a certain way. At least you want them to be successful, or you want them to be this or that. So it's harder to let them be, as they are, than it is a person that you don't know. Because your emotional attachment is greater, and there you have all kinds of preferences. You prefer that they be successful rather than be bums. You don't want your children to be bums, you see, regardless of whether that is the healthiest way for that person to be! That's related to emotional attachment. By the same token, they don't want you to be different than you were. They expect you to be the old "Mom" that you always were before, because of the emotional attachment, regardless of how much you've changed.
We need the awareness of what we call love, which is, like Ida was saying, that we define, and what true love really is. And that experience of love is truly an experience of being, and experience of total responsibility. Not the kind of responsibility we call being at fault, you know, not that kind of thing. The experience of responsibility that is being presented here is the experience of awareness of oneness, awareness that, at the great microcosmic level, we are not separate. So if, in fact, we experience this unity, this non-separateness, you cannot help being responsible.
The greatest responsibility, and the greatest action that we can have is to experience that person without judging and evaluating. That's the greatest responsibility, and to have them in meditation, without that judgment. Some people will call it praying for the person. I don't call it that, I feel that one can experience that person just "being " there. The action that comes out of that experience of non-judgment is neutral, and the person begins to experience, then, something different. They begin to experience neutrality, maybe, for the first time in their life.
It takes a little time for some people. You can't expect them to just change, but the more people that are neutral around them, pointing out the destruction, but with neutrality (and this is hard) and also not allowing the person to step on you, or hurt you, they are more able to experience the consequence, with love. This is not easy for the majority of people! The problem is that most of us have judgments and evaluations, because we are sometimes destructive with everything, including ourselves. When you find yourself in that experience of "being", in that neutrality, your actions begin to change for that person.