[A sannyasin says she is afraid of meeting her parents.]
I will take care -- just go and don t be afraid. It is always difficult to meet the parents, the most difficult thing, because between children and parents so many barriers exist; they have been created by the parents.
The children are always afraid. The fear is that if they are true then the parents are hurt. If they want to satisfy the parents they have to be untrue; then it hurts them. This is the problem. Parents don t allow authenticity they don't want you to be yourself. They have a certain idea of how you should be, what you should be. If you are that, they are happy; if you are not that, they are unhappy. And nobody can fulfill their idea, nobody at all, because you are not here in this world to fulfill anybody's idea. And your parents cannot conceive who you are going to be. The future is open -- utterly open and unpredictable -- but each parent tries to control the future and each parent feels frustrated.
It is very difficult to find a parent who is satisfied. Not even the father of Buddha was satisfied. Now, where can you get a better son? But his ideas were not fulfilled. He wanted him to become a great king -- naturally. He was a king and he wanted his son to become even greater. For centuries they had been kings -- they had a long tradition of royalty -- and they wanted the son to have more money, more power, a greater empire. And the son was really frustrating: he became a beggar! Just think of the man in his old age... and the only son simply escaped! The father was really hurt, he was really angry.
Nobody can fulfill the idea of the parents, and if you try to you will remain miserable your whole life because you will be carrying somebody else's idea in your head, which is not you. You will be false. So if you carry the idea, you are false, you are untrue to yourself, and because you are false and you are miserable and you cannot bloom, you cannot forgive your parents either. It is because of them that this whole pseudo personality has happened. Or, if you want to be yourself and you start moving on your own way then the fear arises, and that is the fear.
Now you are a sannyasin -- you are growing in your own way.... It is very wild for your parents. They could never have dreamed of you in orange! Even in their wildest dreams they could not have thought of their daughter becoming a sannyasin, being hypnotized by some unknown man in India! It is natural, but don't be worried.
Just go, be loving, be respectful. Just be with them, let them feel what has happened to you. The first few days will be a little embarrassing for you and embarrassing for them too, but after a few days, after the initial impact, once it settles, they will see, because they love you! Even if their ideas are wrong, their love is true. Even if their concepts of how you should be are not according to your nature, still their motive is just love and nothing else. They want you to be happy, they want you to grow and have a beautiful life. So when they see that you are really having a beautiful life -- you have become better than you were ever before -- the embarrassment will disappear. And soon you will find yourselves bridged more closely than ever before.
So just go. Don't argue -- let them feel you. Arguments create barriers, arguments make people blind. Don't argue. If they say something against me, don't become irritated. They don't know anything about me. Just let them feel you. Meditate, dance, be loving, and just be there silently in the house, as if you are almost absent. When they feel this new quality -- that you are present yet absent, that you are moving as if you are not, that you are so full of love, that you are not getting angry easily, that you are not argumentative, that you are not nasty to them -- immediately the change will happen. And they will start coming closer to you. And if they can come closer to you, they will be able to come closer to me; that's the only way. Then introduce them too. Tell them about meditation and what has happened to you, but not from the beginning.
First let the initial embarrassment disappear.
When you start feeling a communion arising, then talk about me -- talk about what has happened here, what you have been doing here. And this is my experience: almost without exception my sannyasins have been able to bridge themselves with their parents very easily.
-Osho, “God's Got a Thing About you, #14”