When one stops taking what other people do or say personally, one is no longer in conflict with them - Suma Varughese
I have come to learn a great truth about people and their reaction towards me, which is ‘It’s not about me.’ You need to learn to stop taking things to heart. Everyone just wants to get by, and in a dog-eat-dog environment like ours, everyone wants to survive. When all is said and done, it is not personal; it rarely is. Understanding this will free you from the shackles of un-forgiveness and give a new lease of life to your spirit.
People do what they do because that is what their mind, ego selves or situations cause them to do. It has very little to do with us. Unfortunately, we take it all personally, and feel angry, jealous, hurt or sad. And when they do things that benefit us, or give a boost to our ego selves by complimenting us or showing their affection for us, we feel happy, self-congratulatory or validated. But that too has nothing to do with us. Those who like us do so because they are capable of liking us; most of us are not universally popular, so we cannot attribute it to ourselves alone. Similarly, their paying a compliment has at least as much to do with their generosity of spirit, as it has to do with our own magnificence. There really is no connection between what others think, do or say, and how we react to it. What they do is their stuff, and how we feel about it is our stuff. And these two domains are never supposed to meet.
We have all been hurt in some way or another. Whether through personal mistakes or someone else’s actions, we all know what it feels like. Living a lifetime without any experience of pain is just unimaginable. The thing is, we know how it feels to fall in love, so we take the risks, time and time again, because we know it is the most incredible experience in the world. Some of us take a few years out while we heal; others put themselves in vulnerable positions almost instantly. When you witness and experience true love and allow yourself to become vulnerable to another human being, the dirty footprints from your past start to fade away.
What a profound freedom we would experience if we could detach from the stuff of others. With what judicious discrimination we would act if we did not have to ward off huge waves of disruptive emotion. Best of all, with no inner stuff to distract us, how much more open we would be to the other person, how much more available would we be to the issues and problems that are driving their behaviour, how much more accepting and loving we would be of them. With inner stuff gone, all conflict would disappear, for we and the other will be on the same side, instead of on opposing ones.
No comments:
Post a Comment