Encourage understanding and kindness
I want you to do a simple exercise: close your eyes and think about a problem that affects you and that few people know about. Consider the situation carefully and feel the emotions associated with it. Perhaps you feel sadness, anger or anxiety? Let’s go a step further: think of someone close to you who experiences something similar. It can be a parent, sibling, relative, or close friend. Try to get an idea of their pain and suffering. As you do this, go into your heart and feel compassion for them. Now open your eyes and sit with the feelings you experienced. How do you feel? Did you experience a sense of oneness with the other person? A shared humility for life? The objective of this exercise is to understand that your suffering is the same that many other people endure.
We all face battles that few people know little or nothing about. We all carry a heavy load in one way or another. Some carry it in the form of psychological pain while others carry emotional and physical pain. Some wounds are visible, while others are less noticeable. However, this does not detract from the load they bear on a daily basis. Therefore, we should be more compassionate towards others instead of giving people a piece of our mind. Life is not always easy and there are times when we do not give our best. Someone can kindle our pain and we admonish him to remind him of our pain. But let me tell you: that person also carries pain of another kind. Therefore, retaliating when you are in pain does little to heal others and the world in general.
This makes sense? I hope it’s clear that people rarely maliciously try to hurt us. There is often a deep hurt that they are responding to, so we need to be compassionate towards them before responding in anger or haste. I am not suggesting that you become a doormat for others to walk over. But fighting fire with fire does little to foster understanding and kindness. It seems that people are kinder to their pets than to themselves. I have trained hundreds of people over the years with internal conflicts who have high expectations of themselves. When they fall short, they punish themselves because they didn’t live up to the image of who they should be. When asked if they treat their pets the same way, they hate to think about it. However, they treat themselves as second-class citizens. Can you see the madness in this way of thinking?
We are all fragile in those tender places
If we’re not kind to ourselves because of a volatile inner critic, it’s likely to show up in our interactions with others. But going to war with ourselves does little to heal our emotional wounds and we become that person who finds fault with others. Do you know these kind of people I mean? It seems that nothing is good enough for them and they believe that the world is a dangerous and unpredictable place. They like to tune in to the news and remind you how tough the world is. But this is just a perception based on your subjective reality. Because for every bad news there are people who live passionate lives. There are people who wake up grateful to be alive and surrounded by loved ones. There are people in third world countries who are happy to earn a living and serve their family and community.
The opposite of everything we think is wrong with the world exists out there. We just haven’t tuned our consciousness to it. If you were to travel the world for twelve months in search of positive experiences, it would change your life. What we pay our attention to becomes our perception and model of reality. The reason we experience conflict with others is because they have a different model of reality than we do. Therefore, we try to convince them that our model is superior to theirs, and conflict arises. What would happen if we agreed that multiple realities coexist, depending on our level of consciousness? That is to say: the more you grow and develop, the greater your perception becomes. This is why people with enhanced self-esteem rarely find fault with others because they know that we are all fragile in those tender places. Highlighting another person’s weaknesses does little to strengthen our own character.
Are you starting to get the feeling that your perception creates the canvas of your life and your interaction with others? Can you see that being in conflict with yourself means finding something to disagree with in someone else? Can you also see that healing and transforming your wounds is the foundation for a purposeful life? Knowing that everyone is carrying a heavy load reminds us to attend to our own needs first before punishing them. With that in mind, I would like you to think about how you can be more compassionate in your interactions with those who offend you. It is not necessary to agree with everyone and those who are disagreeable can teach us something about ourselves. It doesn’t mean we have to go to war with them. We can still be civil and disagree about our perspective because we recognize our shared humanity. When we learn to heal and transform our pain, we see each interaction as a sacred space of healing and self-transformation.