Dear Ones:
I received helpful information from a variety of sources. This piece, which has become quite timely for me, arrived in an email from Heart Advice, Weekly Quotes from Pema Chodron. I had barely had time to read and digest it when I had occasion to put the sound Heart Advice to good use. Here’s what I had read.
WE’RE IN THE SAME PLACE
I try to practice what I preach; I’m not always that good at it, but I really do try. The other night, I was getting hard-hearted, closed-minded, and fundamentalist about somebody else, and I remembered this expression that you can never hate somebody if you stand in their shoes. I was angry at him because he was holding such a rigid view. In that instant I was able to put myself in his shoes and I realized, “I’m just as riled up, and self-righteous and closed-minded about this as he is. We’re in exactly the same place!” And I saw that the more I held on to my view, the more polarized we would become, and the more we’d be just mirror images of one another—two people with closed minds and hard hearts who both think they’re right, screaming at each other. It changed for me when I saw it from his side, and I was able to see my own aggression and ridiculousness.
Shortly after reading this a situation presented itself where someone gave me the opportunity to practice what I had just read.
Is it easy? No. When one is faced with another’s anger, it is so easy to fall into the retaliatory stance. But I have learned that anger turns inward and makes me sick so I practice not absorbing anger from any source. I use a lovely prayer given to me in a workshop by Joe Vitale in Maui, HI, a few years ago. It is available, with full explanation, in his book, Zero Limits. It is part of a Hawaiian method of healing. It goes like this: I am sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you. It works across time and space. It costs nothing but a few seconds of my time. I can repeat it as often as I want to or need to. It changes my breathing. It changes my feelings. And, I have learned through experience that it causes changes in other people.
I struggle with some concepts on an almost daily basis.
-Life is not a contest. I refuse to enter,continually, into others’ arenas just because others try to make life into a contest. I have all I can handle, pitting myself against myself.
-The only person I can change is myself. That is my work.
And I lose patience and compassion and perspective when someone tries to pull me into their stuff or their anger or their broken dreams or their disappointments or (and this is a big one) their unmet needs.
And that’s where I was when these words came to me. And I needed to read them and heed them. If I was to be compassionate and caring I needed to remember to try and feel what it might feel like if I were walking in another’s shoes. Again, my thoughts changed, my breathing changed, I changed. It certainly rang true that a walk in another’s mocassins surely changes how we view that person.
The situation has not changed. I have. And that is all I can truly expect.
Baruch Hashem. Blessings be to Hashem.
And so it is. And so it is.
With many blessings and very great love for all of us,
Rebba Raine
