Three Thoughts:
When you’re feeling down and anger starts to take over your mind and actions, it makes it much easier for others to react to you with anger. Similarly, if you are deep in your vulnerability and expressing it honestly, others will have an opening to respond with compassion and understanding.Emotions usually attract similar emotions, what you give to others in interpersonal situations is normally what you will get back. The emotion that you are expressing will often activate that same emotion in another person. When people are angry, they are often coming from a place of deep fear and hurt, something is triggering their need for survival and activating their human habit of anger as a form of protection. The higher work of someone who has deepened their healing and cultivated their emotional maturity is not getting pulled into unnecessary arguments when someone else is trying to spread their tension. With mental patience and agility, you can override your survival instinct of reacting to their tension with your own tension. When you use your self-awareness to override your survival instinct, you are saying no to human habit and yes to your human nature. Human habit is the fear, hatred, selfishness, craving-dominated thinking and mental patterns that function as a defense mechanism that solidifies during hard times and spreads into everyday life. From a space of human nature, it is easier to be gentle, to see more perspectives, to express love, to be more creative, and to have compassion and understanding while still being able to defend yourself if necessary. Acting from a place of human nature does not make you passive, it just makes you skillful in your approach to dealing with difficult situations. The goal is to move from human habit to human nature.
How you deal with your down moments is a clear reflection of how much you have grown. The down moments don’t stop coming but your reaction to them can decrease substantially when you take your healing seriously. A lot of your old conditioning can make hard moments worse, but when you relieve yourself of the past through an intentional process of letting go, your mind will have more space to feel the heavy emotions without fueling them or giving them control. Life’s challenges will continue, removing all obstacles is not a possibility, total control of your external environment is a craving that cannot be fulfilled. What you can do is realize how much your perception influences how you feel and how you react to what you feel. If you want to live a life of peace, then it is critical to develop mental clarity, agility and patience. Mental clarity that will help you see things more objectively so that you aren’t constantly projecting onto what you encounter. Mental agility so you can understand more perspectives than your own and to have the flexibility to witness your mind so you more easily shift into actions that honor your present more than your past. Mental patience so you can intentionally slow things down so you aren’t always falling into survival reactions that are being pushed by past trauma or old pain. Healing is an internal revolution where you no longer allow your mind to be governed by the past. Healing is not just a static process of letting go, but one of repetition where you build the mental qualities that you need to support your happiness.
A key aspect of emotional maturity is making healthy sacrifices that support your long-term wellbeing more than your short-term pleasure. For example, you give time to your healing even when it is hard. You make space for rejuvenating connections even when your craving wants to pull you back into old connections that you know are unhealthy for you. You embrace the repetition of good habits even when it feels like they are building up slowly. You do the courageous work of keeping your heart open because you know that’s the only way to have deep and meaningful interactions. You try to take in the present moment with a fresh perspective that isn’t being constantly evaluated by what happened to you in the past. More than anything, you give yourself what you need instead of what you crave. Treating your energy like a precious resource has a deep effect on your life. Saying no becomes more common so you can focus your time and give it to your highest goals. You miss out on some events because you don’t need as much external stimulation to make you feel fulfilled; your fulfillment is now more derived from your self-care and the wholeness that is uncovered from your healing work. You do remain open to healthy connections, but you are now intentional about who you let into your inner circle. You give more time to your rest so that you can prosper while you are in the midst of your journey.Activate Your Human Nature