It’s easy to focus only on the other, while we relate to someone hurting or hurting us.  But underlying opportunities are constantly presented by the circumstances we find ourselves in.  When we stop to listen to what we are saying, and observe what we are doing to someone we love or anyone at that, we are truly either fulfilling our needs through them, or are nurturing them in us.  Perhaps if we see each other as mirrors of something familiar, an unseen truth shared that is soulfully and deeply related on both sides, we will choose to be kinder.  We will choose our words and actions more carefully, in our responses and our reactions.

“For it is in giving that we receive.” ~St. Francis of Assisi

And then, there are the roles we play–mother, father, boss, and so on.  These are roles we’ve also come to understand in the way we have been brought up to accept them as.  Conditioning, education, events exemplified in our lives dictate how we must play those roles, or otherwise, we would have to deny the justice or injustices in the life we’ve lead, which the ego cannot handle.  Maybe our fathers and mothers treated us in some way, where the child in us has a way of justifying itself in the way we treat the next generation.  Or we suddenly see and feel the power we hold as a boss or also understand the exercise of presiding over a successful business using certain tones by which we implement rules.

In any story, someone is always needing something.  For the world is imperfect.  We are a bi-product of the sum of our experiences in a world of human beings.  Human beings, born in a certain environment of conditioning that can create distance in our relationships as a community and as a world.  Needing to circumvent, heal, fulfill, patch a void, or even needing to give, is the result of the sum by which we think, feel and are conditioned to believe.  It’s how we see what’s right. It is how we see us.

Understanding this should make us stop before we hastily respond–before we react and judge others including ourselves.  Understanding that what is happening may not be about us in its entirety, but a circumstance of opportunity for both, even in our confusion, that it is a way to seek the truth in it or to let go and move on.  But moving with kindness and respect always paves a path for us to be, just the way we are.  And when we do, we uphold our values and basically decide that we like who we are.

Someone recently told me, how she saw herself as a bad person, simply for not giving more to the people around her.  Where that in itself was of humble virtue, worthy of a hug like a child unable to take on others before herself, she deemed herself a failure, further taking away from an already lack of self esteem in the expectations of her she had become accustomed to.   Where the truth is, her worthiness did not depend on how much she is able to give–she was worthy as with or without, giving at her own pace.

In romantic relationships, I believe it is important to know that the other is of the same yolk as us.  That we do share the same values and thinking is important in order to have trust in each other and procreate a family whose future will be based on those same values.  It affords the order within a home.  The children we bring become the future of the world in those years to come.  However, when for some reason, a value has been altered and is supported by a deep need, it is still important to realize that a choice is being made based on character–based on the spiritual level by which he or she is at.  We may get disappointed by those choices, but it is in that vulnerability that a man or woman is simply being human.  The circumstance may even reflect something in us from the past that we need to work through, and that opportunity is often missed for being human ourselves.

But once truly understood, we learn to see with better eyes, listen with more compassionate ears and love in a more esteemed and godlike way.  We become resilient to further hurts and betrayals.  We begin to feel even sorry for the other in the hurtful words and actions they choose.  For if every word is upon us like a seed, we shall then come to expect either a beautiful garden in our days to come or one that is barren and full of weeds.

“Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” ~by Jesus Christ are words that just might take you all the way home, breathing through a kindness for yourself, from yourself.

I for one know, that I’ve come to feel better, each time I tried.

Disclaimer: This post was not intended to alter religious beliefs.

December 13, 2018
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