Everyone is unique

There are two universal truths that we sometimes forget.

• Number one: Not everyone thinks, feels and acts like we do.
• Number two: It’s okay that everyone doesn’t think, feel and act like we do.

We don’t have to be on a crusade to change anyone. We don’t have to share Henry Higgins’ sentiment, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”—Why can’t he/she be more like me?

One of the most important things we can teach children at an early age is to enjoy people’s differences. Give people room to be who they are.

We’re going to meet all kinds of people in the world who may not fit our mold. But more often than not, they have something to teach us.

No matter who comes your way, try to keep your heart open and uncover what God wants you to learn from them, because there are no mistakes. Life brings us into contact with the people and situations we need.

While the philosopher and spiritual teacher Gurdjieff led a community in France, one of the people who lived there was an irritable and unkempt old man.

He did not fit in well with the group, and nobody got along with him either. Even the old man seemed to realize this and after several difficult months he left for Paris. Gurdjieff followed him and asked him to change his mind, but the old man refused to go back to such an unpleasant situation.

At last, Gurdjieff offered the man a substantial pension to rejoin the community. When the ornery fellow reappeared on the scene, the other community members were astounded. And when they found out that Gurdjieff was paying him—while they were actually paying Gurdjieff to live in the community—they became even more upset.

Finally Gurdjieff explained why he just could not let the man go away. “If he wasn’t here, you wouldn’t learn what you need to learn about anger or about compassion,” he told them. “That’s why you pay me, and why I pay him!” This wise teacher knew that the crabby old man was the fine grain of sand, the irritant, that would create the shining pearls in his community.

I follow the religion of Love: Whatever way love’s camel takes, /that is my religion, my faith.

—IBN ARABI

Don’t you think God does the same thing? He ‘arranges’ things so we can learn about anger, irritability, patience and compassion.

When we have an instant dislike for someone, we’ve probably bumped into our karma. And the faster we face that karma and resolve it with love, the faster we’re going to be liberated from it.

“Be grateful for whoever comes,” advised Rumi, “because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.”

Whisper a prayer to God to help you stay openhearted and to show you exactly what you are supposed to learn from the situation. Call to your Higher Self and to the Higher Self of the other person to direct your relationship. Then simply be kind and let the rest unfold.

In the short run, it may seem easier to ignore a situation, rebel against it or run away.  But in the long run, it isn’t. When we dislike someone, we tie ourselves to them.

Remember the scene from Return of the Jedi? Luke Skywalker is trapped with the evil emperor and Darth Vader. The emperor is trying to lure Luke to the Dark Side. At one point, the emperor turns to Luke and taunts him with these words:

“The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment, you make yourself more my servant.”

Luke realizes that his hatred will tie him to the Dark Side. He centers in his heart, reaffirms his allegiance to “the Force,” and ultimately—by his own love—draws Darth Vader back to the Light. But the emperor was absolutely right: Hatred brings us to the feet of the object we hate.

Self-inquiry:

• What are the challenging situations in my life, and what am I supposed to learn from them?
• Are there circumstances in my life right now that I can look at as opportunities to keep my heart open? What can I do to keep compassion alive in these situations?

Many of us weren’t brought up learning how to coach. Our role models were managers, not mentors.

It’s part of our collective challenge in this new millennium, in this age of Aquarius, to nourish and express our caring feminine side—the side of ourselves that has to do with building relationships, coaching, team work.

A good starting point is to simply go out of the way to appreciate others. Every day, go up to someone and thank her for her contribution—whether it’s the good work she did or just the fact that she is so cheerful and sunny.

The more we reinforce the positives in others, the more likely they are to repeat that positive behavior. And the more we reinforce their negatives, the more they will likely believe they can only express negativity and therefore repeat that same behavior.

In addition, the more we learn to love and appreciate ourselves, the more love we will magnetize into our world. “A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world,” said Ken Keyes, Jr. “Everyone you meet is your mirror.”

In down-to-earth terms, Lucille Ball once said, “I have an everyday religion that works for me. Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.”

The spiritual activity of our heart has definite effects on our health and vitality. Researchers at the Institute of HeartMath, for instance, have shown that emotions like anger and frustration put a strain on the heart and other organs.

Emotions like love, compassion and appreciation have the opposite effect: they create harmony in the body that leads to enhanced immunity and improved hormonal balance.

There’s a wonderful Hasidic tale that shows the tremendous effect that appreciation can have, not only on ourselves but on the world around us.

Every so often, a rabbi would retreat into a small hut in the woods surrounding a monastery. One day the abbot of the monastery visited the rabbi and asked his advice. He explained that his order was shrinking—so much so that only five monks lived there, and they were all over seventy.

The rabbi told the monk that he was experiencing the same problem. Fewer and fewer people were coming to the synagogue. “I’m afraid I don’t have any advice,” the rabbi said. “I can only tell you that one of you is the Messiah.”

Upon returning home, the abbot told the other four monks what the rabbi had said. Could one of them really be the Messiah? they wondered.  Although each of the monks had his little quirks, they began to see that each had great virtue as well.

Because any one of them could be the Messiah, they carefully treated one another with greater appreciation and respect. And they began to value and respect themselves too.

Once in a while, the people of the town would enjoy picnics on the beautiful grounds of the monastery and sometimes meditate in its old chapel. As the months went by, the people began to feel something special. There was a certain ambience around the place because the monks treated each other with such reverence.

So the townspeople started coming back more often to visit. They brought their friends with them. Eventually some of the younger men who visited the monastery started talking to the monks.

First one and then another of the young men asked to join the order. By the time a few years had elapsed, the monastery was full and it had become a center of great spirituality—all because of the rabbi’s parting words of wisdom to the abbot and the power of appreciation.

The healing power of our hearts can indeed create a chain reaction. In his Hopi message to the United Nations in 1992, Thomas Banyacya said, “If we return to spiritual harmony and live from our hearts, we can experience a paradise in this world.”

Liu I-ming, a Taoist who was born around 1737, said that the power to change the world does begin within each of us. He wrote, “A sage said, ‘If for one day you can master yourself and return to considerate behavior, the whole world will return to humanity.’ Do you think humanity depends on yourself or on others? This is indeed the subtle point of this passage.”

Self-inquiry:

• Do I look for ways to appreciate others?
• Do I go out of my way to give others credit for their contributions?
• Do I look for ways to appreciate myself?
• If I am given the opportunity to lead or to guide, do I use it to encourage the creativity of others rather than to fulfill my agenda? Do I use the role of leader to manage others or to coach?

Just as one of the initiations of the heart is to keep it open, another is to draw healthy boundaries. Yes, you are allowed to say no!

If we cannot set limits when necessary, it is actually unhealthy—not only for us but for others. When you say yes to everything, you know how easy it is to become overextended and exhausted, irritable and uncreative. If we don’t take enough time or space to recharge and nurture ourselves, we are that much less effective in fulfilling our mission.

To truly help others, we need to pay attention to ourselves first.

Setting healthy boundaries also means that we can stand up for our principles in the face of peer pressure or societal pressure. It means we can say no to those things that will not propel us toward our ultimate goals in life.

Twentieth-century Trappist monk and writer Thomas Merton once pointed out that even in a spiritual setting, peer pressure can be a problem: “The poorest man in a religious community is not necessarily the one who has the fewest objects assigned to him for his use. . . . Often [he] is the one who is at everybody else’s disposition. He can be used by all and never takes time to do anything special for himself.”

Rabbi Moshe Leib expressed the same sentiment:

“A human being who does not have a single hour of his own every day is no human being at all.”

There is a Buddhist story about a young woman who learned an important lesson about boundaries from her Buddhist meditation master.

Each day she would concentrate on developing loving-kindness in her heart. But as soon as she left the house for the market she would have to deal with a merchant who met her with unwelcome advances. Finally, she lost her cool and, brandishing her umbrella, chased the impudent shopkeeper down the street.

Unfortunately, her meditation master was watching her from the side of the street. She approached her teacher, ashamed that she had lost her temper. In his most gentle tone, he told her, “The next time something like this happens, fill your heart with as much loving-kindness as you can—and then take your umbrella and hit this rogue right over the head!”

The soul is not where it lives but where it loves.

—THOMAS  FULLER

There does come a time when we have to draw the line for the protection of our own energy and chakras—and we can usually do it without hitting someone over the head with our umbrella!

At times I’ve had to learn my lessons in drawing boundaries the hard way. Someone once called me on the phone and became irate with me. After I hung up, I could literally feel a pain in my heart, and it took me some time to recover. I later realized that the most loving thing I could have done, both for me and the person on the other end of the phone, was to draw my boundaries by politely saying good-bye and hanging up.

When people are angry, we do have the option of explaining to them softly but firmly that we will be happy to talk to them later, when they are feeling better, but we will have to conclude the conversation if they continue to talk in this manner.

We can’t always change someone else, but we can take responsibility to guard our own energy by drawing healthy boundaries.

Self-inquiry:

• Are there circumstances in my life where I need to draw healthy boundaries for myself?
• In these situations, how can I lovingly communicate these limits?

Both Eastern and Western adepts tell us that the greatest power in the universe is softness. Lao Tzu used the analogy of water: “There is nothing softer and weaker than water, and yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things. . . The weak overcomes the strong and the soft overcomes the hard. . . The softest, most pliable thing in the world runs roughshod over the firmest thing in the world.”

When water is running through your fingers it doesn’t feel “strong,” and yet water can wear down rock and find pathways in, through and around gigantic obstacles. The power of softness can do the same.

Softness is a receptive mode where unnatural, forceful human actions and reactions give way to the natural movement of the heart. Softness is a nurturing, giving attitude that does not take offense. Softness is the opposite of brittleness, rigidity or resistance. Brittle things can break, but softness is flexible and can bend. As a wise commentator once said, “Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape.”

That’s the whole principle behind the martial arts, such as T’ai Chi Ch’uan. They are based on cultivating inner energies and developing softness that will triumph over the use of external, muscular force. The body appears to be soft and gentle externally but has a great concentration of internal power.

The twentieth-century T’ai Chi Ch’uan grand master Cheng Man-ch’ing writes: “Those who love combat never fail to use stiff and brutish force to strike their opponents, or fast techniques to grapple with them. . . . If one’s defense against this is hard, the result will be defeat and injury for both parties. This is not mastery.

“If my opponent uses hardness, I neutralize it with softness. If my opponent attacks with movement, I meet him with stillness. . . . This is what Lao Tzu referred to as softness and weakness overcoming hardness and strength.”

In our personal interactions, softness is a gentle way of dealing with a situation that doesn’t degrade the other person (or yourself) but shows him that you have his best interests at heart.

Take this example from Zen Buddhism. A student studying meditation with a Zen master would sneak over the temple wall at night and run into town to have some fun.

The master discovered this one night when he noticed the stool the student was using to make his getaway and return. So one night the master waited in the cold and stood in the place where the stool usually was. When the student returned, he stepped onto his teacher’s head and jumped to the ground. When he realized what had happened, he was shocked and embarrassed.

“It’s quite cold this time of the morning,” his teacher simply said. “Take care so you don’t catch cold.” The student never again resorted to a midnight escapade. His master’s single act of softness changed his life.

Self-Inquiry/Assessment:

• Are there times when I have seen softness rather than harshness turn around a situation, and what can I learn from this?
• The next time I find myself in a charged situation, how can I use softness to turn it around?