Friday, 25 July 2014

Enter stage left


At home, at school, in the workplace, in the community – no matter where we are, our lives are spent crossing paths with all sorts of people. Some encounters are delightful and some are trying – you might come across someone wonderful, while at other times you might get tied up with someone more difficult. But our encounters with people and the effect they have on us are no mere act of chance. The universe carefully selects one person for another person and sends us the person most suited to our needs.

Let's say you have an impossibly horrible boss. You take your work seriously and keep your head down and they don't even glance your way. Then, if you make one tiny little mistake or something doesn't go the way they want, it gets blown completely out of proportion and you get screamed at, being reprimanded and blamed for it. “They're so mean!”, you think to yourself, but, face to face, the words just aren't there. And so you tremblingly get back to work lest the heavens open up on you again and if they start screaming at you again, you end up cowering like a child...

People outside the situation might want to say
            Why would you stay in a place like that?
            You can't just put up with this kind of abuse!
            Why wouldn’t you just quit?

But it’s hard to decide when you’re in that situation whether or not you should just quit. Depending on the level of “abuse”, there are a great many instances where you shouldn't just keep on taking it. But with a lot of these types of situations, they’re a chance for you to think about the meaning of your encounter.

The first thing you might realise is that similar episodes occurred in your childhood: perhaps a father who didn't acknowledge you, a mother with a quick temper, or a grandfather that everyone was afraid of. When we were kids, we were powerless, but now that we're grownups we can overcome those very same situations. It's for that reason that that boss entered your life.

Perhaps your dad has already passed away and it's too hard to patch things up with your elderly mum. But in place of those relationships, you just might be able to work on your relationship with this boss. The people that we encounter in our lives are just like the characters in a play. One after another, the right person comes along at just the right time, all to help us grow up. So, this mean, impossible, simply awful boss is also a kind of teacher who is there that you might learn something.

 So, the next step is.......

We take hold of this “not being acknowledged” thing, and actually think about it - Why might my boss not appreciate me, even though I’m completely, desperately, throwing myself 100% into my work? The first part of the answer might be “Well, my dad was like that too” and deep within that, well hidden, lies the key. It's that, in actual fact, we don't even acknowledge us ourselves.

Maybe you’re a complete perfectionist and can't tolerate the idea of slipping up. Or maybe from the get go, you have absolutely no faith in your own abilities and hate yourself for that. It’s not easy to accept ourselves exactly as we are and we tend to judge ourselves about the parts of ourselves that we think are bad or that we don't like. And so, that boss is merely a reflection of the things about ourselves that we hate and our not appreciating ourselves.

The same thing happened with the man I married. There were things that were great and things I found challenging, exactly (I later realised...) like my mother. He was quick, good with his hands, creative, and had a great sense of style, just like my mother. He acknowledged my abilities and was someone who I could have fun working alongside, whooping with laughter the whole time.

The flipside of course being.......

He was emotional and would all of a sudden get into these bad moods and then he’d just blow up...just like her....The marriage turned sour and while I was thinking about it and all the advice I was getting, I realised that I'd met this man so that I could deal with my relationship with my mother. So, not only did I want to get to a place where I could say to him all the things that I couldn't say when face to face with my mother, I also began to think about why I encounter people like this.

I realised that I was totally unaware of my own needs; I was getting pushed down and down and down by their emotional needs and wasn't taking care of my own. It was a system wherein I wasn't taking care of my own emotional needs myself and so neither my mother nor my husband would take care of them for me.

I even believe that my soul chose my mother as the character in the play that is my life best able to get me to learn that “I need to take care of myself!” Then, since I didn’t manage to learn that lesson when I was a child, my soul chose for my husband someone who could teach me that same lesson…that’s why I met him. So my heartfelt thanks goes out to these invaluable teachers, my mother and my ex-husband.

Next time, when you meet someone difficult, maybe you can probe into the forces at work there. And the good news is that once you've properly learnt that lesson and “graduated”, you'll cease to come into contact with people who are similarly difficult. You might not be able to believe this until you actually experience it for yourself, but lessons like these, flowing out from the providence of the universe, are simple and reliable. 

So really there’s nothing to worry about. Just like with a play being performed on stage, take a step back once in a while and take a look through the audience's eyes - by doing so you can just float on through.

 [The original article in Japanese 「出会い」was posted in Nov 2011, which you can find here.]

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