Stillness 8-25:
When you’re having a hard time getting along with someone, what do you do? Attack, or growl, or feel hurt, or smile, snarl, try to talk about it, see a therapist, or walk away?
There’s another way, which is to bring the experience into your energetic field rather than leaving it stuck in your physical and psychological fields. You don’t have to have to talk things over and you don’t have to turn your back. Surprisingly, those two things can sometimes make the situation messier.
What you can do is focus your energy on filling yourself and the other person in a bubble of peaceful light, and then filling that bubble with love. Even if you don’t feel love, you can still think it and say it to yourself. Focus all your prayerful attention on the person inside that light-filled bubble. What happens is that your energy enlarges the bubble so that the intention of light shimmers, expands, and begins to overlap with yours. The love does too.
I have such a strange example of how this worked: Several years ago I was attending a special event that was being held outside on a late summer evening. I was standing near the back of the tent, because all the seats were filled. As I listened to the speakers on stage, I became aware of someone approaching the audience from the parking lot. Even in the dark, I recognized them right away. It was a person I’d had a very difficult time with some years earlier. We’d had a bitter fight about something I wanted to have happen and they did not. Our power struggle even created a bit of a rift in our community and our paths hadn’t crossed since then. Now this person paused under a tree about 20 feet away from me, and I felt such antipathy that my heart sank. My evening I’d been looking forward to was ruined because of their presence. I’d have to be polite and fake and then go home early. What a disappointment.
The speakers droned on. I felt there was nothing I could do. So I closed my eyes and focused on creating a bubble of light around this person. Then I filled that bubble with love. Literally, I said to myself over and over, I love you. I didn’t feel it, but I certainly could think it and I could say it inwardly. So I did. Everything around me dimmed and faded—the speakers on stage, the stars overhead, the quiet night—there was just a focused concentration on filling this person I loathed and dreaded encountering with love and light.
And this is what happened: I felt an arm slip around my waist. My eyes flew open and I turned in surprise. My nemesis, who hadn’t spoken to me in five years, had come over and put their arm around me! Our eyes met, in wordless communication. The experience was so enormous no words were necessary.
We turned back to face the stage and I leaned my head on their shoulder. We stood like that for I don’t know how long, feeling an extraordinary peace. Eventually, at the same time, they removed their arm and I lifted my head, and they were gone. I haven’t seen them again, even from a distance.
So this story is just to tell you that focusing your energy does work to change what you think was stuck. When you give up your ego and calm your psyche, there still remains active, impactful energy that has its own wisdom. I don’t know why we fought or why there was such rage that boiled in me whenever we encountered, but for some reason it happened. And now it is over and we are at peace.
Ah, mystery! But we have impact even over mystery. We have more power using love than if we stay in our ego-driven, psychological stories about our lives. Try a different way of communicating, connecting, and living. Go beyond the story you’ve written about yourself and others—it’s freeing and it’s much more fun.