I had a disrupted friendship once over something I said. The
friend was so angry, she wouldn't talk about it, and the friendship stayed
disrupted for a long time. When finally we talked, it all boiled down to what
my friend heard and what I actually said.
We must become willing to change our minds. We hear what we
hear...why would we change our mind about that? Because how we are interpreting
what we heard is causing us pain...we are taking it personally. Even if Gertrude
calls us ugly to our eyes, if we don't take it personally, it cannot hurt us,
harm us, irritate us or take us down.
We do not take it personally by allowing the possibility of
another way of interpreting what we know we heard. There. That's our open
invitation to God to do our thinking for us because we have let go of reliance
on our reasoning mind.
We hear A, and we react with anger. We open our mind to
another way of looking at A which does not change A, only our interpretation of
A...God enters, and we know peace.
This is a practice that will take this lifetime and the next
to do as we breathe, I'm guessing, but it gives us hope. Doesn't that beat
living in our own mind...discontented, hopeless and blameless (i.e., put-upon)
to boot?
Thank you.
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