I'm convinced that our peace of mind begins with the decision to take nothing personally.
We do get to decide the way we choose to live, starting with the way we think. We can decide to be a forgiving person or to be a nonjudgmental person or, actually, to quit resisting the dailies of our life. The dailies are not personal, they're just the happenings of life.
Our decision rests, of course, on the willingness to detach ourself from our egocentric wants...our wants which are based entirely on our perception...and come all dressed up as needs. We want to pay back a self-identified tormentor, i.e., to not forgive. Or to judge that same tormentor for being wrong when we are right. We call that feeling need, thus of God, and devil take the hindmost.
We have, in short, taken personally another's tempting...as if it had legs and must be crippled, or, better yet, demolished and by us. No. If we do not give life to others' tempting, it is dead to us. Or was never born into our own perception.
This is the nature of my spiritual growth: To accept the dailies of life with love and laughter, and when (not if) we realize something is unacceptable, we shake the dust off our feet and move on.
Or, more beautifully preached centuries ago by Meister Eckhart: God is not found in the soul by adding anything, but by a process of subtraction.
Thank you.
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