How do you not take something personally? When someone cuts you off in traffic, or insults you, or betrays your trust, how do you not take it personally?
You can ignore the action; shrug it off and pretend that it never happened. You can try to justify it on your own terms. You can take a "spiritual" approach to forgive and forget, or you can recognize the internal pain of the individual and understand that the slight really didn't have anything to do with you. But, for so many of us, none of these methods work, or work well, or work for long. We eventually (maybe seconds - maybe years later) react in pain or anger and then berate ourselves for our reaction, always realizing too late that scolding ourselves for feeling any pain at all only adds "insult to injury."
Throughout my entire life (until recent years), I took things personally. Lots of things. Pain and tears were always the result. If there is any one statement I've heard too many times to count, it's "Don't take it personally." Those who issued the statement were well-intentioned. Not wanting to see me hurt, but not knowing how to ease my pain, they gave me the only "medicine" they knew how to give. Take two bromides and call me in the morning. It wasn't until well into adulthood when I learned that my pain was always my pain; no one else's. No one else had the power to ease my pain. It was entirely my responsibility, my choice, and my creation.
There were many times another statement was coupled with the "Don't take it personally" platitude. I was often counseled to not be so sensitive. In my late teen years, I decided that I didn't want to give up my sensitivity even if it meant more pain for me. If I lost my sensitivity, I wouldn't be sensitive to others' emotions or conditions of being, and I didn't want to cause anyone else the pain that I so often felt. I saw myself becoming a brute or cad through loss of sensitivity. So, I endured pain time and again. Too many times I cried myself to sleep and all my pillows were spotted from tears. I became intimately acquainted with pain.
In my struggle to come to terms with pain, I tried to void it by denying my emotions. If I didn't let myself feel so emotionally "up," I wouldn't feel so emotionally "down." I became a walking neutrality, neither living nor dead. But, the pain lessened. So too did the joys in life. I found that I couldn't feel as great a sense of pride or pleasure from my creativity or a job well done as I could when I was allowing myself the full spectrum of emotion. Then, I began hearing people say, "Ronnie, you should take more pride in your accomplishments." But, I couldn't - not if I didn't want to take things personally. Taking personal pride in an accomplishment is no different than taking personal affront to an insult or rebuke. The energies are the same. It's still taking something personally. The more I tried to feel one (the pride) but not the other (the pain), the greater a schism I created in myself and the more I evaded reality. Wholeness of being cannot be achieved by faking reality in any manner.
At the core of their essence, physical pain is the same as internal pain. Both hurt. And both are imbued with emotion - generally anger or despair. Our emotional response to physical pain can happen so quickly that the pain and response may seem simultaneous. How quickly did you react in anger the last time you stubbed your toe or whacked your thumb with a hammer or banged your head? Our emotional response to internal pain can be so entwined that the two may seem inseparable. How often have we experienced internal pain and then succumbed to depression or despair over it until the emotion itself seemed to be the pain?
In my life, I have experienced what I classify as two types of physical pain; acute and chronic. The acute was the toe-stubbing, head-banging, or thumb-whacking trick. The pain was sudden, intense, and local. I have also experienced the chronic pain of kidney stones where the pain was relentless and inescapable. A drug - a combination of codeine and morphine, didn't dent the pain. In desperation, I turned to meditation and discovered an amazing characteristic of physical pain. It was when I attached emotion to pain that it became painful.
I can remember lying on my couch (or bed or floor) consumed by pain and fighting it until I broke into a sweat and vomited. But, I eventually came to learn that if I could get past fighting the pain, I could deal with it. I began to allow myself to get into the pain - to experience it fully. It felt as if I were allowing myself to sink into the essence of my being and drown in that ocean of pain, and when I did - when I released my fear or hatred of it, the pain was no longer painful. The pain was still with me, but only as an undefined sensation, neither good nor bad –as if shielded by a powerful drug.
Pain can be viewed in many ways; as evil, as God’s curse, as an enemy. All these ways share a common energy: the force of evil, the power of a curse, the strength of an enemy – something tangible and to be fought. But, where there is no resistance, there can be no force. So, for me, the dichotomy of fighting my pain was by accepting it. By accepting it, I released it. I had to get into my pain before I could get out of it.
Internal pain, which we often call emotional pain, works the same way. The pain exists to tell us that something is “wrong;” that something needs to be healed. The pain could be acute: the pain of an insult or reprimand. The pain could be chronic: grief or unresolved resentment or any long term loss. The emotions that we attach to the pain are our forms of resistance or denial. So, whenever you feel internal pain, do take it personally. Get into that pain. Don’t try to ignore it or “shame” it into remission or invalidate it. Accept it. Revel in it. Grovel in it. Bring it on! When the first onslaught of emotion subsides, the pain – unmasked for what it is, will be revealed. Once you stop fighting it, you’ll be able to bless it for the gift of healing that it offers. It is only by overcoming pain that we overcome it.
As I look back through the years, I realize that I have been blessed to have taken so many things so personally. I didn’t listen to the purveyors of platitudes who said, “Don’t take it personally. It wasn’t meant for you.” No? Then why had I chosen to be in that circumstance or to create the circumstances which developed the incident? I began to see that from each stab of pain, I had the opportunity to heal the wound and make myself whole. Now, because I have healed many of my wounds, I’m no longer injured by as many of the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as I once was. In these cases, I don’t take things personally because I no longer have to. I have also discovered that when I am free of pain, I no longer seek to inflict it on others.
If any of what I’ve written here resonates with you, then yes, do take it personally. I am speaking directly to you – you who are reading this now. You are Divine. You are God’s greatest expression of creation…and yes, you can take that personally too.
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