Why do some people respond so differently to various situations in life? Why does it seem like, sometimes, some people are not even capable of love or compassion?
We move through the world with our own toolbox, and that toolbox is how we respond to the world.
Suppose you get yourself into a situation where compassion, resilience, patience or understanding is required. If, in your personal toolbox, you don’t have these qualities, you’re not going to be able to respond to that situation in that manner. Usually what happens in our world is people hurt us unintentionally because they are not able to respond to situations skilfully.
Let’s say I’m walking and I see a nail sticking out of the wall. What am I going to do? I’m going to pull out a hammer and take care of it. But if I open up my toolbox and there is no hammer, and all I’ve got in there is a paintbrush or a fork, I’m not going to be able to hammer it back into the wall effectively. If the nail were a living being, it would say, ‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing? Don’t you understand that I’m a nail? That what I need is a hammer? Why are you whacking me?’ It wouldn’t understand that we’d love to hammer the nail back in, but we just don’t have a hammer.
This is a metaphor I use as the foundation to answer the question of why people hurt us in life. There are so many times when what we need from someone is understanding, patience, compassion, but people respond with impatience, anger or without understanding. And we get hurt. But we blame them for that, without understanding that they didn’t wake up in the morning planning to hurt us, or intending to make a mess of that situation. They’re just moving through the world with a certain toolbox, and when the situation requires love or generosity or openness or understanding, they find that they don’t have any of those things. What they have is fear, anger, loneliness and grudges, so that’s how they respond to the world.
Our toolbox is built up throughout our lives. It begins in our childhood. Our parents give us the first tools. If we are raised with patience, understanding and generosity, we develop the tools for these qualities. But the opposite happens if we’re raised with impatience and abuse.
What have been the most beneficial tools on your spiritual journey?
On a personal level, I think the tool that was most beneficial for me throughout my life has been the knowledge, the deep awareness that I deserve and am entitled to a happy life, and good things in life, that the world by nature is good. It’s the way my parents raised me. They taught me, ‘You can do anything, be anyone, have anything, achieve anything.’
When I was very young, my mother used to take me to a place near our house that had a huge slide, but she was too scared to go down it with me. So she would grab any random guy going up the stairs and ask, ‘Would you take my daughter down the slide?’ I was maybe four or five years old. Today, people would call her crazy to just hand off her toddler girl to some unknown male passer-by like that! But my mother had a very deep belief in the innate goodness of people, and it never occurred to her that anything could happen to me. She used to teach me, ‘Strangers are just friends we haven’t met yet.’ That was the motto I was raised with. And with all that combined—faith in the goodness of people, faith in the universe, awareness that I was entitled to good things—I was secure in my belief that there would always be enough. I was not raised with fear. I was raised with a sense of plenty.
What that did for me was it enabled me on my spiritual journey. If I didn’t have faith in the universe, in its fundamental goodness or rightness, I think it would have been very difficult at the age of twenty-five to leave the world that I came from, to leave a path that I knew was going to take me towards financial and career success, for a spiritual life. To walk out of a world in which everything is set for you, on a physical, tangible level, and walk into a place where you don’t speak the language, you don’t know anybody, you don’t know anything about the culture, you have no idea what tomorrow is going to bring or how long they are going to let you stay is quite a risk. When I first moved to the ashram, Parmarth had a policy wherein each guest could stay for fifteen days at the most, and beyond that, needed special permission to continue living there!
If I had been raised to fear what’s going to happen to me, where my next meal was going to come from, who’s going to put a roof over my head . . . it would have been very difficult to take that leap of faith with what I had experienced.
The other most beneficial tool in my life is a deep commitment to truth. Growing up in my home, telling a lie was the absolute worst sin you could commit. You could’ve done something horrible, but if you admitted it, the punishment would be almost nothing. On the flip side, you could’ve done almost nothing, but if you lied about it, there was hell to pay. I wasn’t supposed to lie even about little things! There was no such thing as a white lie in my house. This ‘truth at all costs’ belief was really ingrained in me.
That’s the second very powerful tool I had. Which is why, when I was given this experience on the banks of the Ganga, when I knew that this was where I was meant to be, there was no way I could not live it. People say to me, ‘God, it’s amazing that you decided to stay, it’s amazing that you left that world, it’s amazing that you came here.’ But for me, there actually was no other option. I could not deny the truth that I had seen. I could not deny what I had experienced. It didn’t come in the form or manner in which I had anticipated I would find happiness. I was on a path, I was getting a PhD in psychology, I was going to live a normal life—house, kids, career, vacations at resorts, all the things that we think a good life is made of. I was not expecting that the happiness of my life was going to come through renunciation, in celibacy, in spirituality, in an ashram in India. But when it happened, when I had that awareness, when I had that opening, because truth was the biggest tool in my toolbox—it was the only thing that stared me in the face every time I opened my toolbox—there was no way I could deny that I had had that experience, no way I could turn my back on it and say, ‘I didn’t see that.’ It is that commitment to truth that led me here.
How do we deal with people who have grudges and anger and are responding with a tool that is not right for the situation?
The first aspect is to really recognize this, so that we realize they are not trying to hurt us. Our pain stems not so much from exactly what people do, but from the fact that we feel like a victim of it. We ask ourselves all the time, why me ? When we understand it’s not about us, but it’s about their insufficiently stocked toolbox, it takes that sting out of whatever they’ve done or said.
Imagine you are walking through a park, and you get bitten by a mad dog. What are you going to do? You’re going to go to the doctor, get the wound bandaged and get a rabies shot. Would you rather chase the dog down the street to bite it back? You understand that the dog didn’t wake up in the morning planning to bite you, or watch your movements for a week and lie there waiting to ambush you. You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You intuitively understand that. Even though you have a real wound that needs to be bandaged, it doesn’t create a psychological problem that breaks your heart.
The way we understand the dog is actually the same way that we need to understand people in the world. The dog bites because it is sick.
The same is true with most people who hurt us. They’re not doing it to us, they’re not plotting and scheming about how to make us miserable. They may not have an illness that’s curable with an injection or a pill, but they are living in a state of dis-ease . They’re upset. Their toolbox doesn’t have love, patience and compassion at that moment. So in that state of dis-ease, what they’ve got in their toolbox is control, grudges, pain, violence and fear, and that’s how they respond to the world.
When we truly and deeply understand that, it doesn’t harm us psychologically any more.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that we keep walking on that path, knowing that there is a mad dog sitting there. It doesn’t mean that we allow ourselves to become victims. Understanding others does not mean I become a doormat on which they can stomp their boots or that I let myself be bitten, literally or metaphorically, every day. It simply means that I don’t react when they hurt me because I realize they are in a state of dis-ease. I don’t feel psychologically damaged based on their behaviour. Then, with clarity, I’m able to respond effectively.
We have to have that understanding first, though. Does yelling back at them ever work? Never. Does criticizing them back ever work? Of course not. So, when we know what doesn’t work, we have to start looking at what might work.
If someone is mean to us, we have to understand that they are miserable. People who are happy spread happiness. This is why we like to be around happy people. People who are in love, even if they are not in love with you, are still really nice to be around! When a friend of yours falls in love, you can feel it, even though you are not the one they are in love with. The love seems to overflow. People in peace exude it. Pujya Swamiji always says, ‘When you are in peace—you exude peace, you spread peace, you manifest peace. When you are in pieces, that’s what you spread—you spread pieces, you share pieces.’
If somebody flings hurt and pain at us, it means that’s what they have inside. Air conditioners give cold air because that’s what they have. Heaters blow hot air because that’s what they have. Whether it’s effective for that moment or not that’s all they have.
So if what someone has is pain and anger, that’s all they’re going to give you. You could scream all day at an AC, ‘I’m getting pneumonia!’ but it won’t matter! You can start coughing and sneezing, you could get a fever, you could drop dead in front of it . . . it’s going to keep blowing cold air, because that’s all it has.
The minute we recognize this, it doesn’t get easier but it gives us distance from an immediate reaction to the person. If someone in your office is really sick and coughing all over the place, you don’t want to stand near them. You know you’ll catch whatever they’ve got. But you also know that they are not doing it to you, they didn’t manufacture a virus to come in and give it to you. It’s festering inside them. Get too close and you’re going to get coughed on. This is how people in our lives are sometimes. They have festering illnesses of pain, anger, grudges and ignorance. We don’t want to get too close, but we also need to realize that it is not about us.
Sometimes, it seems that someone is deliberately going out of their way to harm us. However, it is still not about us! Imagine what must be going on in that person’s heart for them to spend their time and energy simply planning to harm another. Imagine what their own heart and mind must feel like if they keep producing hatred. Whatever is produced inside of us affects us first. So if someone is producing anger, hatred and revenge, that’s what’s flowing through them, long before it comes out in the form of words or actions directed at us. Although it may not be random, the way the mad dog biting you is random, this sort of situation is nonetheless a sign that the person is dis-eased, and we must respond accordingly.
The first step is to understand. The second is to share as much love and peace as we possibly can, and never give up. Because if we give up, then we’ve let go of our own dharma, which is to share love and peace. That’s who we are. If we recognize that we are the Divine, the Soul, consciousness, then exuding that is our dharma.
There’s a story I love about a saint who is bathing in a river, where there’s a scorpion flopping around, about to drown in the river. The saint goes to pick it up to save it, and tries to put it on the shore. When he does that, the scorpion stings him. The saint instinctively flails his hand in pain, dropping the scorpion back into the water. Then the saint goes to pick it up again, and the scorpion stings him once more before he can get it to the shore. Again he flails his hand, and again the scorpion falls in the water. This happens several times.
Finally, a man sitting on the edge of the river cries out, ‘Baba, chodo usko! Let it go! It’s a scorpion, he’s going to keep stinging you! Forget it!’
The saint replies, ‘It is his dharma to sting, but it is my dharma to save, so if he’s not leaving his dharma, why should I leave mine?’
So we don’t give up, we don’t react, we don’t justify by saying, ‘Well, he started it.’ But we also don’t keep sticking our leg into the bush where we know the mad dog is. We have to figure out ways, even living within four walls, to protect ourselves, not by reacting, not by biting back, but simply by effectively taking care of ourselves, whether it’s creating physical or emotional distance. We don’t do it out of anger, we don’t lose our dharma, but we recognize that we must protect our own physical and psychological space.
Should that person try to come towards us with love, looking to change, we must allow it to happen. We should never turn around and say, ‘Forget it! You’re too late. Who the hell are you now to come to me? I’ve been putting up with this for thirty years!’ We must recognize that sometimes it takes thirty years for somebody to change, for them to recognize the need to change.
We’re not just energetic receivers, but also energetic transmitters. If you’ve been energetically receiving a person’s anger, grudges and pain, now you need to be an energetic transmitter of love and peace. But again, it doesn’t mean that you walk into that person’s psychic aura of anger. As I said, I don’t metaphorically stick my leg into the bush where the dog is. But I stay present in my own dharma, in my own peace, in my own love. If you become enough of a magnet, enough of a transmitter, you can change anything.