The prayer for serenity is: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ So how do we accept the things we cannot change?
First of all, there are very few things we can change. We cannot change the fact that it’s raining outside. But the rain is not the problem. The rain is just rain. It is my mind which says, ‘Oh no! Another rainy day!’ The problem is my reaction to the rain, and that I can change.
In the same way, in our relationships, we cannot change another person unless they want to change. But the problem is usually not what the other person is saying or doing, but my reaction to it, my attachment to the fact that they should be saying or doing something different, and I do have control over my reaction. When I change myself, everything changes. If you and I grab opposite ends of a rope, and you pull to the left and I pull to the right, there would be a lot of tension in the rope, a literal tug-of-war. If you just let go, there would be no tension, and I would be at peace. The truth is that I can’t make you do it, but I can let go of my side. If I release the rope, automatically all the tension is gone. It only requires one person to let go of 100 per cent of the tension.
In our lives, when there is any problem, it’s really important to ask yourself, ‘Can I change it? If I can’t change it with my words or actions, can I change it internally? Can I let go of my end of the problem?’ It’s not so much a matter of having to love or even accept everything; it’s simply a matter of realizing that the problems you face are due to your own reactions, your own tugging.
One person could walk into a room full of people and say, ‘This is amazing, we’ve got people of every colour, height and culture together, it’s perfect.’ Yet, somebody else could walk into the same room and say, ‘My God, there’s a chip here in the ceiling, why didn’t they paint that, why hasn’t this thing been fixed?’ It’s not about the room, it’s about how I’m interacting with the room.
There are always things and people around us in the world that could be improved. But we must decide whether we want to look at the world through those eyes, or we want to look at the world through eyes of love, eyes that see what’s beautiful.
How can I help someone who doesn’t want to be helped?
You should not try to change other people. First, it is actually impossible. You can never change anybody. The only deep change that occurs is when they, perhaps impacted, influenced, touched or taught by you, change themselves. That change must come from within.
Otherwise, the most that you can get, unless they are really open to change, is behaviour modification. For example, let’s say your child’s room is dirty. It drives you crazy, and every time you see his room, you yell at him. Eventually, your child will learn to pick his clothes up and put his room in order because he doesn’t want his mom to yell at him. He’s modified his behaviour. However, nothing deep inside him has changed. He has just made a wise decision, consciously or unconsciously, that it’s easier to pick up his jacket than to face your wrath.
The truth is, the reason you yell, the reason it drives you crazy has nothing to do with a sweater or a pair of pants on the floor. If you go to a clothing store and see that someone has left their clothes on the dressing room floor, you’re not going to be upset. But when you see your son’s clothes on the floor, you feel disrespected and ignored. You have gone out, bought the clothes with money you’ve worked hard for, given your children these garments putting your time, energy and love into it. In your mind, you believe that the fact that they’re on the floor means your children don’t respect you, your time and energy.
Unleashing your fury on your children every time their room is messy doesn’t make them value you. Has anybody ever respected another person for yelling at them? It’s actually the opposite. When people scream at us, we think, ‘When are they ever going to shut up!’ Your children simply conclude that once they pick up their clothes, their moms won’t have a fit. But you still don’t get the love and respect you wanted in the first place. You get basic behaviour modification, but that’s not what you are looking for.
If your husband forgets your anniversary every year, and every year you cry and mope, maybe he’ll finally hire a secretary whose job is to remind him of your birthday and anniversary. So now he shows up on time on the right date with chocolates and flowers because his secretary reminded him and she ordered the gifts. But you know it’s all happening only because of his secretary. Are you happy about it? No, because your sadness was never about the chocolate and flowers. Your sadness was that, as your husband, he should remember these important dates, love you and think about you, that he should value you. Forgetting your birthday means, in your mind, that he doesn’t value or love you. The fact that he now has a secretary who reminds him to take home the flowers she bought doesn’t change anything in your heart.
The reason that I give these two examples is that in both cases, we think that what we want is something external, but really speaking, we want something deep on the inside. We want a change, not in how someone acts but in how they feel and think. Unfortunately, though, we can never change that through coercion. By trying to do the impossible, we not only don’t succeed in changing others but we also thwart all the great potential in our own lives, because we succumb to annoyance, irritation, anger, frustration and judgement. Every time people do that thing that annoys us, we judge, criticize, hurt and get angry. That becomes our nature, which means we’re not able to fulfil the incredible potential that we have because the very nature of who we are has become warped in this fruitless effort to do the impossible.
One of the most fundamental tenets of psychology is that that which bothers us the most about other people is actually what we ourselves personally need to work on. Every time we think, ‘This person needs to change’, and that person has not asked us for help, the first question we need to ask ourselves is, ‘Is it really they who need the help, or is it just that their way of being is difficult for me to handle?’ It’s a lot easier for us to look outward and say someone needs to change than to look inward and realize we need to be more accepting and compassionate.
In most cases, it’s only our own inner acceptance and compassion that can actually help the situation. We cannot force help on someone. All we get is resentment. Our effort to change them can actually push them away. So, instead, we need to look within and ask, ‘How can I accept this situation?’ Remember, acceptance doesn’t mean thinking it’s great as it is, or that we just have to love something. It means we recognize that we don’t have the power to change this situation. It’s about having acceptance and compassion, both for the person who is acting in a way that we think is wrong, and for ourselves, who are so troubled by it that we’re trying to help them even though they don’t want to be helped.
Acceptance and compassion create space, and in that space, people are able to breathe. When they are able to breathe, they are often able to look at themselves and realize they do need help, whether it’s for something as obvious as alcoholism or drug addiction, or something more subtle, such as ego, jealousy, lifestyle, neglect of their spiritual practice, family or health. Thus, no matter what it is that seems wrong about how someone else is living, we have to first create the space for them to breathe in the awareness that they may need to change.
Realize that being in love is more important than being right, because being in love is the rightest thing you can do. Love has the power to change things. Being right doesn’t change anything. Be in love, because when you love, people around you feel love. Make a resolution that from now on, you’re not going to try to change others. If you can change yourself, that’s great, but if you can’t, at least stop trying to change others.
How do we help others who are struggling? I know someone who keeps having challenges, but sometimes it gets really tiring listening to their same old commentary. Help me to help them.
Think back to a time when you’ve shared your problems with someone else, whether they are emotional problems, relationship or health issues, or anything else. What did you want from them? You wanted somebody to listen, you wanted love and compassion, and for someone to be there with you. Connection is so important, and that’s really what we’re craving. We rarely go to our friends or colleagues or even family members to solve our problems. If something happened at work, and you go home and tell your spouse or your parent about it, you don’t want them to solve it. You just want them to listen and understand or have sympathy for you. I remember when I was young I’d come home from school and tell my parents about things that had happened at school that troubled me. My mom would say, ‘I’ll come in tomorrow, I’ll tell them! I’ll fix it.’ I used to think, ‘No, no! Please don’t come to school and fix it!’ It was the last thing I wanted. No kid wants their moms to show up at school and fix things. You just want them to listen.
We’re not looking for others to solve our problems. If a friend or a colleague is struggling with their spouse or child, they’re not looking to us to give them the answer. People think about their problems, often all day. They’re the ones living and breathing the problem. You can be very sure that before they’ve come to talk to you, they’ve thought about it a hundred times, and it’s unlikely there’s going to be something you can say that they haven’t already said to themselves. What people want much more than answers is connection and compassion, and just to have someone there with them.
Don’t feel as if you are the fixer, or that you have to be the fixer. Just understand that someone is coming to you for love and connection. If you can give those, it’ll help them, and you will also benefit in the process. Whatever we’re sharing with others is being manufactured inside ourselves. If I’m angry and shouting, I didn’t buy the anger off a shelf and swallow it. It’s welled up inside me, in my mind and physical body. I’m the anger manufacturer, which means that when I get angry at you, even if it is for something that you did, the first recipient of that anger is me. We have to be really careful about what emotions we manufacture. Someone else may have done something hurtful, but that doesn’t mean that our anger factory has to go into overdrive poisoning our own selves.
There’s a beautiful quotation that says, ‘Getting angry at someone else is like drinking poison and expecting that someone else will die.’ On the other hand, if I know that what you need is just love and compassion, I have to become the manufacturing plant of love and compassion. I may not have the answer to your health problems because I’m not a doctor, and I may not know how to fix your marriage, or what to do with your unruly children. But you came to me, which means what you need from me is not the medical advice you could get on the Internet, but just love and compassion, and that is something I can surely give.
So don’t feel frustrated, annoyed and helpless because that person keeps coming to you with the same problems over and over again. This is just an opportunity for you to cultivate compassion. If it benefits them, fantastic. But the first beneficiary of that compassion and love is you.
I have worked to truly change myself. I’ve tried to forget the mistakes I have made in the past and move forward, but people around me keep reminding me of the mistakes I made. What should I do?
It’s so hard. We try to change, learn, grow and evolve, but it’s so difficult when people around us don’t want to let us embody this newness, change and betterment. So what do we do?
First of all, before we can actually change others’ perception of us, we have to change our own perception. People are only going to accept that we’ve changed when it’s real. The fact that a mistake I committed was in the past does not guarantee I have changed after that. If I lied a week ago, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to lie today. If I cheated two weeks ago, it doesn’t mean I’m not going to cheat today. Think for a moment about the people who have hurt you in your life. You’re only going to let it go and continue the relationship if you feel they’ve changed and won’t hurt you again. It’s very difficult to trust, believe, honour, and to have faith in people if they have not actually changed and if they don’t recognize that what they did was a mistake.
Similarly, we have to realize that this applies to us as well. We have, perhaps, done something in the past that we know was a mistake. We want to be free of it, but do we want to be free of it without changing our ways, or do we want to be free of it because we are a better person now? That’s an important distinction, and it’s important to the people around us. So if we find that people are not letting us forget the wrong things we have done in the past, or they’re not accepting that we’ve changed, we need to introspect: ‘Have I really changed? Am I just trying to put the past behind me because it’s uncomfortable and I feel guilty, or have I really taken steps to be different?’ If I’ve lived with you every single day for the last thirty years, and every day for thirty years you’ve hit me, I’m not going to wake up tomorrow and believe you if you tell me that you won’t hit me. Unless you have really taken steps to introspect, reflect and understand why you were harming me, I’m not going to let it go.
Our ways of interacting with people are habitual. We don’t necessarily process each word, action or reaction. Our relationships become a habit. If you change, I’m not going to know unless that change has been really deep, really profound, and something that I’ve been able to see.
If people are not letting you forget your mistakes of the past, here’s what you need to do: 1) have patience and faith, both in the other people and in yourself, and 2) know that truth is a magnet. When you live in that truth, people will respond.
In America, I used to hear people say all the time to their children, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ For example, the parents may sit around smoking cigarettes and getting drunk, but they try to teach their children never to touch these things. Or, they cheat on their taxes and lie to people, but try to teach their children to always be honest.
I have frequently heard parents say this to their children. It’s a useless strategy, because children are going to do what you do, regardless of what you’re saying. But it’s not just children. In all of our relationships, we tend to respond to what people do more than what they say. Someone may profess love to us, tell us that we’re their one and only, but if we can see from their actions that we are not their one and only, the words are going to ring very hollow.
Therefore, if we’re really changing, that change needs to come through in our actions, not just in our words. The words have to be there, but the actions have to follow even more strongly. When we’ve made mistakes in our past, whether it was a one-time mistake, or a habitual mistake, we have to remind people that we have changed, and also embody that change.