4

The Opponent

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

Note: In this chapter, I will ask that we not approach the word opponent within the framework of an adversary. The idea of the opponent here is more along the lines of sparring partners—the people with whom we connect and who can ultimately challenge us, in beautiful and difficult ways, to be better versions of ourselves.

Lao’s Time

In the movie Enter the Dragon, there’s a scene we affectionately refer to as “Lao’s Time.” My father, as the character Lee, steps out of a meeting to instruct a student by the name of Lao. The young boy and my father bow to each other and the scene begins:

Lee: Kick me. Kick me.

Lao executes a very pretty side kick in Lee’s general direction.

Lee stops him.

Lee: What was that? An exhibition? We need emotional content. Try again.

Lao executes another kick, but this time he grimaces a bit and throws an aggressive kick that is bigger and slightly unfocused. Lee stops him again.

Lee: I said “emotional content.” Not anger! Now try again. With me!

Lao focuses in on Lee and throws a very concise kick directly to Lee’s chest, followed by another one. The two move in harmony as Lao kicks and Lee moves with the kick. Lee is pleased.

Lee: That’s it! How did it feel to you?

Lao: Let me think.…

Lee slaps Lao on the head as Lao turns away from the experience and gets into his head to try to analyze it. Lee admonishes him.

Lee: Don’t think! Feel. It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory! Do you understand?

Lao nods at the advice. They square up to bow. Lao bows low, looking at the ground. Lee slaps him on the head again.

Lee: Never take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow.

They bow eye to eye and the lesson ends.

This scene, which my father wrote to illustrate some of his thoughts on his philosophy of fighting, includes some of the most iconic lines from the film. It’s a small exchange that holds so many juicy nuggets on his beliefs about martial arts, life, and relating authentically to “what is” in the moment.

Note that when the student first executes a perfectly lovely kick, my father says, “What was that? An exhibition?” In other words, who are you kicking? Why are you kicking? I mean, it’s a pretty kick. It looks nice. But how does it relate to you and to me and to where we are in this moment? What is its purpose? What were you trying to express? The kick seems like a performance of a kick—disconnected from the circumstances.

“We need emotional content,” he suggests.

The kid tries again, but he conflates the word emotional with the emotional context of attack. So he gets himself fired up and throws a wilder kick with an intense look on his face. But Lee admonishes, “I said ‘emotional content’—not anger!” What my father means by emotional content is really context—being in current and appropriate relationship with the situation, feeling and sensing the energy of the present setting, i.e. what’s happening in the moment. Anger would be the wrong context for this teacher–student situation. Lee continues: “Now try again—with me.” Be in relationship with me. Kick me. Direct your intent toward me. Come at me. I am here asking you to kick me with the correct intent for the context. So focus on me; give me your awareness; include me. In other words, actually try to do exactly what I’ve asked and kick me.

And so Lao tries again, and this time the kicks are focused; they have a target and a purpose. The two move back and forth, engaged in a symbiotic dance. Lee is ecstatic. Yes! That’s it! And he asks Lao, “How did it feel to you?” Lao puts his finger to his chin pensively and turns away from Lee to contemplate. You see him literally turn away and go into his head to try to recapture and analyze the experience. Lee then raps him on the head.

“Don’t think. Feel!” Don’t separate yourself from the experience in order to analyze it. Don’t isolate yourself from what just transpired. Don’t disappear. Lee didn’t ask, “What do you think?” He asked how it felt. What does it feel like to be engaged in this with me right now? Can you stay with me and with the sensation and respond directly to what’s happening? He goes on to tell him, “It is like a finger pointing away to the moon; don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!” Don’t concentrate on only one part of the experience and miss the glory of the full experience, which is still unfolding and which is where the deeper understanding lies. And lastly he instructs, “Don’t take your eyes off your opponent, even when you bow.” Never fully disconnect and shut down even when it’s time to leave. Stay present. Stay aware.

In the example above, the “opponent” relationship is a teacher–student one. The teacher (my father) is trying to get the student (Lao) to relate to him and the circumstance directly. He wants him to feel, to sense, to be in the moment with his sparring partner rather than just perform a well-executed but perfunctory lesson. He wants true engagement between them. After all, if a fighter is not in active relationship with his opponent, he will eventually be unprepared for what comes his way. In other words, he’ll get popped. He’ll be living a pattern behind a wall of isolation rather than living life. He’ll be going through an order of operations or a program of moves rather than sensing the real-time changes in his partner and the setting and reacting accordingly.

What is combat, after all, but an intense relationship? Your opponent attempts to block and counter every strike you throw as well as land strikes of his own, which he will do in direct response to the signals he reads off you. He will also sense your energy, your reaction time, whether you seem confident or unsure, whether you move with experience, whether you hold his gaze, any patterns you have, etc. And while he is relating to you, he is adjusting himself as well. He is adjusting his strategy, his technique, his approach. If you land a strike, then he has to assess how you found an opening in him and vice versa. It’s a dance. It’s a relationship.

Does it sound familiar? It should, because we are assessing one another every day, sensing the energy and adjusting accordingly. You show up excited and upbeat for a lunch date with a friend, but when you arrive, you find them flat and morose. If you are aware, you probably downshift a bit. Maybe you ask what’s wrong or you try to get them to laugh, but you respond to what you’re getting based on what you’re sensing. Even when we interact with a total stranger, like the checkout person in a store or the mailman, we notice if someone is rude or pleasant and we respond in turn with either an inward annoyance or a friendly smile. We are in relationship all the time, and our relationships are a reflection of our own inner world.

To learn and to grow, you need relationship. You need that sparring partner to level up your game. Simply put for our purposes here, there is no one better than the person standing before you at any given moment to help you see yourself more clearly. Someone who is there, whether they know it or not and whether you’ve known it or not, to show you where the pain points are, to show you how to be better and how to shine your light more brightly. Because you are in response to your environment all the time, your environment becomes a reflection of you. So what can you learn about yourself? Where can you discover the cause of your own ignorance? How can you become better from this? But be aware: You want to become better, not better than! The opponent relationship is not a contest.

The Non-Competition Model

This may sound strange, but Bruce Lee did not believe in competition. I mentioned earlier that he believed in fighting for real and that he didn’t compete in the competitions of the day. But he came to the idea later in life that competition in general was not the correct model for personal or spiritual growth—or martial arts prowess, for that matter. To compete is to be bound up and focused on what is happening outside of yourself. Are you trying only to best someone else or win the prize? Or are you interested in your own process of growth? Competition categorizes everything and everyone into winners and losers rather than collaborators and cocreators. It separates us from self, and it pits us against one another.

Our potential can never be fully realized in competition because instead of thoroughly observing ourselves and maximizing the creation of our own experience, we focus on winning at all costs. We may spend hundreds of hours breaking down another’s performance in order to best it while learning only very limited information about ourselves. And in this model, the information we do learn is grounded in what others have that we lack, rather than about what we possess that makes us who we truly are.

When we turn to water, we see a thing that is not in competition with its surroundings but in cocreation and coexistence with it. The water doesn’t desire to best the earth. The water simply is. And the earth simply is. Sometimes the water overtakes the riverbank, and sometimes the riverbank changes the course of the water. In a state of neutrality or emptiness, because there is no comparison and no judgment, there is no competition. Life is not a competition; it’s a cocreation. I often tell people that if you must compete, if that is a model that drives you (for now), then compete with yourself. Push yourself. Top yourself. Grow yourself. Inherent in competition is the notion of winners and losers, but if we choose to approach each experience openly and neutrally and inhabit each moment fully, then there’s no room for winning or losing. There is only room for what is unfolding before us and how we choose to respond. The sooner we learn that there is no winning and losing in the big picture of life, the sooner we can move from a sense of striving to the simple, active state of being.

Sure, people win and lose at things all the time. And it can be argued there are external measures for whether or not a person lived a “good” life. But only you will really ever know whether your life was good for you. Only you know the level of satisfaction you have within your heart and soul. Only you know what demons have plagued your mental emotional space for years. So I suggest that, until the lights are turned off for good on this life of ours, we work less on one-upping each other and more on the lessons to be learned, the pivots we can make, and the growth we can attain. Any winning and any losing is only temporary. The stream doesn’t do a victory dance and decide to cease because it reached the ocean. It keeps on flowing.

At the end of the day, the person you should be keeping tabs on is yourself. What is your experience of life and how can you make it better wherever you find yourself? So when you are standing in front of another person and you’re all caught up in being better than or just as good as they are, remember that all that comparison is a reflection of the limited game you are playing.

I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.… If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.

The Six Diseases

If we want to look at how we practice all forms of rivalry, there are six diseases my father wrote about, all of which stem from the desire we have to win at all costs. These diseases rely on being in competition, which is typically where we go in a relationship the moment any discord pops up. When we relate to others in these ways, we are disconnecting from them and disconnecting from our true selves in order to access some form of outside validation. In other words, there is no relationship, no collaboration, no cocreation. There is only the victor and the loser.

The Six Diseases are:

The desire for victory

I have to be the winner. If I don’t win, I’m a loser. If I win, everyone else is a loser.

The desire to resort to technical cunning

I rely on the power of my wits to show you how great I am. Who cares about people or their feelings as long as everyone can see how clever I am?

The desire to display all that has been learned

Check me out. I know lots of things. I can speak at length about anything. It doesn’t matter what anyone else has to say (especially if it’s dumb).

The desire to awe the enemy

I am a force to be reckoned with. Look out! I will wow you to get your approval even if I have to do something shocking and wild to get your attention.

The desire to play the passive role

I am so easy to get along with. Who wouldn’t like me? I am so unobtrusive and sweet. I will put anything that’s important to me aside to make sure that you see how likeable and wonderful I am. How could you not like me when I sacrifice everything just for you?

The desire to rid oneself of whatever disease one is affected by

I am not okay as I am. I will perform constant self-work and read as many books as I can and take so many classes to make myself good that you will see that I am always trying to be a good person even if I continue to do lots of shitty things. I know I’m not okay as I am. And I know you know that I know I’m not okay as I am, which makes it okay not to get truly better as long as it looks like I’m trying.

With all of these pitfalls, there’s an attachment to an outside outcome, which ultimately disconnects us from people and situations. There is only the desire to manipulate or shock and awe the “opponent.” Even in the noble desire to be rid of the disease, there is a characterization of oneself as “the afflicted one” and therefore a denial of your own power.

I offer you these six diseases to consider as possible avenues of self-exploration because we have all participated in them when relating to another person or a situation. Can you recognize any of these in yourself? If you were to dig a little deeper, where would you find the wounding perception that motivates the disease and where could the healing begin? Allow yourself the awareness to notice your tactics and the freedom to feel your pain points. Realize that the diseases are just a delusion of the mind and the ego.

You complain about how judgmental people are? Guess what you’re being—judgmental. You give someone the cold shoulder for not being nicer to you? Guess what—you’re not being nice. You gossip about what a gossip someone is? You’re a gossip yourself. You get mad at someone for not loving you the “right” way—that’s not very loving. Take a look in the mirror and see how you are extending the life of the disease rather than finding the cure and, ultimately, the healing.

These diseases are traps. They will keep you locked in isolation and stagnate your growth. They will keep your success always outside of yourself and out of your hands as you chase victory and validation through the eyes of someone else. And what’s more, they will keep you from being fully yourself. Attachment to outcome is denial of one’s true commitment to self.

The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of an engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. See that there is no one to fight, only an illusion to see through.

The Sparring Partner

Relationship is a process of self-revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself—to be is to be related.

Studying yourself in relationship is not about comparisons or judgments (i.e., competition). Think back to choiceless awareness and the empty mind. There is no right or wrong. There is only “what is.” We don’t need to shame ourselves or beat ourselves up in the process of making ourselves “better,” nor should we shame and blame others to make ourselves feel better either. We need only observe, notice, and be curious about what is revealed through our responses and then choose how to move forward. Though simple in theory, this process isn’t easy. To confront ourselves through the eyes of others can be sobering and uncomfortable, in particular if we aren’t satisfied with where we are in life right now. But a relationship is also a clear reflecting pool in which we can see ourselves most astutely if we dare to really look.

When you pay my dear friend and intuitive counselor Tony Leroy a compliment, he responds by saying, “I’m just a reflection of you.” It’s lovely and, more important, it’s true. After all, relating is an energy exchange between both parties. And we can choose to be conscious or unconscious about this. A relationship is the perfect place to practice learning and noticing ourselves. And not only relationships with partners, spouses, or close friends (though those are some key sparring partners), but relationships with everyone we come into contact with. We create our reality by how we choose to act and how we choose to respond to things outside ourselves from within ourselves.

So what makes a good sparring partner? Typically, when a fighter is getting ready for a bout, they want to spar with someone who will present a challenge, who can match or better yet slightly outmatch them blow for blow. If the fighter can too easily manipulate his opponent and knock them down, then they will not get to see for themselves what areas they need to work on. They will not be challenged to get better.

While there are the sparring partners we choose specifically to help us with certain things, we are actually encountering sparring partners everywhere. In particular, because there are aspects of our personalities that we are unaware of, we may not even realize who has good info for us as we move through life’s journey. But if we get interested enough to notice our relationship dynamics and get curious about the exchanges we have and the other people involved in them, there are clues to figuring out the things we are hiding from ourselves. Every encounter is an opportunity to understand our inner workings a little better.

Every time we point the finger away from ourselves, we should turn it right back around because the human across from us is in fact ourselves. I had someone I thought was a friend treat me like crap recently, and I was all up in my anger about it—complaining, seething, judging them for being incapable and unkind. But when I turned the finger around at myself, what I got to see was myself being judgmental and righteous. What I was really struggling with wasn’t forgiving him for his unconscious (or even conscious) actions but coming face-to-face with my own. I couldn’t forgive myself for having allowed myself to end up here. So every time I would get upset or reactivated over it, I would say to myself, “When I forgive him, I forgive myself.” When I stopped judging him for his actions, I stopped judging myself for my reactions. I needed him to be wrong in order for me to be okay. And if that is what you need to be okay, well, is that really okay?

The Blame Game

I have learned that being challenged means one thing and that is what is your reaction to it? How does it affect you? Now if you are secure within yourself, you treat it very, very lightly—just as today the rain is coming on strong, but tomorrow, baby, the sun is going to come out again.

Looking at our lives and ourselves in relation to others is important and valuable, but we need to be careful about what we think we notice or see. If you’ve ever seen a troubling reaction flash across someone’s face while you were speaking or had someone snap at you for no reason or not call you when they said they would or ghost you, or, or, or … You know what happens. The stories and explanations start running through your head immediately in an effort to gather the evidence that supports your life theory. “She just doesn’t like anyone.” Or, “He is such a child!” We lose our empty mind, our neutrality, and jump right to the explanation for their behavior that makes us the hero or victim of the story. You assign all sorts of motives and blame onto others and make all kinds of justifications for yourself.

Your partner doesn’t want to have sex with you tonight? Must be because he or she just doesn’t like sex. Of course it has nothing to do with you. Or how you treat your partner. Or how emotionally absent you are from the relationship. Conversely, your friend didn’t call you back after you texted her three times yesterday? She must not care about your friendship. Well, to hell with her!

The stories jump up strong and clear as soon as we sense a hurt. We attempt to rationalize, analyze, and explain them in ways that support our victimhood or our superiority. After all, it’s easier to find fault with someone else than it is to acknowledge the wounds within ourselves. My father identified the motivation for this behavior this way:

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for actions, which are prompted by our own questionable impulses and inclinations.

So how do we not jump to create a narrative and deflect blame? How do we assess what is ours and what is another’s? Well, first: Start from neutral. Empty that cup! Without making a story out of it, what actually happened? Next, open yourself up to the possibility that you may not know the full answer. Then, two words: feel and speak.

If you’ve taken up the mantle of the eternal student and know how to do the investigative work of getting to know yourself, then this process is easier because you already know what some of your stories and wounds are, what some of your weaknesses and strengths are. But if you aren’t there yet, take a moment and feel deeply into your body. Does it feel like this is your issue or are you taking on someone else’s? Or is it a little of both? How do you tell the difference? Try to be objective. Don’t judge it or make it right or wrong. Discern. Stand a few feet back from it and ask yourself what part of this pattern or story sounds familiar to you. Listen to the language of your thoughts. Are you blaming? Or criticizing? Are you painting yourself as the hero of the story and the other person as the villain?

If you’re still not sure, then open your mouth and speak. In the instance with your partner, ask him or her: Do you feel connected to me? Do you enjoy having sex with me? And with the friend: Is there something going on in your life that kept you from getting back to me? Is everything okay? Or make a request: I’d appreciate it if you could shoot me a quick text to let me know you got my message and you’ll need to get back to me later. Two of Ruiz’s Four Agreements are “don’t make assumptions” and “don’t take anything personally.” Maybe you have been acting unappealingly and haven’t been aware. Maybe your friend is having a bad day completely unrelated to you. How will you know what is happening if you don’t allow yourself to fully connect and relate?

If you feel uncomfortable communicating directly and asking for what you want, notice that and investigate it. I saw a meme on the internet recently that intrigued me. It said: “Being scared to ask for what you need is a trauma response” (source unknown). Think about that. When in your life have you felt like your needs and wants were not valued? Why did you feel that way? Trace it back and untangle that knot.

Ultimately, we suffer because we put the responsibility for our happiness and our peacefulness outside of ourselves. We think we feel good or don’t feel good because other people and events make us so. We form attachments to people, things, and happenings and assign them the quality of being attractive (I want this) or unappealing (I don’t want this), and this gives them power over our inner world—our security, our confidence, our contentedness.

My father said, “Most [people] challenge [and blame] because they feel insecure and want to use a fight as a means to achieve some unknown aim.” So take a moment to recognize that insecurity and then get to know what the aim within your heart is. Search out the wounds. Are you blaming someone else for something that’s present in yourself? Are you offering people the benefit of the doubt around their reactions and seeking to find out what’s really going on with them, or just coming in for the attack or the brush off? Watch and learn from what you project in the mirror of relationship. Everything we need to know is there for us if we have the courage to get in the ring and spar.

Own Your Sh*t

Accepting that the man in the mirror of relationship is always ultimately you and relinquishing the blame game means owning your own shit. That requires being honest with yourself about how you show up in the world—what you allow, what you accept, and what you proliferate.

A while back I was in an on-and-off relationship that went on for a number of years, and I always felt undervalued and dissatisfied, yet I kept going back. He would tell me how much he loved me and make all kinds of promises about things we would do, ways we would be, places we would go. The words were phenomenal. So when the actions wouldn’t follow, I was often confused. He wouldn’t say he wanted to do all these things with me if it weren’t true, right? He says he loves me, so it must be that he just doesn’t know how to love me! So I need to show him by being super loving and giving to him … right? And then he’ll get it.

I had this idea in my head that if I could model the care I wanted (without having to actually ask for it) and by example have him adopt it, then that would thereby prove my worth. It felt like if I could just make this man care for me the way I wished to be cared for without having to demand it, it would somehow validate my specialness. I was looking for someone else to validate me rather than supporting and validating myself. Sound familiar?

What happened instead is perhaps not surprising: this person continued not to care for me or show up for me despite what he would say, and I would break it off again and again. I finally ended it for good after a particularly bad spell of stonewalling and being misled, and I then blamed him for undervaluing and dismissing me. Framing it this way meant I got to be righteous and hurt. But who was really doing the undervaluing and the blaming? Who was putting on the grand performance of care or not care? In order to truly heal and move past this pattern, I had to take responsibility for what I had allowed, and how I had failed to show up for myself. As it turns out, I had been the one who hadn’t valued me. I hadn’t been caring for myself. He was just reflecting me back to me. That’s not to say his behavior was okay, but it didn’t absolve me either.

What followed was some of the deepest personal work I have done. After a lot of anger and disappointment (all of which, while understandable, was not useful in helping me heal or grow), I had to look deeply at myself and acknowledge how I had let myself down, and how this relationship had sprung out of my own personal wounds and issues. That was a hard realization to come to, but it led to a deeper sense of self-love, self-worth, gratitude, and lessons finally learned that won’t need to be repeated in another relationship. Since taking personal responsibility and healing this area of my psyche, I began to experience more personal peace and contentedness than I have ever known up to that point. I have never felt so whole.

But I wouldn’t have been able to get there if I’d just continued to play the blame game and acted like my shit didn’t stink. And there was a lot of blame to play—so I did just that for a solid while, believe me. But the truth of the matter is that this was a pattern I had been repeating in all my relationships up to this point. This was simply a different flavor of the same thing. I had gotten out of other relationships that weren’t working, but I hadn’t learned the lesson of those relationships because I had refused to look very deeply in the mirror at the real culprit—me. I wasn’t owning my shit. After yet another go-around in this particular relationship pattern, it was time to ask myself why this was really happening, to look deeply at my fears and my hurts, and to finally accept myself, forgive myself, and level up.

We often get stuck in self-criticism and righteousness over our mistakes and our shortcomings, but as I said above, doing that does not create healing or a sense of inner peace. There’s nothing wrong with mistakes or failings or harsh realities. In fact, sometimes we need them to get truly real with ourselves. As I discovered from this experience, it was time to take a good hard look past the self-righteous, ego-based image of myself and into my heart and soul and see what was actually inside me. It was time to feel into my relationships with more sensitivity in order to get a better picture of my relationship with myself.

It is not a shame to be knocked down by other people. The important thing is to ask when being knocked down, “Why am I being knocked down?” If a person can reflect in this way, then there is hope for that person.

True Communication, True Relationship

Even as my father was creating the art of jeet kune do, he continued to always practice a basic wing chun exercise called chi sao, which translates to “sticking hands.” In this type of sensitivity training, two practitioners maintain contact with each other’s forearms while they execute techniques. They tune into changes in pressure and momentum with great sensitivity in order to be able to feel when there is an opportunity to attack and when they need to counter an opponent’s movements precisely, quickly, and with appropriate response. This exercise is often practiced blindfolded so that you have to hone in very directly to the sensation of your opponent and his movements. The drill claims to cultivate lightning-quick reactions and the ability to almost read your opponent’s mind.

In chi sao, the practitioners rock their arms side to side in a circular motion, never releasing the tension on their forearms and never stopping the motion. They continue to exchange energy back and forth, all the while sensing what the other is giving and then trying to respond skillfully and immediately. This is a truly connected relationship in which both sides are in full communication, contact, and sensitivity to each other, and in which both sides are pushing the other onward. This exercise requires great attention and presence, but it is also meant to prepare you to find the opening through which you will act.

So how will we act when we encounter a challenging person or situation? Do we just skirt around and avoid it or them altogether? Maybe. When it’s someone or something that we aren’t that invested in, then yes; maybe that’s fine. But what if this is one of our deepest relationships and it hits on one of our deepest wounds? What if the opposition we are meeting is within a very close relationship of ours where the stakes are emotionally high and we don’t want to just walk away? As my father wrote:

Instead of opposing force by force, one should complete an opposing movement by accepting the flow of energy from it and defeat it by borrowing from it. This is the law of adaptation.

In martial arts, this “law” could be akin to the idea of using the movement of someone’s strike to create an opening for your own action. Like in the chi sao exercise, this means being so attuned to your opponent’s energy that you can sense the opportunity to respond immediately. In a challenging personal situation, you can borrow the energy a person or situation is giving you and adapt that to the appropriate response. I say “appropriate response” here because unlike in a fight, we are not looking for the opening in which we can strike at the other person. The opening we are looking for is the one where we get to respond sincerely and with proper intent toward the meaningfulness of this particular sparring partner. Ultimately, we are also looking to stay open enough to learn something important about our sparring partner, ourselves, or the situation.

Let’s take the example of the guy I was seeing who was saying all the right things but not holding space for our relationship. In the beginning, I opposed that with force—I got mad. I tried to get him to take notice of me by first demanding his attention in petty ways and then flinging my hurt at him. All that did was make him pull away and put up more resistance, because who wants to be in a relationship with a petty and angry person? I was meeting his wall with my full-scale assault (force meets force). Instead I ultimately did the right thing and accepted the situation by borrowing from him what he was giving me (force adopts force), and I turned away. Thus, the water flows along the barrier and onto greater depths. It was the better and more powerful move because it preserved my dignity and my energy, bolstered my sense of self, and led me away from an impossible situation. I was taking care of myself rather than trying to get someone else to do it for me. And so I completed our relationship with the energy he was giving to it—the energy of withdrawal.

This was only possible by accepting what I was being shown through the mirror of our relationship. And the lessons I went on to learn about myself were only possible by looking honestly and deeply at what I had brought to this relationship. I transformed and healed myself, not through avoidance but rather by directly relating to and borrowing from the situation and meeting myself there in the process.

I love the quote below because it speaks to the depth of how much we are reflected in the things we encounter throughout our experience. We encounter the world every day, all day, and if we know how to look at it, if we can listen to our inner stories and how we are reacting to everything, then we will find that what we encounter is our love, our pain, our healing, our likes and dislikes, our beliefs, and more. We will find that what we encounter is ourselves.

The world and I are both in active correlation. I am that which sees the world, and the world is that which is seen by me. If there were no things to be seen, thoughts to be imagined, I would not see, think, or imagine. I acquire no understanding of myself except as I take account of objects, of the surroundings. I do not think unless I think of “things”—and there I find myself.

There Is No Me

To live is a constant process of relating; so come on out of that shell of isolation and conclusion and relate directly to what is being said. Do not make up your mind as to “this is this” or “that is that.” Begin to learn to investigate everything for yourself from now on. The oneness of life is a truth that can be fully realized only when a false notion of a separate self—whose destiny you consider apart from the whole—is forever annihilated.

We have used the word opponent throughout this chapter in talking about that which we relate to, but what is really meant is a symbiotic relationship between me and what I perceive as outside of me. And “outside of me,” we are discovering, is actually also me, because the world and I are always in active correlation—so there is no “outside of me.” Rather, like the principal of yin yang, there are no actual opposites but instead only complements. “When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same as if seen from the center of a moving circle.” My father also put it another way—“To change with change is the changeless state.” In other words, when I express my true self and move with the world rather than against it, then change becomes something to flow with rather than resist.

In looking at our “opponents,” we must not be afraid to uncover our true self and let that be seen. And in being comfortable enough in our own skin to be vulnerable and real, we suddenly begin allowing others the comfort of their true identities as well. If we do the work of understanding who we are, we will hold more and more to our core and see the opposing points of view more as complements rather than condemnations. Remember, opposites isolate us and create false distance. In reality, there is no distance—everything is connected like one fluid motion of a wave.

Remember the last part of my father’s water origin story when he was out on the boat? A bird flew by and cast its reflection on the water, and in that moment, he realized that when he was facing an opponent, what he needed to do was feel his feelings and think his thoughts, and then allow them to pass through like a reflection rather than get hung up on them. He said, “Should not the thoughts and emotions I had when in front of an opponent pass like the reflection of the bird flying over the water?… not being without emotion or feeling, but being one in whom feeling was not sticky and blocked.”

Wouldn’t that be nice? To be able to have your feelings and thoughts and allow others to have their feelings and thoughts? And to be able to share your feelings and thoughts without having to make a case for yourself or against someone else? You just come together, share, and then walk away, both intact—maybe having opened each other’s eyes to something new. And if the relationship is toxic in some way, you can always walk away intact and still allow them to keep what’s theirs at a safe distance.

So take a moment to consider with me the possibility of holding relationship to others in this way: Picture a full, bright moon shining down on a pool of still water. On one side is the water and on the other is the moon. As they hold and reflect each other, notice that each makes the other even more resplendent.

As the water manifests the brightness of the moon, the moon manifests the clarity of the water.