Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
struggling with accepting others
I'm having a hard time with certain relationships, and it's the same problem that recurs. Relationships with certain people (they're usually close friends) all of the sudden change and I start to become annoyed by them, and irritable when I'm around them.
I'm not quite sure of the cause of how to remedy but I feel that the reason for it is definitely that I haven't figured out how to completely escape my ego and I'm still applying strong judgments to others.
The situation (which I am quite aware of even while it's happening) is quite troubling. it seems like i tend to judge close friends more harshly than complete strangers. I can't figure out why!!!
Especially in conversations, I can't figure out how to let the judgments go. Because these judgments are largely unconscious, and most of my consciousness is directed towards the conversation and keeping the social vibe going. It seems that the act of letting things go requires much more conscious attention sometimes.
Does anyone have a trick for this, or know how to remedy? Have you ever felt this way?
I'm not quite sure of the cause of how to remedy but I feel that the reason for it is definitely that I haven't figured out how to completely escape my ego and I'm still applying strong judgments to others.
The situation (which I am quite aware of even while it's happening) is quite troubling. it seems like i tend to judge close friends more harshly than complete strangers. I can't figure out why!!!
Especially in conversations, I can't figure out how to let the judgments go. Because these judgments are largely unconscious, and most of my consciousness is directed towards the conversation and keeping the social vibe going. It seems that the act of letting things go requires much more conscious attention sometimes.
Does anyone have a trick for this, or know how to remedy? Have you ever felt this way?
0
Comments
When we try to make habits or thoughts go away, it requires judgement, and negative evaluation plus rejection of your own thoughts. In other words, you are trying to defeat judgement, negative evaluation and rejection by using the same mechanism on yourself.
Accepting your own thoughts would be an effective way to learn how to accept others.
What happens with me at least is this:
1) I begin interacting with my friends
2) Being with them makes me unconsciously aware of how much compassion I lack for them and for myself, as all beings are subject to birth, aging, old age, sickness, and death (i.e. suffering).
3) My ego becomes angry at them for making me aware of one of my faults.
4) My ego judges them and criticizes them to make me feel better about myself.
5) I suffer as a result of my actions, and so do they.
To tell the truth, I havn't as of yet had much success in developing more compassion for my friends and for myself, but I am working on it, and I have had some promising early success. I am somewhat less critical and judgemental than I use to be.
Metta meditation can be helpful too.
http://www.buddhanet.net/metta.htm
Kind wishes,
Dazzle
I think some of it stems from the fact that those people who we are closest too are the people we care about the most, and as such we want thtm eot be happy and to understand the world in the way we do as Buddhists. So when we see them being different or what we may see as wrong, its difficult to accept and we want to educate them and help them.
I think this is a very natural response and as has been said the best thing is to accept that this response happens, but to make note of it and try and let it pass. you don't have to act on it.
These days I try to think about why people think or feel the way they do, what has happened in their lives to lead to them being as they are. To let go of my own ideas and think about how they got theirs and thus to understand them from where they are. I think this does help a lot.
I think also that because we spend more time with people we care about we come across the same things over and over again and this can be very frustrating.
The danger is that as you catch yourself judging others you then develop into judging yourself and its a downward spiral. but as has been said if you are aware this is happening then you can do something about it.
But Buddhism DOES have the answer:
1. Regular meditation increases our ability to practice mindful awareness off of the meditation cushion ... even in the midst of social situations.
2. Observing ourselves, we come to see the stimulus-response pathway ... for me, I began to be able to see how a situation would trigger my discomfort and then to see how that triggered my **** responses.
3. Whenever I saw that discomfort rise up, I would allow it to be there but the action that I took was to generate compassion for my poor, deluded, suffering self. It works ... I almost never feel judgmental anymore, and when I do it quickly dissolves and the compassion I feel for myself expands to include the other person and I end up feeling very close to them.
Buddhism says much about generating compassion for all sentient beings. We too are sentient beings, worthy of compassion for our fragility and ignorance. So whenever I say the Four Immeasurables, I envision all sentient beings ... and I'm in there too:
May all sentient beings have happiness and its causes,
May all sentient beings be free of suffering and its causes,
May all sentient beings never be separated from bliss without suffering,
May all sentient beings be in equanimity, free of bias, attachment and anger.
After reading some of the advice in this thread I can see how I've been going about this issue in the wrong ways. For example, I've been hyper critical, angry, and disappointed with myself for feeling hyper critical, angry, and disappointed with my mother, just like Godzilla described. I'd completely forgotten to generate compassion for my 'poor, deluded, suffering self' as Foible put it so well. I was trying to do that for my mother while hating myself for not being able to.
My inner rage toward my mother has been so overwhelming at different times in my life that I've felt like a monster, an angry demon. That's especially how I've been seeing myself, to varying degrees, for the last 7 years when it comes to her and I don't think I've ever stopped to look at how my own anger was making me suffer, especially when I force myself to swallow it out of shame.
Yup. It's the shame. *light bulb goes on* It's the shame that's been holding me back this whole time. I have to get right with myself first before I can start working on the relationship with my mother. It's so obvious to me now.
Thank you, Dazzle, for suggesting the use of mindfulness of the breath in the moment as well as metta meditation practice. I don't know why but I've never actually used these practices when it comes to conflicts with my mother. I use them all the time in so many other instances yet it hadn't occurred to me to use them in this context for some strange reason. Sometimes the simplest things that can help the most just fall through the cracks and a timely reminder can be priceless.
Foible, your three points are right on the mark for me I think. I'd like to copy and paste them onto my desktop as a daily reminder/guide/formula/recipe if you wouldn't mind.
Thank you all for your wise advice and clarity and thank you, Leisha, for bringing up this topic in the first place. This is a pretty big deal for me and I'm awfully grateful to you all.
hope you don't mind me responding to what you've written, but as I read your post it really struck me how strong your anger with your mother is, and to me that would imply that she has done something or been a certain way that has triggered such a strong response from you.
Maybe instead of your anger being something to be ashamed of, your anger is actually appropriate and a way of you defending yourself? In which case maybe you need to accept your anger and not try to change it but try and understand why its there.
Sometimes people can do things that really hurt us and make us angry and I don't think Buddhism is about ignoring that that can happen.
Lots of food for thought here. Thank you!
I don't think there's anything wrong in what you're doing. I've had friends in the past who got into drugs, or became borderline criminals, or just intolerable in other ways because of how they behaved. So I judged their behavior and realized it was best to stop being friends with them.
Now of course, your friends don't sound like that by the way you describe them, but still, there's nothing wrong with finding something objectionable in your acquaintances. The question is how much you're willing to tolerate them.
It just occurred to me that when giving advice you might want to include the fact that you're not a Buddhist because if I was new here and came looking for advice from people following the Buddhist path I'd like to know if that advice was coming from a Buddhist perspective or not. Just a thought, to be fair.