The Mirror Isn’t the Person – It’s the Reaction
I began meditation in search of God. That’s what the books pointed toward, so I kept practising without really knowing how sitting quietly could lead anywhere close to that. I didn’t know it would end up changing the way I looked at people, and eventually, the way I looked at myself.
Then People Started Showing Me Something
Though, I had the notion that meditation meant looking within, alone, eyes closed, away from everyone. However, somewhere along the way, I started noticing something outside myself too. People were showing me parts of myself I couldn’t always see in meditation. I don’t remember exactly when this began. It probably came through some kind of hurt, someone’s behaviour landing harder than it should have, and a question forming on its own: why does someone else’s behaviour have so much power over me?
That question stayed with me longer than I expected it to.
Why Does Someone Else Have the Power to Hurt Me?
I started noticing how much I was accommodating people. Adjusting, waiting, making myself available, changing my plans, accepting things that hurt me and then feeling hurt by them anyway. The harder part wasn’t only what other people were doing. It was seeing my own participation in it. There was a thought that came with real force: how can I be so stupid as to give someone else the power to hurt me?
That was uncomfortable to sit with. But it’s worth being precise about what this actually means, and what it doesn’t. Sometimes someone really is behaving badly. Seeing my own reaction clearly was never meant to explain away someone else’s behaviour, or make it my fault that they acted the way they did. The mirror is the reaction. It was never a justification for what caused it, the same distinction Do We Really Need to Forgive? makes about allowing something without approving of it. Meditation had already taught me I could watch what was happening inside me without that watching turning into blame. So I started watching.
I Started Watching Myself
Not just around people I loved. Around everyone: family, colleagues, friends, strangers, people I admired, people I couldn’t stand, people who had something to offer me, people who had nothing to offer me at all. The waiter. The security guard. The colleague. The person with status, and the person with none.
I watched what changed inside me depending on who was standing in front of me. Why did I behave differently with different people? Why did someone’s position change how I treated them? Why did I want approval from some people and not others? Why did certain people irritate me almost instantly? Why did I tolerate things from some that I wouldn’t tolerate from others? Why did I behave differently when nobody “important” happened to be watching?
I wasn’t looking for answers right away. I was just watching. Slowly, patterns started to show themselves.
One Interaction Could Be Dismissed. A Pattern Couldn’t.
A single reaction could always be explained away. But when something kept repeating, I got curious. If the same feeling showed up again and again, I looked at it. If the same kind of behaviour from completely different people affected me in similar ways, I looked at that too. I wasn’t questioning myself to find something wrong with me. Just to see what was actually happening. There was no method to it. It happened on its own, the way Conscious Living describes the outer world working, not as a distraction from the inner one, but as one of the only ways to actually see it.
