Mirror, mirror…
Each time someone pushes your emotional buttons, just remember that the problem doesn’t lie with the other person, as much as you would love to believe so.
The external world is just mirroring what lives within you.
When my daughter was still in primary school, I would get really angry with her about one thing. Her messy room. It used to really trigger me. I tested everything to change her behaviour. I tried reasoning, bartering, bribery, anger, punishment. No results, no improvement. It was like talking to a wall.
Until one day I remembered the mirroring aspect of life.
Still, I couldn’t figure it out. I am a very neat person. My wardrobe is organised, it’s clean, my shoes are put away all facing the same way, I don’t leave things lying around on the floor, God forbid! And I religiously fold my clothes. Alright - some people may even call me somewhat OCD. Well, I exaggerate, but you get the drift. Just to say. I could not identify with the mirroring aspect of my daughter’s chaos in my own life.
Until one day I caught my own self-talk, saying “what a mess” while looking at my desk. Yes, I admit, I used to hate admin with a passion. My way of dealing with papers was to pile them up. Oh, they were really well organised piles, very neat, each pile with a specific subject and in chronological order. Yet I knew that I still needed to file all these papers away “properly” instead of having five different stacks of papers on my desk.
And that’s when I “got it.” I cleaned up my office, filed my papers away, and waited. I felt so good about myself for finally addressing my own mess, I could walk right past my daughter’s room and not be bothered by her mess. I could even walk into her room and look at the chaos with compassion, and let her be. I knew there was no point in fighting. Experience had shown me that fighting with her about it didn’t result in a clean room, or only in a very short lived tidy room, with a lot of anger and resentment in the air. This saddened me a lot more than the untidiness ever did.
Once I realised that my knee-jerk reaction to her room was directly linked to my own feelings of discontent with my own admin “chaos,” not only did I use my daughter’s room as a measure of me needing to address my papers, but I also noticed that our relationship improved. And one day, without me saying a thing, or raising a finger, she started becoming a neat freak herself. It was rather spectacular in my eyes. The magic of how letting go of an issue can somehow just resolve it peacefully. I believe in zen it is called “doing by non-doing.”
The moral of the story? The only person in the world that you can change, is yourself. And once you do that, and your actions are in line with your beliefs, you live with integrity.
Somehow, life becomes a whole lot more flowing and filled with love.