“Your opinion of me is NONE of My business”
I remember when I heard this for the first time at the early stages of my spiritual journey. I was shocked thinking “Isn't it selfish and uncaring and unloving to say that?!” All my life I had been conditioned and have defined myself by the OPINION OF OTHERS. "Who am I without others approval or validation? How can I fit into this social structure if I don’t comply by its values and opinions?Surely my safety and my worthiness depend on it!" I was raised a Catholic with constant fear of being punished by God for my sins, feeling undeserving of His Love. I saw myself as a “servant” to others to please them and make them happy and so maybe earn God’s forgiveness and my place in Heaven. I saw myself as a victim and collected in my life many “abusers” who in the eyes of God’s Last Judgment would look worse than me and hence more guilty and maybe oh maybe I would escape His punishment. God would punish them and not me...
I believe that we are born with openness and willingness to BE, free of judgments. Yet, especially in the first 7 years of our lives we are like sponges, absorbing with no censorship all that is said and done to us and about us. We accept those opinions of others as truth of who we are. If we are called stupid, fat and ugly, we accept that it is who we are. We define ourselves by other's reactions to us and we build our image of ourselves and the world around us based on all those beliefs we accumulated in childhood. We forget that we are spiritual beings in human bodies and with human experiences. We are in this world but not of it...We forget who we are in Truth, of that part of us that is always ONE with Our Source of Being. That Being that is called so many names – God, Divinity, Light, Universe, Consciousness, Peace, Love… I see It as this All embracing, eternal, limitless and unconditional Love.
I know now though that I don’t have to EARN It or please everyone to deserve It. In fact the only time I “lose” my connection with It is when I am in fear. I love the quote from A Course in Miracles, “In every moment we are either Hosts to God – Love, or the hostages of our ego – fear”. And one of the biggest fears that keeps us in hell on earth is the fear of opinion of others. We give that true Self away and we become the hostages to our voice of fear that we are not enough or are unlovable, which is merely an accumulation of our mistaken beliefs of who we are, learnt in the past.
I see now that I am never upset by what others say and do to and about me, but by MY INTERPRETATIONS OF WHAT IT MEANS ABOUT ME.
The undesirable comments and actions of others trigger in us our old unresolved pains and traumas. Our ego's reaction to it is to blame OTHERS for that. And the powerless battle for both parties goes on like a ping-pong match of tossing the blame and guilt at one another.
But there is a true, powerful way of resolving it. Firstly we have to ACKNOWLEDGE out emotions and see them as gifts as they make us AWARE of those unresolved traumas which block us from our freedom. Then we AWAKEN to the AWARENESS of Love Presence within us, our True Being. We now stop reacting to them or try to escape from them by making ourselves busy with over eating, over drinking, narcotics, shopping, sex – the list is endless.
Instead we can look at them and validate them with new eyes – eyes of Truth. We can challenge our old beliefs about ourselves; “Is it really true that I am unlovable just because he hasn’t responded immediately to my text? Am I really a failure when I wasn’t chosen to play that role in that film?
We look at those situations with NO RESISTANCE, but now WITH ACCEPTANCE OF WHAT IS and new UNDERSTANDING that my pain is the effect of MY INTERPRETATION OF WHAT IT MEANS ABOUT ME AND NOT BY WHAT IS HAPPENING. I AM loveable and loved, worthy and whole, with or without it”.
Another teaching from ACIM says that “We are not here to change the world around us but OUR OPINION and beliefs about the world”.
I now know that my true power and freedom lie in taking responsibility for my feelings, as people and the world around me only reflect my own vibration and my continuous string of thoughts running in my subconscious mind about myself and the world around me.
So my only duty here is not to listen to the opinions of others and not to try to change them but to change MY beliefs about them and see them with Love instead of fear.
And that is how we become powerful, free and happy; By allowing the Love to fill us healing all the wounds of rejection, shame, humiliation, not being good enough, undeserving of Love. We stop the running judgments of ourselves in our mind and we stop chasing for this Love outside of ourselves. We stop pleasing others and stop saying "yes" to them when everything in us wants to say "NO".
And so that is what that quote means to me and that is what I aspire to be in every moment of my life. Am I there yet? No, but the time I am “the hostage to my ego” is getting shorter and shorter and my Happy times resting in Gods arms are becoming longer and longer…
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