Understanding What is Behind Your Reactions

And there’s like this, if you want to feel the duality, just try and speak an aphorism in the face of what you’re really doing. And you’ll see how superficial that aphorism is, a beautiful truth when, “Wow, I am being judgmental, why? Gosh, why?” Well when you do that—again, when you stare into the well without just pulling out something, whether it’s a truth or an aphorism, but really stare into that; “what is behind this that I tend to do?”—you’ll find things; you’ll understand yourself. Sometimes it’s you’re simply afraid for yourself. You’re armoring yourself; you’re defending yourself; you’re walling up your mind in Separation because Separation is a scary place, especially if you don’t have your foundation, especially if you’re disassociated from who you are. So there’s a lot of this reactivity in the mind that is defense-oriented. I’ll leave it there. 

When you look into these, take note of what you do and ask: “Why did I just do that? What was behind that?” Maybe you saw something in someone else that you know is in you and you don’t like that about yourself. You can’t accept that. You just saw it and therefore you’re reacting to that person. You’ll find these, these are the breadcrumbs into the forest and you’ll make discoveries there. And often it’s really not about judgment at all; it’s not about blame or criticism at all. It’s something else. It’s like referral pain in the body. You got knee pain; it’s not the knee, something else. You got low back pain; it’s not the low back, it’s something else. It’s like these referral points. And I think we bounce off of our pain points—our judgment, our self-criticism, our shame—because it’s just, we just don’t know how to get into it. But really it’s not even about that. You don’t have to own your shame or your past errors as what you did. It wasn’t even you who did it. You were acting out your conditioning or the mental environment that you’ve been absorbing all your life. So having the courage to go into those pain points and see where they refer you to, I think that could lead to some really important discoveries.