When facing someone who triggers us, who annoys us, or who causes us anger, it is easy to just blame the other individual for their actions and write off the experience as another one of those unpleasant parts of life.
But to do that, we would be missing out on one of life’s greatest gifts, that of reflection.
We have a tendency to think that we are all separate individual human beings, with no relation to each other. In this disconnected world in our minds, what someone else does has no relation to us, other than proximity.
However, if we take these opportunities as moments when life is reflecting back to us something within ourselves, then we can use these encounters as clues into our own psyches.
Say someone irritates us because they are cheap. In what way are we cheap (to ourselves, others, etc.)? If we get angry over how someone treats us with disrespect, in what way are we disrespecting ourselves or others?
You get the idea.
We are truly all connected, whether we like it or not, and the sooner we see each other as mirrors of our own behavior, the sooner we can stop reacting to these situations unconsciously and start responding to them with love and compassion.
