We Change the World by Changing Ourselves

When we engage with others and are engaged by others, we have a basic choice on how to conduct ourselves. We can choose to behave reactively to the ideas and emotional states of others or choose to behave proactively by remaining grounded and centered in our highest values.

When we are devoted to a life of self-reflection and self-knowledge, we are so often encountered with others who seek to fight, to drag us down to their level and beat us with experience, and to stifle us and fog us because our radiance disturbs their false equanimity. As these people are not offering us equal value in return, it is not our job to dismantle their antagonism. They have not paid the price for our abilities. Neither is it our job to react to them and respond out of distress and unease. If we are dedicated to a life of self-reflection and self-knowledge, our job is to contain their antagonism and remove it from our lives as it crosses our boundaries. We can only do this while remaining grounded and centered in our highest values. We owe it to no friend to step off the path of self-growth in order to mend the wounds they do not attend to. This places us in the role of a parent. It is fundamentally reactive and disturbs the balance of the friendship. It is also the modus operandi of all cult leaders, those who place themselves in the role of parent to their friends. It is important we ask for value in return for the gifts we share.

We can contain the antagonism of another by expressing and maintaining our boundaries and preferences in a clear and empathetic manner. The empathy is for ourselves. We do not owe empathy to a person who is behaving antagonistically, either by acting out of their wounded child in order to fight with us or acting out of their inner parent in an attempt to “correct” our behavior. We owe it to ourselves to remain grounded and centered in our path to knowing ourselves better and healing our childhood deficits.

We do ourselves a disservice when we behave reactively toward others by acting out our wounded child or our inner parent. These such circumstances, which occur to us all, call for us to self-reflect and attend to our unmet needs. We can learn from every conflict we’ve ever had.

When we engage from our true self, which is boundaried and aligned with truth, we appeal proactively to the true self in others. The more consistently we can do this, a consistency born out of daily dedication to self-reflection and self-therapy, the less we find ourselves in the company of those uninterested in living rich inner lives. The corrupted, the stuck, and the antagonistic fall away of their own accord. Those who are true seekers learn from our gifts and, in their own time, learn to share their own gifts. We change the world by changing ourselves. To live proactively is to lead by example. To live reactively is to repeat our unconscious, historical traumas.