Duality is Sneaky
Within any given moment, an opportunity to experience joy or pain is right there amid life. Depending upon your prejudice, history, focus, or tendencies, you will seek out and experience joy, or you will notice the pain and limitation of life. All of this happens in the flash of a thought, a nanosecond in time.
This all happens so quickly and often appears to be so logical that we simply do not question it, because it seems real according to our human ways of measuring life. And because it seems to be so logical, we slip into a state of duality. Let’s take this experience and oversimplify it for the point of this conversation. We often tend to separate things into two experiences: Right and Wrong. And, with this over simplification, we make people and ourselves right or wrong. Any tendency to place an experience or a person into one of these categories causes us to create a chasm within ourselves that becomes harder and harder to heal over time. The effort to undo right and wrong takes way more effort because of the inertia that it is associated with it.
Why would we go through such effort to transcend these tendencies? Freedom, freedom is why! With every judgment where we are certain that someone or something is wrong. There is a weight to carrying these judgments. Freedom from all of this assessing will leave us freer, lighter, and more open.
The best way to heal this duality is to not create it to begin with. So, depending upon where one is on the timeline of your life, this effort will take more or less focus on your part, but always worth the effort. Below are some suggestions to use in your own life and to use in influencing friends and family.
1. Replace curiosity with judgment. Curiosity is the cure for judgment. Where curiosity exists, judgment cannot, and the lines between right and wrong will immediately blur. So, if you feel tempted to fall on one side of the story or another in assessing right or wrong, ask yourself these questions: what is actually happening here? What is the call for love? What is trying to be healed.
2. If you are a parent or grandparent or one who has any influence over children and the way that they think, learn to ask them questions that lead them to think about why they think what they think. Ask them questions like: What do you think about that? How do you feel about that? Etc.
3. When listening to another, especially when they are seeking for you to agree with their strong opinion or upset, say something like: wow, that’s interesting, or that’s surprising, or wow, you seem to feel very strongly about this subject. All of these options allow you to leave this individual feeling heard, but you will not be colluding with their pain and story.
4. In general, resist the temptation to assign right or wrong anywhere. Humans are complicated creatures with needs that are equally complicated. Oversimplify anything with right or wrong and you will miss the nuances that make us precious and special.
Please send me any comments or questions about this article, I would love to engage with you in a conversation about this. Email me at michelle@michellewadleigh.com
Michelle Wadleigh, Teacher, Speaker, Transformation Facilitator, No Mud, No Lotus Forgiveness Coach.
