Month of Mays: May We Envelope Our Enemies with Love
When I learned reiki and began letting go of expectations, I noticed an interesting change happening. I became more emotionally stable. Fewer things upset me and I spent less time worrying about what other people thought of me. I stopped playing the victim because I realized that things would improve a lot faster if I stopped complaining and actually did something about the problems. There was, however, one glaring exception. I couldn’t let go of the past. The way I viewed certain people, those who I had already identified as enemies, remained the same. I kept clinging to that storyline.
If someone that offended me previously walked through the door, I still wanted to see myself as the victim. With every new offense, I went back through my mental list of their previous offenses and upset myself even more. I subscribed to the illusion that if only they would apologize, my life will be better.
Who are Our Real Enemies?
This illusion was shattered when, one day, I actually got the apology that I thought I wanted from someone that hurt me emotionally. In the moment, I forgave this person and felt lighter. I thought that would be the end. But a few days later, resentments creeped right back in. I was angry about the same thing again. I still couldn’t let it go. That’s when I realized I was looking for an apology from the wrong person. The apology I wanted was an apology from ME!
I was mad at me for not being strong enough to defend myself. I was mad at me for putting myself in the situation in the first place. It was me. The part of me that’s ruled by my survival instinct was enraged at the person who made a bad decision and potentially risked my survival: me. And I was just using the person who hurt me as a shield to hide behind, so that I didn’t have to face my own rage.
How Our Survival Instincts Still Rules Us
As human beings, we love to believe that we are somehow superior than our animal counterparts. But at the fundamental level, we’re still mammals. We have a deep-seated fear of not being loved. Baby mammals cannot survive without the mother’s milk, so we crave our mothers’ love. Young mammals rely on the herd to protect them, so we try to be as lovable as possible to be accepted by our community. People who dislike us activate this fundamental fear as an mammal, so we make them the enemy and try to convince ourselves that they are wrong about you.
But the only true way to escape from this fear is to become someone that you can rely on for love. When you lovingly accept yourself, you feel safer. And when this happens, you stop finding enemies because there’s no one that can hurt you irreparably. Instead, you see the children within them who are controlled by their survival instincts, operating under irrational fear of not being loved. You start wanting everyone to feel loved, even someone like Vladimir Putin! Let me tell you, once I began sending reiki to all the people that I disliked before, every relationship improved. The idea might not sit well with you in the beginning, but try picturing your “enemy” as a child and sending reiki to that child. Flood this child with love and give him/her a hug. You will never see anyone as an enemy again.