It happens to me all the time. I'll open up to my husband or a friend about something that is bothering me, they will give me some good advice, and I immediately get angry and defensive. I really just noticed this about myself in the past month. After my emotions have settled I always realize that the advice is good and I usually take it. I'm still not really sure where the emotion part of that comes from, but I am curious about why it happens. I am starting to be able to be a witness to my own behaviour, and watch it objectively.
This is svadhyaya, self-study. This work of looking at yourself, seeing yourself dispassionately and without ego is challenging. At Christmas every year I enjoy unboxing all the ornaments and remembering where they came from, things I had put out of my mind for a year. We're all a bit like those boxes of ornaments. We have things we forgot about, or things we packed away deeply that we need to brush off and open up once in awhile. Doing this work with yourself can be difficult and draining, but it can also be so rewarding.
Yogis know that how you see yourself impacts how you see others, and you can not see in others what you do not see in yourself. It can be interesting to stop and be curious about why you are feeling the way you do about someone or something. Is there something there that you see in yourself that you might not be comfortable with? When we experience discomfort with a situation it comes from something within us, not from the situation itself. As we learned when we were talking about santosha, all things are neutral. Good or bad comes from us.
The beautiful thing about this is the flip side is also true. The things we love and admire in others, the devine, we can only recognize because we see it in ourselves also. So the next time you see someone you love, and you can think of all those things that make them amazing, that's because you have that awesomeness inside you too. And that is a beautiful feeling. Inside you is all the beauty that you see in the world around you.
In the next little bit, see if you can be curious about the boxes you have packaged yourself into. Can you peer into them and maybe unwrap one? Be kind and gentle as you would to someone you care about, but see what you can learn about yourself.
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