When we’ve been hurt by someone else’s behaviour or words, often the mind plays up and decides that our ego has been bruised, the self-image tainted, we feel that we need to enact vengeance, to get revenge, to punish or the opposite, play the victim and seek attention and feel sorry for ourselves. In most cases, there is a bit of both punishment and victimhood.
These games that we play serve no purpose at all, other than to perpetuate the victim/punisher role that is played out in the mind and continue our own internal pain. It is damaging not only to ourselves in terms of the suffering we unduly cause inside, it is also damaging to the people we inflict our victim/punisher behaviour on. It is not for us to judge and punish other people’s choices of behaviour.
If we stay conscious, if we allow the reaction to just be, if we choose not to be internally bothered by others and if we choose to just simply observe our ego and thoughts, then we stay calm, at peace and do not react out of fear and its other emotions.
That does not mean we have to outwardly accept others and their choice of behaviour, it simply means inner surrender and acceptance to what is, to accepting others as they are and to not allow suffering within from our ego’s desire to be a victim or a punisher of others.
