How People Treat You Is Their Karma, How You React Is Yours

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There is a specific distance between our heart and the individuals in our lives that is filled with love, patience, kindness, compassion and everything good.

In this space, we are able to love unconditionally, assume the best intent (more often then not), find humour in unexpected ways, discover forgiveness and allow space for relationships to grow naturally. For us mortals, this area is typically reserved for beloved family members, partners, children and the absolute closest of friends. This tends to be our place of authenticity and where we are most comfortable being ourselves.

How we tend to feel about someone can often be deeply connected to their proximity to our heart.

Having said that, it is unfortunate for those that fall outside of the circle as the more distance that exists between our heart and where they are standing, the fainter these qualities become. I don’t believe this is a conscious choice for most, yet its reality is always present and evidenced within our interactions. I can populate an endless list of examples where I have pushed others almost mercilessly as they interfered with my doing (getting things done) or did something to enflame my ego. When this occurs, I lose complete sense of who I want to be and my focus shifts to ensuring the individual is clearly aware of my colorful thoughts towards them. There is no love here and it couldn’t be further from my authentic self.

Whether it is the guy that stirred the reaction by stepping on your fly new kicks, the customer that showed up late for his appointment, the acquaintance that is overly opinionated or the colleague that opines to know it all – we often don’t afford these individuals the opportunity to occupy the space close to our heart and to experience the benefits or knowing our authentic selves. As an outsider, they are excluded from a pretty awesome club and miss all the benefits and love that comes from being in this exclusive group. In place of awesome, they receive our judgement, our assumptions and a giant dose of our ego that turns everything they do into something about us. That’s a pretty crappy trade by any standard and a steep price to pay for not being in our club.

At the most granular level we are all people and it is our labels, thoughts, feelings and emotions that we attach to others that dictate entrance to our awesome club and ultimately their proximity to our heart.

Imagine what your life could be like if you if you used the infinite space within your heart to share your love and your best-self with the world. Conversations would be transformed and your relationships would immensely evolve. You could use each interaction to share your gifts, lift others up and propel them forward on their journey as it is hard enough to navigate this life without having to deal with the bombardment of judgements, assumptions and destructive egos.

We each have the opportunity to create more richness in our lives and positively impact everyone around us – all we have to do is choose to let them in. Let everyone experience the love, patience, kindness, compassion and all the goodness you create. Dr. Wayne Dyer said it best,

“How people treat you is their karma; how you react is yours.”

How are you choosing to react to others around you and how is that helping you create more of what you want?