Reflections

Yield to Counterintuition

• By fannieb
• August 30, 2015
• No Comments

As I grow spiritually and become increasingly aware of my thoughts and the fields of energy all around me (including my own) my life lessons are coming faster and faster, but so too are the tests and retest. Today on my morning walk I saw a woman walking toward me 10 feet away. She was getting in her morning exercise too. I’ve seen her several times before and my thoughts of her based on these previous encounters created instant dread at having to pass her and I groaned silently inside.

This woman of average height and weight was wearing black biking shorts, the tight knee-length kind, and a red T-shirt. In her hands she was clutching pink dumbbells which she was using to do bicep curls as she walked. On her face she was wearing a scowl which conveyed the message, “Don’t fuck with me!” The carriage of her body and the manner in which she walked made me envision her in a suit of armor meant to protect her from the cruel and unfair world that she inhabits.

The first time I passed her on one of my walks I looked into her face in preparation for greeting her with a friendly hello. I tried to look into her eyes which were averted and I got a bad feeling as if I were to say something to her she might lash out at me, so I didn’t speak. This was the reason for my internal groan this morning – I did not want to have to come in to contact, no matter how briefly, with this foreboding and negative force.

And so this morning as I approached her I braced myself putting on my imaginary suit of armor in order to protect myself from her and her menacing presence. We passed each other silently, each of us not looking directly at the other. Once I was a few steps beyond her I sighed in an effort to shake off the stress I felt during those 30 seconds. I continued on my walk reciting my French language lesson for today and when that ended I started listening to a Stuart Wilde book on tape called “Silent Power”. And, coincidentally, what I heard almost immediately was how to handle people with strong negative energy fields. Stuart’s advice was the complete opposite of what I had just done in bracing and hardening myself and my heart. His recommendation was to soften and project silently love and peace to those you meet on the street, including the hard done-by person. In this way their negativity can pass through you as it has nothing to attach to.

Ooops. I failed that pop quiz, I thought. I’ll have to remember to do that the next time I see her. And I honestly thought the next time I’d see her would be tomorrow or in the next day or two, but not five minutes later who was completing another lap of her morning walk but this angry woman. I smiled to myself as I would soon have the opportunity to try out this technique. I took a deep breath as I walked toward her and thought the words “peace and love to be with you” as I passed her. The change in my energy from our last encounter 20 minutes earlier was drastic. Instead of feeling of tightness in my body and irritation followed by relief I felt much more at ease and less threatened. It actually worked, at least for me. I don’t know how she was feeling at this second pass but I had no hostility toward this woman and my judgment of her dissipated almost completely.

Who knew that yielding with loving thoughts instead of blocking with hard, defensive ones could have such an effect? And, how amazing that I was given a chance for a do-over when these words of wisdom couldn’t have been fresher in my mind!

Photo Credit: Michael