As a highly sensitive and empathic person, I often (and often unknowingly) take on bits and pieces of the people around me. When this happens, the “mirror” approach to the world stops working.
What I mean is, what I see around me may not always be a reflection of me after all. I find myself constantly holding up the mirror when I am disturbed by something I encounter, always asking myself, “what am I doing that is bringing this experience to me?” and, “how can I change and be better to create a more pleasant immediate environment?”
This is all nice and well and good, but it regularly places other people’s free will and karma upon my own experience. Just because I am smiling doesn’t mean the world must smile with me, and if I’m smiling and I’m greeted by a surly and unfriendly barista in the morning, that doesn’t mean his approach to me is mine to change or that I have to go into some horribly deep reflection to determine what’s “off” inside of me that inspired such a salutation.
It simply means I keep smiling and let him work out his own issues – they are not mine to process – and an intentional detachment from the meaning of his behavior will spare me and my psyche the need to address it for him.
We highly sensitive people can take the mirror approach a bit too literally and cause ourselves a great deal of harm in the process. Similar to a dog taking on his master’s illness in the purest form of self-sacrifice (no martyrdom or message), we encounter dis-ease in the world and almost subconsciously feel it’s ours to digest, process and smooth over. We make ourselves sick.
A friend of mine recently held up this mirror for me to help me see that not everything that passes through my spectrum of feelings and thoughts is my own, and that I often inflict punishment upon myself for ways of being that are not inherently mine to begin with.
As such, the old saying, “Smile and the world smiles with you,” is nowhere near an if-then statement. There is no pre-determined direct causality to the act of smiling. For if there were, then my free will would somehow bear more weight and significance than another’s. Someone may argue that if you smile, it may feel like the world is a happier place, which is more the meaning of the phrase. Sure, yes. Point taken. My own insight here tears down the empath’s literal interpretation of seeing the world as a pure and unaltered reflection of your own experience.
Seeing other people’s behavior as causally linked to my own human experience is a rather self-absorbed and egocentric view of the world. Rather, in order to save my sanity, I am reminded to use the mirror to identify patterns, habits and points of needed self-reflection. It is a tool but it is not dogma.
The world doesn’t always smile with you, and that doesn’t mean you should surrender your smile to some deep inner analysis, you just keep smiling anyway.
You stay in your own vibration.
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