“It is our relationships with people we consider ‘difficult’ that offer us the greatest opportunity for spiritual growth. It is one thing to be patient and show kindness and compassion toward people we love, but it is quite another thing to manifest such spiritual attributes toward those we dislike.
We can usually bring ourselves to overlook the shortcomings of friends and loved ones, but we find it much harder to show forgiveness and love to those we don’t like. Yet this is precisely how we experience the greatest spiritual growth. The challenge in life is sowing patience and understanding toward someone we dislike, having compassion for someone who irritates us, and showing forgiveness and love toward someone who has caused us harm.
Buddhism teaches that the practice of patience toward an enemy is a noteworthy endeavor. The Dalai Lama points out, in The Art of Happiness, that if you can learn to develop patience and tolerance toward your enemies, everything else then becomes much easier: ‘The enemy is the necessary condition for practicing patience.’
It becomes easier to demonstrate spiritual attributes in our rela
tionships when we understand that in meeting difficult people, we are simply meeting ourselves.
The readings repeatedly tell us that the difficult people we encounter in our lives are a reflection of ourselves, as we previously were in this lifetime or in another. “…each soul must meet its own errors—in body, in mind and in spirit. In spirit the entity is ever willing to correct same. Self so oft gets in the way.” (3320-1)
Venture Inward, Oct. – Dec. 2012, “Living In The Spirit,” Kathy Callahan Ph.D., p. 11- 12.
