Ask The Master: 28 Dec 2007

Q. I get easily angry and hurt when someone insults me. How can I avoid this?

Why do you try to avoid it? To suppress pain, anger and humiliation will only cause it to stay in your system in a repressed form. Suppressed emotions can be dangerous - a little anger, a small feeling of hurt, can fester over time into a deep and lasting hatred.

Try accepting your emotions without judging yourself. Are you feeling hurt? Right, now enter completely into the feeling of hurt. Don’t avoid it, don’t reject it. Don’t sympathize with yourself either, and don’t direct it against the person who hurt you - simply watch the emotion as it plays in your system. This may take a while - may be a few hours, even a few days. And then you will see a transformation you never imagined. After all, emotion is energy, tremendous energy. Just how long can so much raw energy circulate in your system?

The moment you accept your pain with no rejection, welcoming its role in your life, the whole quality of pain changes. The same energy that was pain, anger or suffering, is transformed into the blessed emotions of love and bliss. This is compassion, the silent force that moves in each of us, the force that transforms the ugly into the beautiful. And compassion brings its own reward. Just give yourself a chance and you can experience what I am saying! I don’t speak philosophy; I speak out of experience.

Pain is simply the response you have chosen to a particular situation.

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This excerpt has been taken from the book: Uncommon Answers to Common Questions