Falling Forward Into the Light

“Many of the faults you see in others, dear reader, are your own nature reflected in them.” — Rumi

“When we look into a mirror, we see a dirty face because our own face is dirty.” — Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche

“Meditate peacefully. Become the witness of your thoughts.” — Baba Muktananda

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When I was ten years old, there was a girl in my fifth-grade class who I really liked. She was very smart and especially good at math. One day after gym class we were standing with some friends on the outside field, talking about what we wanted to be for Halloween, and I told her she could go as a pumpkin and wouldn’t even need a costume. She struggled with her weight, and she immediately burst into tears. I was horrified. At ten, I didn’t understand why I had said something so hurtful to someone I genuinely liked.

The girl told her parents, who called our little Catholic school, and soon Sister Mary, our principal, was calling my parents. I was suspended for two days, something that was unheard of at our school. Looking back, it was an unusually harsh response to one ten-year-old saying something mean to another, although I certainly didn’t have the perspective to understand that then. I only knew that Sister Mary, whom I idolized, was deeply upset with me. When I returned to school, none of the other girls would talk to me. I remember sitting alone on the playground jungle gym, completely rejected and ashamed. Eventually, as things do when you’re ten, it passed, and we were all friends again. The lesson, however, never left me.

More than fifty years later, I can see grace in what happened. I saw immediately that my words had hurt another person, and then I experienced for myself how painful judgment and rejection could be. I was given an unusually clear lesson at a very young age about how deeply my words could affect another person.

What took much longer was understanding where my judgment of the girl came from. My mother had been a model and was stunningly beautiful, tall, and willowy. I was an athletic tomboy with a very different build, and there was a great deal of emphasis in our home on weight and body image. I absorbed far more of that than I understood at the time. It took me years to realize that my judgment of the girl had very little to do with her. I had judged something in her that I was already judging in myself.

For years, I looked back at the incident and felt deep shame. Today I can look at my little-girl self with compassion. She hurt someone, understood immediately that she had hurt her, and carried that lesson with her. There is shadow in all of us, and I have come to understand a spiritual truth that I certainly didn’t understand at ten: what I judge in someone else generally reflects something in me.

The Masters have taught this forever. Maharaj Charan Singh, or Maharaji, taught that rather than becoming occupied with the faults of other people, we should look for our own faults and work to remove them. He connected fault-finding with a sense of superiority, the very opposite of humility.

That makes so much sense to me. All of us carry both shadow and light. When I catch myself judging someone or seeing them in a negative light, I try to be quiet enough inside myself to notice what is happening within me in that moment. Sometimes I may find fear, pride, shame, or an old wound that has been touched. Sant Mat teaches that we do not necessarily see things as they are; we see them through the lens that we ourselves bring.

I have watched fear turn into judgment, defensiveness, and stories in my own mind without even realizing it was happening. Meditation has taught me to witness what my mind is doing rather than automatically following where it leads. Kathy taught this through the repetition of the Holy Names. When fear arose, she taught me to repeat the Names, and slowly and slowly I began to understand that I could watch my mind without having to go wherever it wanted to take me. I think about that little ten-year-old girl when I write this. I couldn’t possibly have understood everything I had absorbed by then, but through meditation and grace I don’t have to remain governed by it or unconsciously pass it along.

Maharaji was once asked how to deal with someone who criticizes or loses his temper. His answer was wonderfully practical. We cannot control the other person’s mind. We can control our own. Then he added, “If there is one fool under a roof, why have two?” I love that because there really isn’t much left to argue with. My mind can create some pretty elaborate stories about people, and in the moment they can feel completely true. Later, I may realize there was one fact and my mind built a whole house around it.

When someone tells me about an experience they had with another person, I know I am hearing that experience through their perception and history, just as I will inevitably hear it through mine. If that person has said or done something in the past that hurt me, triggered me, or made me defensive, it can be especially easy for me to hear someone else’s experience and think, Yes, that’s who this person is. I can even take on someone else’s perception of what that person intended. Once I do that, I may start seeing everything they say or do through an intention I have already assigned to them, even though I don’t actually know what their intention was. Before long, I may have created an entire picture of someone out of my own experiences, someone else’s experiences, and assumptions that may or may not be true.

For a while now, I have been trying hard to listen to what someone is actually saying to me in the moment and separate it from everything I think I already know about them. That means trying to unwind things I have heard from other people, my own past experiences, old emotional reactions, assumptions, and stories I may have already formed. It isn’t easy to peel away all those layers and simply listen to the person who is actually in front of me, but it feels increasingly necessary, especially at this time in history when communication seems so challenging.

Kathy talked to us often about gossip and judgment, and from what I witnessed, I think those things upset her more than almost anything else. I understand why more now than I did then. Whenever I judge, gossip, or create separation between myself and another person, I am moving away from love.

This week I caught myself starting to say something about someone from my past, and I stopped and said to my friend, “You know what, I haven’t talked to them in years. I have no idea who they are now. I’m sure they have grown just like I have.” How often have I held onto an opinion of someone based on one moment, one argument, or something that happened years ago? People change. I have changed tremendously. Thank God I’ve changed. Kathy taught that we could not live for a second in our body from ten years ago because our consciousness is continually expanding. Why wouldn’t I give someone else the same grace?

Saint Paltu described the saints as tender of heart, wishing well to everyone rather than dwelling on the faults of others. Their response to the world is compassion. I am certainly nowhere near that, but I increasingly understand why that tenderness matters. Kathy taught us to try to love everyone. For me, the harder part is loving the person I don’t understand, the person I fear, the person who irritates me, judges me, or who I believe has hurt me. It’s easy for me to talk about loving everyone when everyone in the room is someone I already love.

The Sant Mat teachings on judgment keep returning me to compassion. I have no idea what another person has lived through or what they carried into the room with them that day. I don’t have to reduce a whole human being to the part of them I happen to be seeing.

After so many years on this path, meditation has made the parts of myself I would rather not see harder to ignore. I can become aware of fear, judgment, pride, and shame within myself, pray for them to be removed, and try to make different choices. But I know I cannot completely free myself from my own ego. Ultimately, I need the grace of the Lord for that.

The ego is a trickster. Comparing myself to someone else through judgment or gossip can leave me feeling superior, which feeds my pride, or inferior, which feeds my insecurity and shame. Neither actually leaves me feeling better about myself. If I bring someone else into it by talking about that person, it can go even further. Kathy called this a “wedge play,” when what I say about one person influences how another person sees them and creates separation where there may not have been any before. Either way, nobody wins.

Maharaji compared our spiritual effort to a child learning to walk. The child is going to fall and get bruised because falling is part of learning to walk. Our failures, when we are genuinely trying, can still be attempts to move forward. I love that teaching because seeing my shadow doesn’t require me to condemn myself for having one. If I spend all my time condemning myself for falling, I am not getting back up.

Meditation and the Holy Names continue to bring me back to the Source of love. Years ago, on one of my visits to the Siddha Yoga ashram, I came across a teaching from Baba Muktananda about the mind that stayed with me. What I took from it was that if I wanted to stop feeding certain thoughts, one of the first things I could do was to stop speaking them. I have found that to be true. With meditation, the Names, and a great deal of grace from God, I have learned that I don’t have to give every thought my attention, and I certainly don’t have to give every thought a voice.

Kathy taught us that everything is a microcosm of the macrocosm. Looking around the world today, with so much fear, judgment, and division, I think more about what that teaching means. My individual impact may seem small, but every time I question a judgment, choose not to give a thought a voice, forgive someone, or forgive myself, I am choosing what I want more of in this world.

Sometimes I visualize all of us holding onto each other’s arms and walking together into the Light, into God’s glory. In that image, no one is left out. The people I understand, the people I struggle to understand, the people who love me easily, and the people who challenge me are all there. Seeing my own shadow makes it easier to accept and forgive the shadow in someone else. The more honestly I can see both shadow and light within me, the easier it becomes to recognize both in everyone around me and to remember that none of us is defined by our worst moment.

I am still an unfinished work of God’s art. I will get afraid again. I will probably judge someone again. My mind will probably build another elaborate story, and I will have to remember that a story created by my fear is not necessarily the truth about another person. I will sit down, say the Names, ask forgiveness when I need to, and begin again. Maharaji taught that when we fall while genuinely trying, even the fall can become part of moving forward. Maybe that is what grace gives all of us: the chance to see, to learn, to forgive, and to begin again. Kathy taught us the same truth in different words: we do not fall backward. We fall forward into the Light.