Week Fifty-Five: Finding Ourselves in Others

A friend of mine described a spiritual practice she’s been doing for a year or more. It touched me deeply, so I wanted to share it here. Each day, she invites herself to see the “face of God” in everyone she encounters, and recognizes that it’s all one face. For example, when she’s on the train, if she sees someone who has long hair, she says to herself, “Ah, there I am with long hair.” If she sees someone with a different body shape – larger, smaller, taller, shorter – she says, “Ah, there I am with a tall body.” When she runs into someone who seems disoriented, on drugs, or otherwise not fully centered and functioning, she says, “Oh, and there I am when I’m not completely in my right mind.” Her report is that this practice has significantly shifted her experience of being with other people in what, previously, would have been stress-filled and unpleasant situations. Now, she spends her time finding “herself” in all the people around her and feels much less judgmental, critical, or irritated. She also feels more connected to those around her in a general way, and reports that this has added an important and positive quality to her daily life.

The experiment for this week invites you to take the basic premise of my friend’s practice and apply it to any area where you feel separation, stress being around people, being in judgment or intolerance about differences among and between the people you encounter during daily life, or a sense of isolation. It needn’t be a spiritual practice of seeing God’s face but, rather, a more basic psychological exploration of ways to identify and experience the connection we all share as human beings, as brothers and sisters, as expressions of One Life. Or, you may have a way of framing the experiment for yourself that’s different from what I’ve written, but that works better for you.

As with all the experiments, allow yourself to be curious about how this one will affect your perceptions and the quality of daily activities and encounters. It’s one more way to bring awareness to your internal process, to how you behave in the world, and to the choices you make, moment to moment. It’s also an opportunity to choose some new ways to be and to respond, and to see if you like them better than what’s usual for you, or if they allow you to feel more masterful, centered, and/or connected.

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