Soulsong #497 – Can I Love My Enemies?
Jesus and other spiritual icons taught people to love their enemies, to bless their persecutors.
This is good advice. Loving anyone – friend or foe – feels much better than hating anyone. Love is a high-vibrational state-of-being which, by Law of Attraction, beckons loving people into my experience.
Many people try to love their enemies yet can’t sustain it. And they often wallow in guilt for falling short of a spiritual ideal.
If I experience hatred or similar intense negative emotion, I need not compound my pain with guilt. Rather, I simply try to find some thoughts that are, well, a little less hateful than those I’ve been thinking.
I find ways to be grudgingly thankful that my antagonist isn’t worse. I appreciate any good times I may have previously shared with this person. I think of ways I’ve grown in wisdom as a result of our conflict. I use humor to secretly parody my antagonist and, if I can, my own reaction to the person. I acknowledge that this person is hurting and unhappy, as revealed by his/her behavior.
Where possible, I kick my enemy – I kick him/her out of my thoughts entirely.
Hating anyone will only bring that person – or someone similar – more predominantly into my experience. But it’s asking too much of myself to jump from hatred to love. I simply take it one thought-step at a time – from hatred to animosity, perhaps. From animosity to resentment. From resentment to grumbling tolerance. Sliding back to animosity. (Sigh.) Eventually moving forward again to resentment, tolerance, and beyond.
And in that journey of a thousand steps, I will dramatically change myself and the expanse of my future for the better.
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Copyright 2007, Karen Williams
