When you experience hatred being directed at you through someone’s eyes, it can be shocking, especially when it’s someone you don’t know. The fact is that people have all types of reasons in their minds to truly hate.
The important thing to remember is that those reasons are never about you, ever. Even when the other says they are, they are not ever about you, ever.
You see, hatred is an act of selfishness, and the need for power over others. When someone chooses to take a path that another disapproves of, they can choose to hate them. When someone takes actions that another is frustrated by, they might choose to hate. When someone has situations or things that the other wants but does not have, they might choose to hate. There are endless reasons for hate. Yet the one thing that is common in all of it is a driven need to be the one that is on the side of “right”. How interesting that what someone is considering to be “right” is the very thing that is causing so much cruelty, agony, and violence in this world.
The fact is that most of us have hated something or someone at some point in time. What did we do? Anything to come out of it? For me, when I hear those words rumbling around in my head (usually stemming from technology!), I remind myself that, ‘eh, that is just your desire to control the situation. Flow with the wisdom and timing of the Universe instead.’ I focus on coming back into my body through a simple somatic gesture of rubbing my palms on my neck and shoulders, my arms and my legs, all while doing my boxed breathing; four second breath in, four second hold, four second breath out, four second hold, until I calm. A walk in nature (which is also found in the city with trees, birds, squirrels and sky, etc.), is centering and works miracles for bringing me out of my thoughts and into my body again.
Try these or find your own way out, lest you drown in the whirlpool of obsession over other people or situations until the day you leave this beautiful earth.
~Janice M. Burke
Image by Janusz Walczak
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