Life, this great mirror!
Never was the mirror as well polished as this week!
Let me first explain what I mean by ‘life is a mirror’: whenever something bothers you/ triggers you on the outside (people, politics, situations, institutions…) it’s reflecting a part of you.
I first heard this kind of counter-intuitive sentence years ago during a yoga class but it actually took me years to really integrate the concept and see examples of it in my own life, like the very obvious one below.
Like I wrote in the previous post, I started working with teenagers a couple weeks ago.
One morning, during a French class I saw their lack of motivation to the fullest. They were slouched in their chairs, elbow on the desk, palm of the hand supporting their cheek with a bored AF facial expression. The teacher was giving everything, explaining French grammar to them (and me) but they couldn't care less. They were just there because they had to be. They were counting the minutes until they could finally escape and do something else. And there I was thinking: OMG how can they be so uninterested?! They are just waiting that the class is over instead of seeing this as a learning opportunity! In that moment I couldn’t put myself in their shoes and totally judged them.
Later on, that same day, the roles switched and I was the student in a class I wasn’t necessarily interested in myself. All of a sudden I was the same as the students who were in front of me a few hours earlier: unmotivated, checking the clock every 2 minutes and wishing to be somewhere else like home or a tropical country!
In that moment I felt a tone of compassion for them, totally understanding that French grammar and most subjects were far from being their passion! I remembered that I too used to be this way - and apparently still was from time to time.
Of course this was an extremely obvious example and most of the time life teaches us things in more subtle ways than that but my point here is: whenever we judge something/ someone or that something triggers us, it’s an opportunity for us to ask ourselves: am I a little like that too sometimes?! What can I learn here about myself?! And ultimately see things from another perspective and find compassion & peace.
