Hi everyone, welcome back! Last week, I examined our beliefs around ‘rules’, what rules are and whether the existence of these rules help or hinder our lives here on Earth! This week, I would like to examine ‘fighting’ and understand if all the fighting that we do makes the world a better place or brings us the much elusive peace that we are searching for in this world!
Belief: I need to be fighting for my safety, my peace, my love, my life because if I don’t, I will neither be safe nor peaceful and maybe not even alive in this crazy world!
Anywhere I look, I come across people who appear to be fighting with something which they think is evil. They could be fighting their disease or fighting for peace or fighting for good or fighting to get justice or fighting to stop injustice or simply fighting wars to keep nations and communities safe! And often, people fight because they want to gain something good out of this fight, something that they think may otherwise not be achieved if it wasn’t for them fighting to achieve it. And as an end goal, they want to help themselves as well as others through this fight. Thus, a lot of times this kind of fighting is also called ‘the good fight’. And truthfully, all the fighting for this and that makes a lot of sense from the outside-in perspective since almost all humans desire a peaceful, healthy, happy and safe environment for themselves and their families and considering the state this world is in right now, all this fighting makes so much sense. But it makes sense until we look at this fighting from an inside-out perspective! Let’s examine.
Let’s first understand what fighting is and what our internal state looks like when we are in the ‘fight mode’. So, the dictionary definition of fighting is ‘displaying or engaging in violence, combat, or aggression’ and simply based on this definition and by using our own common sense, we can identify and relate to everything that our bodies and minds and hearts feel like when we are in this aggressive state of fighting. But let’s not rely only on our common sense to understand what it feels like when we are the ‘fighting mode’; lets close our eyes gently and try to imagine ‘a fight’ that you either fought in the past or are fighting this very moment! How does your body feel when you imagine yourself fighting? Does your body become tight and tense up? Does your mind start to create hundred thousand thoughts which are full of fear? Does your heart have that sinking feeling which tells you how hopeless the situation is? So, folks, if this is what it feels like to be in the ‘fighting mode’ even the ‘good’ one; how do you think anyone who is in this mode and who feels all the feelings that go along with this mode can create anything positive? How is it that we can create anything good from feeling the way they feel in this mode? Let’s look at this through an example.
Recently, I came across a ‘How to fight against bullying’ training for parents. Some “expert” who had experience in this field was apparently educating parents on what to do when their kids are being bullied by other kids at school! And when I saw that ad, the first thought I had was how on earth would any parent or their kid be taught to ‘fight’ against bullying or the bully themselves? Wouldn’t ‘fighting’ make an already bad situation worse? If you don’t quite understand, imagine this – imagine that you are that parent whose kid is being bullied and since you found out about this situation, you are angry and ready to fight. You are ready to fight with the parents of this kid for raising such a kid that goes around bullying other kids. You are ready to fight with the school staff that allowed something like this to happen to your kid. You are ready to fight with this kid himself for bullying your kid. So, when you are in this fighting mode and feeling all the feelings that go along with feeling this way, although, your fight is for ‘good’ and the outcome you desire is also positive; however, you may not be able to achieve that positive outcome in the long run. And you may not be able to achieve a long lasting positive outcome because even though you may be able to get the ‘bully’ suspended from school for a short while, you or anyone else didn’t do anything to change this bully’s behavior. Instead, you and the school and his parents who must have been mortified, just made sure this bully understood that he is a bad person which by the way only confirmed his already strongly held belief that he is a bad person and the reason he was bullying another kid in school is because he felt like a bad person already! So, instead of helping him with love and understanding and compassion, you and everyone else did what anyone would do when they are in the non-compassionate and fighting mode – declared him a bad person without even going deeper to understand why he was bullying! So, basically, you gave this bully confirmation and more reason to continue his behavior. On top of that, you also didn’t help the kid who was bullied. And you didn’t help him because instead of teaching him to stand up for himself so that this doesn’t happen to him in the future, you just made a victim out of him. And the thing about feeling like a victim is that you don’t feel empowered from inside but instead you feel like the world is a bad place and the people who live in it are bad! So, this kid just created a belief about this world and the people who live in it and will use this belief’s lens to view this entire world and the humans for the rest of his life or until he takes time to examine his belief and is ready to shift his perspective!
Folks, choosing compassion over fighting, love over fear, aggression over understanding is much harder, and digging deeper is even more painful, but the fact of life is that this is what is needed in this world on an individual as well as collective level especially when this world is already entrenched in wars and fights, hatred and aggression. Most people living in this world already feel like they are victims of something or someone and thus spend lifetimes living in fear and hatred. And people will continue to live in this whirlpool of emotions because of their own beliefs/thoughts/feelings until they realize that their feelings come from their own corrupt thinking which is created by the things they believe in! NO ONE and NO THING outside of them can make them feel anything if they don’t want to feel it! More on this next time.
If only we knew that the positive outcome we all so very mush desire is only one hug away! Its only one understanding away! Its only one compassion away! So, let’s try fight a little less and understand a little more!!
And as always, feel free to leave a comment if you feel like leaving one. And until next time, fight less 🙂
