What We Get Wrong About Other People

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about what we get wrong about other people and how to see them more objectively and with a little more compassion. So as we go through life, it can sometimes be really difficult to understand why other people speak or act the way they do. And it can be equally as hard to witness larger scale human behaviors that lead to suffering, injustice and harm on the planet. We might make all kinds of assumptions or judgements about other people that sometimes, for instance, some people are just bad, horrible, and selfish and that's that.

But if mindfulness teaches us anything, it's that if we look a little bit closer and see through our judgments, we begin to see a really different picture. We begin to see that those people are struggling with the same things we all struggle with. For instance, we all hurt sometimes. We're all reactive sometimes, despite our wishes to do better. And we're all dealing with this human mind and all of its conditioned patterns.

Patterns that can make us become anxious sometimes, greedy sometimes, angry, afraid, insecure, selfish, and sad sometimes. Being human is hard, a lot of the time. And I think that one of the most wonderful things about ongoing mindfulness practice is that when we investigate and get to know our own mind and why it does what it does, we start to understand not only ourselves, but everyone else better too. The way our mind operates is the same basic way that all minds operate. And the more that we see this, the more we naturally have compassion and understanding towards people, even when they're not at their best.

So there's a poem called Compassion. It's one of my favorites by Miller Williams. And in it, he says these words, "Have compassion for everyone you meet, even if they don't want it. Because what seems like conceit, bad manners or cynicism is actually often a sign of what no ears have heard and no eyes have seen. You do not know what wars are going on down there where spirit meets the bone." I love that sentiment.

So that's the invitation I offer for you today, for all of us today, to remember that we get a lot of stuff wrong about other people. We often don't see the full picture. So if you can let go of your assumptions and have compassion for them, because you never know what wars might be going on there, where their spirit meets the bone. So that's the invitation, to be more compassionate with everybody you know and everybody you meet this week. So thank you for your practice and your presence here with us.

And now let's settle in for today's meditation.