What is it that allows your heart to be hurt? Your heart was not made for hurt, yet it has become accustomed to it. How do you remove hurt from your heart? How do you disallow it in the first place? What is there about life that wrings your heart, wears it out, rubs it raw? Where does such sensitivity come from?
It comes from you. Your mind orders pain to reveal itself. It orders you to turn over every event and person in life and to find what roughness exists there, and then to take it as a personal affront. It is as if everyone within your range who does a foolish act or says a foolish thing must have meant it for you. Beloveds, it is their own thinking aloud. It is their own mumbling of their lips. It has nothing to do with you.
Even if someone should hit you and curse your name, it is about them, not you. They are mistaken. The more egregious their mistake, the less it is for you to take personally. Is that perhaps the opposite of how you have been thinking?
If someone is angry with you, he or she is working something out in their head. They may yell at you, but it is themselves they are angry with. Their anger belongs to them. Try as they may, they can’t get rid of it on you. Isn’t it ridiculous for someone to blame you for their internal infernal anger? Do you agree it is?
Then it is the same for you. Even when someone else’s anger incurs anger in you, they are not responsible. You are. In any case, you are not here on Earth to trade anger for anger.
It is for you to trade love, and that is all.
Turning the other cheek doesn’t mean to offer to be hit more. It means to turn aside from anger. It means to present a different aspect of yourself. You may think you are incapable of this. When did you try?
What is it that you think you must defend? Your honor? If it is your honor at stake, then represent yourself with honor. A fist for a fist is not honor. I don’t know what you call it, but it is not honor. I might call it ego, that strutting pompous imposter that eggs you on and causes you dishonor.
Someone can call you all the names they can think of, and you don’t have to answer to any of them.
If you continue fuming over something, it is ego’s embers you are matching.
Anger and fighting are such a waste of life. They are not what life is meant for. And when you look at anger in the cool light of day, you also see the fallacy and folly of it. Anger is a game you play that you cannot win. Even if you win a bout, you are winless. What is the treasure in your anger out-angering someone else’s anger? Or what is the treasure in your muscle being bigger than another’s muscle, or your voice being louder, or your arguments better? What is there you can possibly win but defeat?
Pummel your anger if you must, but not someone else for his.
There are levels of anger. Some anger simmers. Some anger seethes ferociously. All anger works against you. It boils your blood, and it saps your energy. It tightens your blood vessels. It closes your arteries. Anger punishes you for having it.
If you cannot at the present banish anger, you can at least put it in its place. There is no place for it in your heart.