What to do when you are affected by the opinions of others?

You may feel as if people are trying to bring you down to their view of reality.

You may feel that people are trying to make you digestable, comprehensible…

This ranges from people who only see you as a sex object, to people who want you to be their good daughter or good partner, to people who think they want to be your friend and for you to be like them.

They will tug on you where you are wounded and tell you this is where your place is.

They will stay there sniffing your wounds from all directions.

This is nothing except another way that we keep ourselves and others small.

Of course it is not intentional. 

But it is conditional. 

We don’t have a culture of allowing another person’s bigness. We have a culture of making comparisons, and inevitably either finding others better than ourselves, or ourselves better than them.

Could it be different?

What if we really let people be who they are? Without the need for their experience to make any sense to us. 

What if we developed so much empathy that we could feel others without the need for their experience to be confirmed within us?

What if we stayed deeply present with our own experience and didn’t succumb to the fearful mind which will always find reasons to worry?

What if we taught ourselves to trust our knowing, our gut, our intuition rather than the mind?

If you feel affected by others and out of yourself, take a moment to pause everything. 

Ask yourself:

Which influences are affecting you? 

Are you feeling yourself becoming defensive? 

What wounds are being triggered?

What do you need to regain clarity?

Once you have clarity about the situation, what follows is very similar to what I talk about in my video Woman as an Initiatress on YouTube (pardon the poor quality but the material is gold, and it can be equally addressed to men).

When you are enjoying a dance with someone and then this person is trying to get sexy with  you right there and then – and it’s neither something that you find desirable or that appeals to you naturally, what do you do?

If you get pissed and yell at the person you are getting pulled to their standpoint.

If you close off and feel abused you are letting yourself be pulled to their standpoint. 

If you see the humanness in this situation, see humanness in your reaction, recognise that that’s the reality in which this person is living AND see that you have a choice: to engage with this scenario or not …  

Then even a greater thing can happen. You can bring this person to shift that standpoint.

The way to do it is not by giving them a lesson. The only way to do it is by staying in such honesty with yourself that those around you have only two choices: rise to your reality or be removed out of it completely.

If you happen to be pulled into the standpoint of those around you, well it’s a great space for going deeper.

You get to see places in you where you are not stabilised within your true being, and where you falter in your attempt to be the leader of your life. You see wounds to your ego which are making you lose yourself and be affected by other people’s opinions. You see parts of yourself where you are trying to fit in to the viewpoints of others.

And seeing these things is gold. That’s when you can take the lead and be the creator of your one and precious Life.

Photo by Arthur Savary on Unsplash