Letting Others Influence Your Experience...

Stopping other people from influencing your experience is pretty darn hard.  In my path to figuring out life and how I want to live it, I decided pretty early on, that other people and their negative behaviors/attitudes/worldview/you name it, was going to have less impact on me.  Just setting that intention has allowed the little things that others do, more easily slide off my back.

I want to be that spiritual duck, everything runs off my back. It passes over me, touching me, but not ruffling my down.  Yea know, spiritual duck.

Because of my diligence in this area I find that traffic doesn't bother me much anymore, I don't feel impatient with slow people in front of me, I don't feed into strangers bad moods by adding fodder to their negativity cannon, and other such things that have made my day-to-day life a little brighter.

Lets jump ahead to earlier this week.  As part of my journey, I have signed up for some life coaching classes, where I learn different tips and tricks to be an effective life coach.  I am pretty excited about it, I get to be surrounded (over the phone) by people of a similar mind set. Other spiritual ducks in training if you will.

So, imagine my surprise when one of my fellow spiritual ducks is a total dud!  He has openly told the wonderful woman running the class that "Well, to be honest, I didn't really learn anything new today."  First of all, there's a difference between an honest comment and an 'honest' comment that aims to attack and belittle.

Without even realizing it, I have been berating this person off and on all day.  I just can't believe someone would speak that way in front of others.  Then I think, in my haughty spiritual duck tone, "Well, that person must have some pretty serious issues to work through!"

HELLO! I am gossiping about this guy, to myself and letting him mess with me.  That's crazy!

"Gossip is black magic at its very worst because it is pure poison" p.37, Ch. 2 - The Four Agreements, Don Miguel Ruiz

I poisoned myself and am waiting for him to feel the anguish of being poisoned.  Crazy.

All I can do is try and let it go.  What I should do (with my amazing mind powers) is send him some positive vibes..... done.  Now to see if I can maintain that.