Day 161: Not Every Opinion Deserves Ownership

I've been thinking about these two Wayne Dyer quotes on forgiveness.

"Forgiveness is the ability to give love away in the most difficult of circumstances."

And:

"In order to forgive you must have blamed. Ultimately, there's nothing to forgive, because there's nothing to judge and no one to blame."

The first quote feels easier to understand.

It's about who we choose to be in difficult situations.

It's the ability to rise above appearances for a moment and see something deeper in another person than their behavior, their mistakes, or the role they played in our pain.

To see the Divine in them, their humanity.

And to recognize that wounded people often wound other people.

If we can see someone through that higher lens, forgiveness becomes possible because we are no longer only reacting to the surface of what happened.

The second quote took me a little longer to fully sit with.

At first, the part about blame almost bothered me.

I thought, "That can't be right. Surely blame doesn't always come first."

And then I realized, if there was no blame, there would be nothing to forgive.

It just sounded strange because most people don't walk around saying, "I blame them."

What we usually say is, "…and that's why I'll never forgive them."

That's where I saw it. the beginning of the sentence is what someone or something else is to blame for in our lives.

Underneath that statement is the belief that someone else caused our pain, ruined something for us, damaged our lives, or took something from us.

That's the blame.

And once we take something in deeply enough to blame someone for it, we usually build an entire emotional story around it to justify why we are right to stay hurt, angry, guarded, resentful, or emotionally attached to what happened.

But if we are co-creating our lives with a higher power or our highest self, we are ultimately responsible for our lives.

We are certainly responsible for our response to everything that occurs in our lives.

Things that other people do or say can only hurt us if we allow it to.

If someone criticizes you, judges you, insults you, misunderstands you, or projects their pain onto you, it only becomes emotionally damaging if you absorb it, personalize it, and decide it means something true about you.

Otherwise, it simply passes by like noise.

You recognize, "That belongs to them, not me."

And suddenly there is nothing to defend.

Nothing to fight or carry.

That's where freedom begins.

I live by two ideas that have changed my life tremendously.

The first is:

Someone else's opinion of me is none of my business.

I don't build myself up from praise, and I don't tear myself down from criticism.

Neither one defines me.

They are simply reflections of someone else's perception.

The second comes from A Course in Miracles:

"My safety lies in my defenselessness."

That teaching changed something profound in me because I realized how much energy people spend trying to defend, explain, justify, prove, or protect an identity.

But when you truly know who you are internally, you stop needing so much external validation and agreement.

You stop feeling responsible for managing other people's opinions of your life.

That doesn't mean we never think about what other people will think.

Of course we do.

I've thought about it many times over the last few years with the motorhome and the lifestyle changes I've made.

I thought about it when I left Palm Springs years ago and moved to a little fishing village at the tip of the Baja where cows wandered dirt roads and life looked nothing like the polished, material world I had been living in before.

Back then, there was no social media.

You simply left and disappeared into your new life.

Now everyone has opinions about everything.

But other people's opinions still don't have to become our identity.

And they certainly don't have to become our prison.

One of the greatest freedoms in life is learning that you are allowed to follow what feels aligned for your soul even if other people don't understand it.

You do not need universal approval to live your truth.

Today's Gentle Practice

Notice today if there is an opinion, criticism, misunderstanding, or judgment from someone else that you are still emotionally carrying.

Then gently ask yourself:

"Did I make this true about me?"

Sit with that honestly for a moment.

Not every opinion deserves ownership.

Not every projection deserves your energy.

Not every misunderstanding requires defense.

Sometimes peace begins the moment we stop carrying what never belonged to us in the first place.

With you,

Lynn