“Anything you are not willing to experience and open as, you will repeatedly confront. If you are afraid to feel anger, if you are unwilling to love as anger and dissolve open as anger, then you will continually struggle with anger in yourself and others. If you are afraid to feel, love, and open as insecurity, then you will necessitate threats to your security. Your very recoil will sustain the ripples of that which you fear, necessitating a confrontation with whatever you are unwilling to fully feel, be alive as, and open as.”
David Deida
The quote above points to one of the most consistent yet so seldom utilized truth of existence based on the Law of Attraction when we focus on what is wrong, we get more of what is wrong. Another way to say this is that when our motivation is to avoid something we are afraid of, or judge something we attribute to someone else, we hold that very thing at a vibrational level, and attract it into our lives. The very thing we avoid because we are afraid never really leaves us, for we have not encountered it as an aspect of ourselves. We have failed to realize that we are the creator of our own reality and that our present situation is an out-picturing of what we carry inside.
Essentially, the Law of Attraction can be understood by the concept that “like attracts like,” and that what we place our focus on has a huge impact on what is actually happening in our lives.
For example, a woman avoids a friend and because she judges her to be critical of her, and saying untrue things about her. She focuses on the mean-girl qualities of her friend, how uncaring and unkind she is, and talks about that with another friend, to gain sympathy and justify her withdrawal from her friend. What she really wants is a deeper connection and the ability to trust her friend, but in focusing on her friend’s “betrayal,” she cannot see how she is betraying herself and her friend, and thus denies own untrustworthiness.
Or a woman judges a man to be selfish and not present enough, and accuses him of not spending enough time with the family, as he is working long hours and traveling a great deal. She reacts by withdrawing her affection and leaving him to spend Sundays with the children, so that she can have her time off. What she really wants is to feel supported and loved by her husband, but by focusing on his lack of presence, she projects selfishness onto him and she cannot own those “selfish” desires within herself.
A ubiquitous drama is the man who reacts defensively when his partner makes a request of him, and then accuses her of being a critical nag, attacking her for the way she asked. All he wants is to feel good enough, and projects not good enough onto her, when in truth, his own feelings of not good enough are his inner point of attraction.
And I admit that in my former marriage, my husband and I were out on a date, and as we were about to take a sigh of relief and drink a glass of wine, I complained that we hardly ever go out and never have much to talk about. Duh! He said, “We are doing that now,” and I really had to take a look at myself.
It seems that the common knowledge of this powerful principle of the Law of Attraction, though not difficult to understand, has not entirely been able to shift the negative bias of the human brain away from focusing on the problem to focusing on the solution. I believe the brilliance of the Buddha can help us with this tendency to create more suffering through our aversion to what is.
In Buddhism, this negative bias refers to the “three poisons,” which speaks of the three unwholesome root human character flaws. There is moha, which refers to confusion and ignorance, raga, which refers to greed and craving, and dvesha, which refers to aversion and hate. The three poisons are depicted at the center of the Wheel of Life artwork as a pig, a cock and a snake, and the three work together to create suffering in our lives.
The quality of dvesha, which can mean aversion as well as hatred, is represented by the snake, or what science calls the reptilian brain. It arises because we are ignorant about the interconnectedness of all beings and all things, and it leads us to set ourselves apart from those we love and that which we long for. We forget that we are powerful co-creators of our own reality.
Fortunately, there are “antidiotes” to these unwanted states of mind, which allow us to shift away from the brain’s negative bias and retrain ourselves to come into alignment with what will allow us to feel happiness. The antidote to ignorance is wisdom, to greed is generosity, and to aversion or hatred is loving kindness, or compassion. Rather than moving away from the undesired state or thing, you instead lean in with compassion.
Going back to the examples above, if the woman judging her friend were to have compassion for her own pain of feeling hurt, rather than focusing on her friend, she could feel her feelings which take her back to earlier wounds. She could own her own sadness of feeling betrayed, and be better able to discern what is real and what is not real about her friend’s behavior.
If the woman who longed for more support from her husband could feel her loneliness and how it is something she has struggled with her whole life, she could bestow feelings of loving kindness toward herself, and better be able to request more presence from her husband, without making him wrong.
If the man who struggles with feelings of not being good enough could face those feelings and understand where they come from, having compassion for the boy so criticized by his father, he would not be so quick to react to his wife when she makes a request.
And yes, if I had been able to have compassion for my own longing for a deeper connection in my marriage, I would not have made my husband wrong for not providing what I had always longed for, but was not able to allow.
I believe it is more important to teach self-compassion and loving kindness to children than anything else.
May self-compassion become the medicine of the New World.
