Q & A: “Who Is Hurting Who?”
This is a part of the “Ask Jane” Series,
in which Jane answers questions
you email to her that of concern to you.
(Names are changed to protect your privacy.)
Just go to the “Contact Jane” page
and ask your question in the contact form.
This is a continuation of a dialog with Fellow Healer in New York, from an email/article he sent that Jane has been responding to as a mini series.
Fellow Healer expounded in a number of different ways about new age thinking and platitudes excusing or justifying unloving behavior. One example was his ex-girlfriend Katie’s response to his reaching out to her: “It was an intense preaching with angry undertones that I had no idea where it was coming from. No matter how you put a nice new age twist on it, or try turning the responsibility on me, her behavior toward me is plain ole strange. No matter how enlightened we get, our behavior can and will hurt others.”
“It’s kind of like having a ‘bad’ boss or a parent who may have hit you in your past. Something inside knows this is wrong. Yet you may have no ideas why the other is acting this way. All the new age platitudes do no good. The best thing that can happen is to feel and then from the feelings decide, ‘I can’t change them, but I will never treat someone the way that person treated me.’”
Jane: You experience Katie as being hurtful to you. But who is hurting who is extremely subjective. It appears Katie was feeling attacked on some level by you, or she wouldn’t have had such an angry response. People basically don’t attack other people unless they are feeling attacked. And people decide whether they are being attacked from within an extremely subjective internal experience. People’s experience of reality is very malleable and subjective, and greatly influenced and distorted by the limiting decisions they made. If you try to make sense of reality by judging the behavior of other people, you’ll find the ground you are standing on to be very shaky and unstable.
The issue here is the question: “What is the source of our pain and fear? Does it come from the external world around us, or our internal world?” I think the gist of what you keep saying, in various forms, is focused on proving that it comes from the external world. It comes from Katie, from invulnerable Katrina response team members, it comes from our unloving parents in our childhood, and so on.
What I am holding in place is that “Life is meant to work” — a fundamental perspective taught in A Course in Miracles, the Abraham-Hicks work, as well as other spiritual practices. I believe it to be the paradigm shift humanity is being pushed toward at this time. From that perspective I think what you’re grappling with has to do with the way you perceive the world. If you’re perceiving the world in a way that’s not working, there has got to be a limiting decision* in there. And it’s permeating your life, including your intimate relationships. It affects the experiences that you focus on in your life, as if this is the way the world is. And so you’re fighting it as if it’s these people or these ideas out there that are forming a dysfunctional world. But your experience originates from inside of you. It’s an unhealed pattern in you. And this perception that the external world is the cause of our pain is shared by, perhaps, most other people in the world, which is what is holding the old paradigm in place.
* For a description of limiting decisions, click here.
