The amazing thing about mirrors…

When I was in my teens, I felt pretty bad about myself. I was shy, awkward, hugely self-conscious and convinced that most of the rest of the world felt none of those things.

So if I would walk past a crowd busy chatting and laughing, and they suddenly erupted into hysterics just as I walked by, I would cringe inside and be convinced that someone had said something mocking or jeering about me and made everyone laugh.

I lived in fear, believed the world to be a harsh and unkind place. I had my reasons, because lots in my growing up had taught me to believe that, but that’s not the issue for just now.

I knew nothing about the Law of Attraction, but I knew that certain painful experiences kept turning up again and again, and believed that somehow I made them happen, although I didn’t know how.

But it was the Law of Reflection that really did it for me in the end. Made me get it. A little, and enough.

I had a very perceptive landlady in my first term at University. She just saw and she just got it. Every time.

One day, I happened to say to her how hard I found it to get to know people. I expected her to sympathise. But she didn’t. Instead, she did me one of the biggest favours of my life.

She told me, “But you don’t ever let anyone get to know you, do you?”

I was gobsmacked, and then hugely shamed. She had seen. She had looked through all my superficial friendliness and my seeming ease, and known it for what it was.

The truth was that I didn’t trust anyone. And I didn’t really allow myself to like anyone. If anyone was doing the judging, it was me. And if anyone was going to look at someone and mock or sneer secretly inside it was me.

I was so scared, so hurt, so wary, so lacking in self-belief or resilience, that I made myself feel just a little better by looking for the flaws in others.

They weren’t doing it to me; I was doing it to them!

So as you can imagine I went through agonies trying to find ways to make her wrong. But eventually I accepted that she wasn’t.

I still believe that it was one of the bravest moments of self-awareness I’ve ever allowed myself to have.

My own thoughts and emotions—my beliefs—and the energetic vibration they were giving out into the universe, gave me my internal world manifested in my external world over and ever again.

The Law of Attraction at work!

But not only that. The Law of Reflection—other people and situations are always a mirror for us of our own denied or shadow parts—was offering its gift of insight too. To me, then, as it does to us all, if we let it.

So I started to grin when a crowd of people laughed because I chose to believe they weren’t laughing at me, just having fun.

And I started to smile a lot more, and to dare more. Just because I chose to. Just little bit by little bit.

And you know what? The world smiled back. And was kind!

That was such an amazing gift!

And we could so easily leave it there. One more story, one more example among thousands of examples, of the way in which our internal world shows up in our external world and shows us something helpful that had been hidden.

But how about we don’t leave it there? How about we now take it and flip it a bit? How about we don’t just think about the external world being our mirror, but also about how we ourselves can consciously now hold up what our own mirror has shown us for someone else?

Because that’s the other bit of what happened to me. I didn’t just learn how frightened I had been, I also learned how frightened others just like me still are.

And that is now my gift to give.

I can now be the one to look up from the group of laughing people, catch the eye of the person out there standing in my old shoes feeling like an outsider, and believing that we are laughing at them.

In love and generosity and oneness, I can take the gift of empathy out there and touch others, and start a ripple which won’t stop.

Because every time I share what I learned with someone who I used to be, they become who I am now. But their own version, and in their own way. And that’s what we all do, all the time. We change lives more often than we’ll ever know.

And because there is only ever One Being here, when one expands in love and compassion, we all expand! The ripple goes on forever!

Wow, don’t you just love that!?

Relephant: 

Why Empathy Will Always Be Our Saving Grace.

~

Author: Janny Juddly

Editor: Travis May

Images: Deviant Art