Tag Archives: Skylight Paths

Becoming Bully Proof

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Yesterday a good friend of mine was in a car accident (no one was injured), and the driver of the other vehicle leaped out of his car and called her a horrible string of names that can’t be repeated here.

Being in a car accident is a scary thing, for everyone involved. For a moment, you know that you are not in control. Human vulnerability is heightened. You could be injured. You could die. Things around you break. It’s scary.

But how do we respond? How do we respond to our human vulnerability? By attacking others? By flying into a rage? By becoming a bully? Will our bullying protect us from vulnerability?

And how then, do we respond to people who turn against us like bullies? This man became a bully. He attempted to prove his Powerful Nature by dominating my friend, by insulting and demeaning her. It was an act of violence, an act of hostility. It hurt her. It would hurt any of us.

Mahatma Gandhi said that when you feel humiliated by a bully, it’s a natural thing to want to slap them to “vindicate your self-respect.”* But instead of doing that, he suggested that we try to address the feeling of humiliation inside ourselves. He said that we could become “proof” against a bully’s insults. It’s a beautiful British use of the word “proof”–like a rain coat is rain proof, or a brick is fire proof.

I love the idea that we can become bully proof. But I know that it’s a life-long task! Gandhi talked about internalizing a non-violent spirit in order to become “proof” to violence.

I believe that bully-proofing begins with self-awareness of the shame and humiliation that is already inside us, learning to love and forgive ourselves again and again. For me, it has to do with accepting my imperfection and failings, and knowing that I am human and beautiful and beloved, even when I make terrible mistakes.

Usually, my mistakes are not as terrible as I fear, my imperfection is not as horrible as I dread. But that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is extending generous hospitality to myself, even (especially) in the face of hostility directed against me.

Self-awareness and self-acceptance allow me to experience the goodness that is at the core of my being, underneath and before every bad judgement, every mistake, every oversight.

I make mistakes, but mistakes are not who I am. This awareness is the basis for feeling that I am completely capable of growing and changing–that I am valuable and deserve to be treated with respect at ALL times. All of us deserve to be recognized as having inherent worth and dignity.

Let a bully’s insults remain “in the bully’s mouth and not touch you at all,” Gandhi said.*


*You can find these quotes and more discussion of these ideas and related spiritual practices on page 139 in my book, in the chapter on “Hospitality to Enemies: Extending Generosity through Non-Retaliation.” The Gandhi quotes came originally from The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas, page 174. My book is Hospitality-The Sacred Art, published by Skylight Paths Publishing.

Poverty of Heart Means Openness

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The reviewer at Publisher’s Weekly described my understanding of hospitality as “capacious.” I had to look that word up! (You can read the full review on the Amazon.com site.)

Capacious means containing or capable of containing a great deal, roomy. Yeah. So, not only my book, but hospitality, too. A roomy heart and life. Capacious!

Priest and author Henri Nouwen (pronounced Now-win) wrote so beautifully about spaciousness of heart during his lifetime. One beautiful image I got from him was the understanding of “poverty of heart” as “openness” of heart. He wrote of this in his book, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life. I highly recommend this book.

Nouwen wrote,

A good host not only has to be poor in mind but also poor in heart. When our heart is filled with prejudices, worries, jealousies, there is little room for a stranger…[W]e have to remind ourselves constantly that an inflated heart is just as dangerous as an inflated mind. An inflated heart can make us very intolerant. (pg 106-7)

But how can we let go of these “prejudices, worries, jealousies” and let our hearts relax into openness? First we have to realize that we are carrying these feelings around with us and that requires self- awareness. There are lots of ways we can improve our self-awareness: through meditation practices, through talk therapy, through conversation with friends, through journaling, or any number of spiritual practices. (I write about these and others in detail in my book, along with step by step instructions to try different practices.)

Hospitality involves awareness of the self–what’s really going on inside me–as well as awareness of the other. We have to see others clearly, and not through a haze of preconceived ideas about them.

With poverty of heart we can receive the experiences of others as a gift to us. Their histories can creatively connect with ours, their lives give new meaning to ours, and their God speaks to ours in mutual revelation. (p 107)

So if we can develop the kind of poverty of heart that means uncluttered, then we will have a much greater capacity to welcome others truly. We will have a capacious capacity for hospitality.

It’s All about Relationship

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Every once in awhile, someone finds me on facebook to tell me what it was like to read my book. I love that and I’m so grateful that something I’ve created helps people.

Despite having “hospitality” as the title, the book is really about how to become a more loving, whole person.

One reader wrote that she found herself thinking more about relationships of all kinds after reading the book:

Just finished your book/loaned to me several months ago/ sat on the table with the stack of “to read”. Was not at all what I expected!

As the creator of several church “hospitality-outreach” programs… I expected a “How to make your church more inviting” manual.

Now that I have finished, I’m thinking more about me and my relationships, both large and small. Thank you so much for writing this book. I’m sure I will return to it often.

Writing the book helped me a lot, too. I felt like I got a lot more language for ideas that had only been vague ideas before struggling to write the book.

I love to write, but it’s hard to set aside the time! Writing this book was like being in Finals at school for a year, pretty much non-stop. Nevertheless, I do intend to write more books!

One obvious next book would be a Study Guide for Christians to go with my Hospitality-The Sacred Art. Because the book itself is written for a very broad audience, (people of various faiths or no faith), I would like to help Christians, or followers of Jesus if you prefer that language, to ground their practice of hospitality in Biblical scripture and Christian tradition.

Looking for the Evil Within Us

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In my book on Hospitality-the sacred art, I have a chapter devoted to hospitality to our enemies. These are two words we don’t put together in our heads (or our practice) very often. Hospitality. Enemies.

The idea is very akin to the Jesus concepts of “Love your enemies,” “pray for those who persecute you.” When Jesus cried out from the cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do,” it’s a similar thing.

In the chapter, I outline a spiritual practice of Self-Examination because transformative spiritual hospitality is based, I believe, on honest self-awareness. This is especially important when we are faced with adversarial or hostile situations.

I rely a lot on the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in this chapter, as they were brilliant theologians and practitioners of “loving” “enemies.” Rev. King has a great sermon called Loving Your Enemies that he preached in 1957, before I was born. I relied on his sermon for inspiration and courage in writing my chapter about hospitality to enemies. Read his full sermon here.

Here is a short piece from my book:

Dr. King’s second step toward loving enemies invites us to look within for a very specific purpose. He suggested that we look for the good in our enemies and look for the evil that is in us. Dr. King described us as being split up and divided against ourselves as though a civil war were raging inside us. It is the “isness” of our present nature being out of harmony with the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts us, Dr King said. In other words, we’re not as completely good as we would like to be.

If we can recognize that this is true within ourselves as well as within our adversaries, then we can no longer see ourselves as entirely innocent, or our adversaries as entirely guilty, or evil. There is no wholly good person, just as there is no wholly bad person. There are only human beings. When we can realize and remember our shared humanity with our adversaires, our attitude can shift, and a little compassion may even rise up within us.

If you would like to explore this particular practice, you can simply add a new step or focus to the earlier exercise of self-examination. Work your way through the same steps of imagining your adversary, and this time look for signs within yourself of hostility, hatred, disrespect, disdain, or anything that undermines the humanity of your adversary by seeing him or her as all bad. Also notice that seeing yourself as all good undermines your own humanity too, because that belief is not based in the complex reality of what it means to be human.