It makes sense that no one else can cause you pain. That's your job.
Interpretation
You are responsible for your own feelings and reactions, not others.
This quote emphasizes the idea that we have control over our own emotional responses and that pain often originates from our perceptions and interpretations rather than from external sources. By recognizing that our reactions are our responsibility, we empower ourselves to change how we respond to what others do or say, fostering a more resilient emotional state.
In practice
In a mental health seminar, to illustrate how our thoughts shape our feelings.
When you stay present with your children, that’s where abundance is. And when you stay out of their business, that’s where everything you deserve in life is. When you’re in presence, there’s no story, and you are abundance. And you come to trust that space so often that you just eventually hang out as that, because there is nothing that can move you out of it, not even a perceived child or a perceived anything.
It is easy to be swept away by some overwhelming feeling, so it's helpful to remember that any stressful feeling is like a compassionate alarm clock that says, "You're caught in the dream."
We don't attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.
An unquestioned mind is the world of suffering.
Hurt feelings or discomfort of any kind cannot be cause by another person. No one outside me can hurt me. That’s not a possibility. It’s only when I believe a stressful thought that I get hurt. And I’m the one who’s hurting me by believing what I think. This is very good news, because it means that I don’t have to get someone else to stop hurting me. I’m the one who can stop hurting me. It’s within my power.
I am a lover of what is, not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality.
There is no room for hypocrisy. Why use bitter soup for healing when sweet water is everywhere?
For I now realize that what overcame me that evening was a sudden awareness of the power of intuition, the supra-logic that cuts out all routine processes of thought and leaps straight from problem to answer.
…but all day long I would be training myself to think, to understand, to criticize, to know myself; I was seeking for the absolute truth: this preoccupation did not exactly encourage polite conversation.
If you haven't cried, your eyes can't be beautiful.
I'm not doing anything, and yet I'm also doing the most important thing a man can do: I'm listening to what I needed to hear from myself.
We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.
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