When We Are Wronged

"We need to constantly be removing any blockages that stop the flow of the Divine into our hearts."

We all have an internal barometer inside that helps us determine if we have been wronged in some way. It's a primitive fight or flight response that we have in response to things that happen to us. This mechanism becomes clouded when the entanglements of our ego come into play. Another factor may be that we have not used that instinct sufficiently or properly in the past, so we are out of practice.

This fight or flight response surfaces when others try and take advantage of us. The real trick is being able to figure out when this self-protective mechanism has been triggered by another person or our ego. Sometimes, our ego blows things so out of proportion that we think our fight mechanism has been triggered. In actuality, our thinking was clouded by our selfishness.

If we notice that we have issues with knowing when we are legitimately threatened by another, then we can work on this issue in a couple ways. The first thing we can do is continually work on diminishing the ego. We can never make the ego entirely disappear but diminish it to a size where it is not a factor. We can also build up enough reference experiences where we properly used our survival mechanism, so that we have enough training to properly use it in the future.

This does beg the question of how do we properly use this survival mechanism? There is no hard and fast rule, but, if we try to look at the situation from an outside perspective, we will clearly see that a certain level of harm was inflicted on us. You may even want to ask an unbiased third party for their input.

We may not be able to always clearly determine when we should fight or flee. This gives rise to two spiritual practices that we can undertake. We need to constantly be removing any blockages that stop the flow of the Divine into our hearts. This means undertaking whatever spiritual practices we need to keep this channel open. This will help assure us that we are operating outside our ego. We also should practice being non-reactive. If we are non-reactive, even when our imaginary "rights" are squashed, we act as if nothing happened. Of course, we should practice healthy discrimation such that we will react when we are obviously being taken advantage of. The benefit to being non-reactive is that we are doing the right thing no matter what the case is. You can always go back later, if you wish, and have a talk with the offender in an attempt to vent your frustration. However, if we had reacted and blew things out of proportion, there is no going back and reversing your actions.