What do you do when a person suddenly verbally attacks you with some vicious words? Do you engage and throw your own verbal nastiness back or do you disengage and walk away? For most of my life I’ve done the former, until I began to realize it was directly affecting my ability to find any bit of serenity in this world. But over the past few years, I begun practicing the latter, and have experienced a lot more peace because of it. In fact, I had one such occasion about a week ago.
It occurred over the Facebook chat tool when out of the clear blue I received a message from someone I knew who I had a checkered past with, but hadn’t talked to in a good while. They had apparently read some of my recent blog entries and had some choice words to say about them. They most definitely were derogatory in nature and it was more than evident they were trying to tear my character apart. They claimed I was becoming a religious nut and that no one could go through the changes I’ve been going through, because apparently they feel people are who they are and never change much in life. Ironically, this is not the first time I’ve dealt with this since I undertook writing a blog that looks for the spirituality in everything.
After reading their messages a few times, I must be honest and say that my ego really wanted to react. It wanted to fight back and give this person a piece of my mind. But I didn’t. Why? Because I realize today that by engaging in a verbal battle, it causes not one, but two people to become irritated, angry, or resentful. It was apparent that this person was feeling those things by their words after reading them, except I wasn’t. That would have changed immediately though by saying what my ego wanted me to say and stepping into that verbal battle. Instead, I prayed for this person, sent them love, forgiveness, and peace and then deleted their messages, feeling a lot more serene in the process.
I had completely forgotten about the whole incident until the next morning, which was when I received another message from this person, except this time it was a sincere apology. In it, they owned up to their harsh words and felt bad about what they had said to me. I actually did respond to this message by saying thank you and that I had already forgiven them.
The bottom line with today’s entry is this. It’s my firm belief that engaging in any verbal battle with someone else that has just attacked you is exactly what he or she wants. Anyone who’s saying nasty things to you is already somewhat spiritually off-balanced in life. Joining them in the battle through your own verbal attacks on their character is only going to cause you to become more spiritually off-balanced in life as well. This is why I find it’s so much better these days to disengage and walk away from these types of situations, all while blessing the verbal attacker with love, forgiveness, and peace. While it may challenge your ego to take this higher road, I can promise you that you’ll end up feeling a lot more peaceful and serene in doing so…
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson