Look at situations that happen often in your life. Maybe it is a situation of somebody complimenting you for something, like “Good job, well done.” Immediately, what is your habit? “I’m the best one in the world.” Instead of just saying, “Thank you,” or thinking to ourselves, “I could only do that because of all the people who taught me and encouraged me,” we take it personally and puff ourselves up, and think that we are somebody special and that people should treat us in a certain way. Without even realising it, we have become rather arrogant. When we become arrogant, we are the perfect target for other people to shoot down, because nobody likes somebody who is arrogant. Then other people get angry at us, or they get jealous of us.

That is another pattern: “Every time somebody does something better than I do or gets credit for something that I do not get credit for, it is not fair.” And we get jealous. There is no awareness that getting jealous is a habit. What we think is, “That person had the success that was not deserved. That is an objective reality.” We do not think, “My subjective habit is ‘every time somebody has some success or gets to do something I do not get to do, I get jealous’.” Look at it and watch how much it comes up: this person, running on automatic, getting jealous.

Whenever somebody gets jealous of us, what do we do? We resent it. “Why are you jealous of me? I’m not doing anything to try and be extra special, why are you criticising me and being jealous of me?” What is functioning here? What is our habit? It is the self-centred mind taking everything everybody does as a personal comment on who we are. We are resentful.

People have different habits of what they do when they are resentful. Some people get very quiet, other people let the whole world know, some people compete, and some people back away. We all have different habitual patterns that are motivated by our resentment. We are operating on our habits, and the other person is operating on his/her habit. And we wonder why we have problems. It is very helpful just to look at these habits we have.

Part of it is our habitual ways of interpreting things. This refers to inappropriate awareness, how I always interpret certain things to mean this and such about me or this and such is that person’s motivation. These are patterns of interpretation. Then there are patterns of emotional response to whatever we have interpreted. Plus, a third pattern is how we act after that habitual emotional response comes.

Can you think of an example?

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!