Theos-Talk Archives (March 1995 Message tl00200)

Reflections on Eldon Tucker's advice to take only the highest,
productive elements of "attacks" and let the rest go:

At least five people have advised me, in the past week or so, to
develop a thicker skin.  But that hasn't felt at all like the
right advice, to become insensitive to energies directed at me.
So while waiting for another solution, I've been thrashing around
in public expressing pain that itself provides a target for
further hostility.  Well, there's something that works far better
than a thick skin, and I want to share it.

If we want to defend our emotional selves from attack, we
instinctively tense up, as it were making our emotional fabric
more dense.  Unfortunately, this is exactly the wrong thing to
do.  To become more tense and dense under attack is to make one's
emotional nature more vulnerable to being wounded seriously.  It
can take days or weeks to recover from the emotional wounds
caused by words used as weapons.  The "thick skin" school of
advice suggests that hostile energy can just be bounced off us
without doing any harm.  But my experience is that by trying NOT
to sustain the pain, the best we can do is to feel somewhat less.

A better solution, at least for me here and now, is to become
more THIN skinned-- let that hostile energy right in.  It feels
like a lightning bolt to the solar plexus when someone directs
intense hostility at the center of your being.  (Yes, for an
author of a book like mine, one's writing is at the center.) And
rather than tensing up and trying to deflect that energy, I think
it's healthier to RELAX, OPEN UP to it, FEEL IT FULLY and then
LET IT GO.  Feel it as the OTHER PERSON'S anger, fear and
hostility.  If you try to resist and deflect it, whatever does
get in will be YOUR pain, fear, and anger.  The key to compassion
is to feel it as what it is-- the other's pain, and then let it
go, reflecting on the experience for its wider significance but
not identifying with or possessing it.

When the solar plexus receives this kind of energy while tight
and tense, it sustains wounds to the lower vehicles.  One's
energy flow, physical well-being, and emotional state are all
thrown into turmoil.  Whereas if the lightning strike hits a
solar plexus that is relaxed and open, it will pass right through
doing no lasting damage.  And understanding will increase as a
result of observing the process.

This reminds me of ceiling fans, in which you can flip a switch
that determines whether the air blows down or up.  In our
"normal" setting, the heart center or solar plexus or whatever it
is that hurts when someone hates you, is oriented downward, to
our personal needs, desires, attachments.  And an attack will
therefore throw the lower vehicles into discord and disfunction.
But by just flipping the switch so that the energy of the
lightning strike goes UPWARD, we can keenly feel the OTHER's
pain, anger, etc., and let it awaken our COMPASSION for their
suffering and our UNDERSTANDING of life.

Having learned all this, I apologize to y'all for what Nicholas
calls my martyr act.  But it was healthier in the long run to
feel the pain intensely and then learn to make good use of it,
than to just try to keep out the hostile energy.  Sorry if my
learning process was felt to be obnoxious to some.

But the result of Eldon's advice coming right before the hate
mail did provide what I feel is a valuable lesson.  RELAX, LET IT
IN, LET IT GO.