by Linda-Ann Stewart

Your life and relationships are a perfectly polished mirror for what is in your consciousness. One of the unpopular concepts having to do with this is, “When you don’t like something in someone else, it’s reflecting something within yourself that you don’t like.” You might have heard about this spiritual principle, and wondered about it, as I did. How could it be? I didn’t like people to be deceptive or cruel. Did that mean that somehow I was being that way? Try as I might, I couldn’t see that in myself. It took many years of observation and contemplation before I finally made some sense out of it.

Some years ago, I was involved with a couple of men who were deceptive and manipulative. These are two characteristics that immediately offend me. However, while I was in the relationships, I wasn’t aware that they were expressing these traits, even when they lied to me. After the second relationship, I decided it couldn’t be a coincidence that I’d attract the same type of man one right after another.

So I began to explore where I might be deceptive and manipulative. What I discovered was that I was deceiving the world about who I was. I was hiding great chunks of myself, afraid of being criticized or rejected. I wasn’t lying to others, the way these men had been. Instead, I was lying to myself.

That’s when I began to understand the principle. A person doesn’t have to be expressing the disliked attribute in the same way. For instance, two friends each have an issue with time. One of the friends is chronically late, and the other is obsessively early. The issue is the same, but they are presenting different facets of it. I know this to be true, as I’ve had friends who are always late, and I’m almost always early.

Copyright 2001, 2012 Linda Ann Stewart
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