5 Ways to Take Things Less Personally with Rick Hanson

I offer these every week along with a guided meditation. Just click the subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the latest recording. Or, if you'd like to join us live, which would be great, just go into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free. So I'd like to talk with you about one of the most intimate and useful and yet still potentially airy-fairy topics of all, which has to do with who are you and how can we be in this life while taking good care of our persons without taking life so personally. And so to get into this, I want to kind of frame things here and include a couple of kind of classic stories. So, I want to make a distinction between the person that each of you are. I am a person as well, by which I mean a particular body-mind process unfolding over time. That's a person. Your little kid is a person. When you were a little kid, you were a person. A cat is a person in a certain sense. Persons exist. Human persons certainly have rights and responsibilities. Human persons, like you as a whole, deserve to be treated well. It's important. And they deserve and have the duty to treat others well too, as well as enlighten self-interest. So persons are real. There's no question about persons. If you have any question about whether you exist, just ask me and I'll tell you. You exist. You as a person. That's what I mean by the word you there. Then there's that sense of self. The self that possesses, that identifies with, that reacts, that feels injured and affronted, indignant. How dare you treat me that way? Now, developmentally, little children need to develop a sense of self. A sense of an inner executive process. A kind of center of choosing. A fundamental kind of stability of witnessing their own experience of witnessing the world. You know, a link between willed action and the sensory feedback of willed action, like reaching for a cup to get the apple juice they want. This is absolutely necessary. And I think it was a great therapist, I think it's Richard Epstein. I should know, Jack someone, it'll come to me. Anyway, they said you have to be somebody before you can become nobody. There's a place for that. And yet, also it's really true that as we take things personally, as we get caught up in our own reactivity about it, you know, we create trouble for ourselves and trouble for other people as well. And related to, you know, my current interest in boundaries, when we feel flooded by what they're doing and reactive about it, our sense of healthy boundaries is starting to break down. On the other hand, to be able to experience and be open to other people while feeling it more as like wind blowing through our leaves, likening ourselves to a deeply rooted tree, that is a lot happier and a lot more effective in the world. How do we actually do that? So I want to give you a couple of examples. First is a teaching story that I've adapted from Taoism. And you may have seen this from me before. Here it is again, if not, this will be fresh for you. And in this story, imagine two cases. In the first case, you are with your friend and you're in a canoe in a lovely river, having a nice picnic, let's say, on a Sunday morning. And you've got grandmother's special silver, you made some good food, you're wearing nice clothes, you know, you're all dressed up. Maybe it's kind of a date, who knows? You're with this person in a canoe. And then suddenly, well, there's a loud thump on the side of the canoe and you're tipped over into the river. You come up sputtering, your hair's ruined, your clothes are wracked, you know, the grandmother's silverware is at the bottom of the river. And what do you see? You see two teenagers with snorkels and goggles laughing at you because they've snuck up on your canoe and tipped it over. How do you feel? Understandable. Okay, take two. Everything's the same. There you are in your canoe with your special friend in the river with your nice clothes and your hair and your grandmother's silver. What a wonderful day. And then suddenly, the shocking crash against the side of your canoe tips you over, dumps you in the cold river. You come up sputtering. Ah, what do you see? You see a large submerged log has drifted downstream, smacked into your canoe and dumped you into the river. How do you feel? And take two. You're still cold. You're still wet. Grandmother's silver's at the bottom of the river. Probably it feels different. It feels different from feeling targeted, capriciously and unfairly by people who are deliberate and they did it on purpose compared to, what a drag, natural hazard. But, you know, you don't take it so personally. Maybe you make some choices in the future. Next time you're in that river in the canoe, you look out for the logs and maybe you choose a different river or a different sport altogether. But it's not so personal. It feels really different. And the takeaway from this teaching story is that most other people are like logs. We're in the middle of their bad day. It doesn't excuse them from moral culpability, but we can start to recognize them as, at the effect of, carried along by thousands of impersonal processes upstream, sweeping them along. It's really quite powerful to regard other people in this way as usually not malevolent, not evil, just carried along by their own tendencies. Yes, we've got to deal with the logs in life. And yes, we've got to make choices about the rivers that we put ourselves in that might be full of logs. But it's not so personal. It doesn't feel so bad. There's a kind of buffer around it. And here we have the wonderful metaphor from the Buddha about the two arrows or two darts. The first one being inescapable, inherent discomfort in life, physical or emotional. You know, you're dumped in the river and you're cold. Okay. Then there are the second arrows, the second darts. We throw ourselves with our cascading reactions of taking things personally. That's where most of our suffering comes from. And that's where we can help ourselves. So how do we actually do that? And here I want to drop in another teaching from, in this case, a great Zen master, Yunmin. I reflect on this teaching a lot. And a friend of mine who's a Zen teacher, Mark Lesser, just kind of dropped it on me some years ago. And light bulbs, very simple and short, like a lot of Zen teachings. Master Yunmin was asked, what is it that trees wither and leaves fall? He replied, body exposed in the golden wind. Now, undoubtedly there are associations to the golden wind and metaphors that you're in Zen that I'm probably ignorant of. I'm gonna take it at face value and invite you to do the same. How does it feel? It's like a poem almost, golden wind. And so we have that aspect of life that includes loss, trees withering, other people doing various things. To enjoy the golden wind, we must be exposed to all those forms of the wind. And if we are to enjoy relationships with others, if we are to participate in life, if we are to dare greatly, as Brene Brown puts it, dream big dreams, swing for the fences, start a global nonprofit to explore the power of compassion to motivate collective action to change upstream sources of suffering, as I had the crazy idea of doing nearly five years ago, the Global Compassion Coalition. If you're gonna do that sort of thing, you're gonna expose yourself to the winds. You know, as Shantideva put it, or it is said in Tibet, the eight worldly winds, gain and loss, pleasure and pain, fame and ill repute, praise and blame, eight winds right there, body exposed in the golden wind. So I wrote one of my Just One Things titled, Relax, You're Going to be Criticized. And that's part of living in this life. Lately, I've been just really looking at how reactive I get when I feel disappointed by another person in which they really did fall short. They really did drop the ball. They really did keep evading personal responsibility. You know, they really did break an agreement. They really did it. And I'm just watching my reactivity to those kinds of disappointment. If you want to live in this life, people will disappoint you. Many people disappoint in one way or another, including politically, shockingly, sadly. And if we are to live, we must be exposed. There's no escape. We live exposed. And can we be all right with our vulnerability, our inherent, I used the phrase earlier, the courage of humility, by which I mean to have the humility to recognize that we are dependent. We live dependently. We live dependently on so many causes and conditions. And it takes courage to face that humility, you know, and then live bravely nonetheless. So how to do, how to do this, how to do this. The first suggestion is paradoxical. The best way to take life less personally is to start by taking good care of yourself personally. Good care of yourself as a person. Basic disciplines, shoring up your own body mind as best you can, you know. Clock out of certain situations. Tell yourself you don't have to work after X o'clock. Eat reasonably well. Beware certain kinds of indulgences. You know, short-term gain, long-term pain. Additionally, really internalize the felt sense of your own worth again and again and again. Very often we psychologically get vulnerable to taking things personally because we're carrying a lot of narcissistic injury. That's kind of a psychological term. You would call maybe the myth of narcissus, this, you know, really, really good-looking, you know, young, young man in the myth who got so infatuated with his own reflection that he just kept staring at it and eventually starved to death. You know, that's an extreme version of narcissism. There's what in psychology is called healthy narcissistic supplies of joining and mirroring, cherishing, prizing, valuing, appreciating that we as big social primates really need. I think in mindfulness circles, meditative circles, spiritual circles, there tends to be a kind of dismissing of our needs. There's a kind of arrogance somehow, including an arrogance that gets, frankly, brought to bear on others. Oh, you still need that? Oh, you still don't realize that XYZ? You know, you obviously need to meditate more. Something like that. No, we are dependent, right? We have these needs. So one of our great needs, you know, is to feel, as I said, to experience what are called social supplies, including real appreciation. I'm routinely struck by the ways in which people seem stingy with appreciation. And yet when they give appreciation, they experience it as a great gift for themselves. So if they're withholding, they're from seemingly others. Yeah, that's true, but mainly they're withholding from themselves the blessing, the joy, the relaxing in the body, the clear seeing of appreciating that which is worthy of appreciation. I don't mean flattery or puffing others up. I mean, appreciating effort, appreciating sincerity, appreciating good intent, appreciating the good intentions that are underneath unskillful actions, right? Appreciation, well, turn it around. Don't you want to feel appreciated? You know, deep down inside, I think a lot of us have an ache in our heart as a result of a lifetime of injustice that we've received in which we have been insufficiently appreciated. This is not fuel for ego. My experience and observation is that when people internalize feeling appreciated, they're less egoic because now they've got that supply inside and don't need to kind of work others or get caught up in trying to impress others. They feel good enough already. Feeling appreciated due to external supplies is not the only way to feel good enough already. We can also recognize ourselves, extremely important, and to factually recognize good qualities in ourselves, things that we appreciate in others that we can also appreciate in ourselves because that's only there. You know, we can do it for ourselves. Sometimes people get caught up in, you know, really fixating on the one kind of external appreciation. They're going to die on that hill. You know what I mean? That's the hill they're going to die on. They're going to keep trying to get blood from that stone. They're going to keep playing that slot machine over and over and over again for the one time it might pay off to get that external supply. That's not wise. Take a look. But meanwhile, you know, even if sometimes people are in real circumstances where the appreciation coming to them from the world is a very thin soup. Okay, we do what we can about that. Maybe we communicate with others. Maybe we find other rivers, you know? When the logs of appreciation, you know, are more common. But meanwhile, we can still, you know, recognize and appreciate ourselves and then slow down and feel it and really, really, really take it in. So this is very important, actually. One of the best ways to take life less personally is to fill yourself up with a sense of your own worth, bit by bit by bit. Number two in establishing over time healthy boundaries with others where you're actually, over time, as best you can trying to shift the kind of balance sheet in your life of good treatment or bad treatment coming at you. Now, in this life, there will be the winds, you know, of bad treatment. There's a funny passage in a book I once read which these two characters are friendly. One is the captain of a ship. The other is a young officer. And the young officer comes on board and the captain of the ship really criticizes him completely unfairly about something or other. And then it finally clarifies, you know, that the young officer was actually innocent. And then the captain says, well, you know, in this life, you're gonna get a certain amount of crap from people. You might as well get it from your friends. So maybe there's a little bit of that. But still, to the extent that we can to set boundaries, to kind of reset what you're getting from others and, you know, gently over time, try to tilt it so it seems more fair and it's more in your favor. That's a very broad point. It's easy to say it, but I just want to call it out. You know, for example, think about major people in your life and your, you know, last, fill in the blank, 10, five, dozen, hundred, one interactions with them. On balance, did it feel not good for you or did it feel like it wasn't so good for you? And I don't mean, again, getting vain or whatnot. I mean being real about it, you know. What do you got going? And then it could well be that there are lots of people where you just really like being around them or you like being in certain settings or you like doing certain things with certain people because when you're doing those things, it feels pretty good. It doesn't feel so good maybe when you're doing other things. So that over time, you've kind of shifted the overall balance in your life as best you can. But that's an important thing to kind of reflect on yourself like over the next three months or, you know, between now and the end of the year, who do you want to spend more time with and who do you want to spend less time with? And what kind of interactions do you want to be having more of and what kind of interactions do you want to be having less of? That's a way to actually affect things so stuff comes at you and you don't take it so personally. My third suggestion about not taking things so personally is to start with compassion for yourself. You know, when something happens that we're affronted by and often there really is something not so good happening. Sometimes we take things personally and really you didn't have to take that personally. It wasn't about you. They weren't doing it deliberately. They were, you know, it was an accident. Okay, but often what we're dealing with are situations where, you know, someone is critical of you or insufficiently appreciative or they take something for themselves. You know, the last cookie, they just grab it for themselves. Wait a minute here, that's not fair. Especially since they do that every time, right? There's a plate of cookies on the table. Something real has happened. What the brain tends to start with is, you know, freeze, flee, or fight, or appease. And we tend to start there automatically, especially if we have any kind of a history of narcissistic injury, of kind of wounding our sense of self and it's much more useful if you can to slow it down with compassion for yourself. You know, I break for compassion, you know, for yourself. Just simple, ouch, this hurts, what? Yet again. And I find for myself, when I shift into compassion, which is not the same as a kind of self-pitying case against the world, like, oh, yet again, I keep getting mistreated, oh. You know, as understandable as that state of being is, it's close to, it's like a near enemy, to use that term. It's kind of a near enemy of self-compassion, but it's not actually self-compassion. Self-compassion is very simple. It's basically, oh, this hurts with caring and lovingness and support, oh, this hurts, oh, yeah. And just staying with that, and what that often will do is it'll help us soften and get underneath the angry reactivity or the ruminating case against a world that has done us dirt, which you can do it if you want. How's that working for you? You know, to be caught up in ruminating and resenting a world that's done you wrong. Grievance, grudges. We're very vulnerable to grievance and grudges, and you can see how authoritarian demagogues manipulate our vulnerability to grievance and grudges to gain and hold on to political power. That's been a story throughout history, certainly a major story in the last century, and a major story in our times as well. So beware of that vulnerability. Have the humility to recognize your vulnerabilities to holding on to resentments, grievances, and grudges, and see if you can slip under them to compassion for yourself. Soften into, open into compassion for yourself for how, oh, yeah, this is a burden. Yeah, that person left me holding the bag, and I'm, I gotta deal with it. Oh, you know, you're feeling it. So that's a third major suggestion. Not take things so personally. Quick review. Internalize healthy narcissistic supplies. Internalize again and again and again a sense of yourself as a person and a sense of yourself as protecting yourself and being on your own side as a person. That really does, over time, you just, it helps you be more spacious and have a sense of a deep kind of keel in your personal sailboat so you're not so rocked over by what's happening there. Second, you know, boundaries, and setting up better exchanges and reciprocity and arrangements and agreements, and seeking people who really support you, major thing. And third big suggestion here, finding compassion for yourself. You know, when you're wronged, when things are happening to you, instead of getting caught up in a righteous grievance with the sense of vengeance and punishment and payback. Doesn't mean being a wallflower. Doesn't mean at all letting people walk on you. But it means starting with kindness for yourself underneath it all. See how that works for you. And then the third, the fourth suggestion is really quite profound and far-reaching. And it has to do with your sense of identity. So if your sense of identity is pretty contracted, right? So your sense that you're identifying with a set of goals and, you know, standards and rules and positions, you're identifying with those, and you see your life as a pretty contracted, separated from everything else of everything, which is a pretty conventional and common way to see yourself and to presume who you are. That's pretty normal. People routinely, when they're interacting with us, they're not communicating to us, oh, you spacious, complex cloud, swirling through, you know, the moment here. No, they say, how you doing, Rick? Right? Or Devian, or Ulrich, or Nathalie, or Brenda. How are you doing, Kate? You know, it's like an entity. Okay, but the more that we, our identity is this part separated out from everything else that's very, you know, vulnerable, easily hammered by life, because it's just a little part in a big hole. The more we, that's our identity, the more, and also the more we identify with very specific things like a role. I am the boss. I am the father. You know, I am fill in the blank. You know, then we're set up, understandably, when the golden winds blow, oof, to take it personally. On the other hand, if the sense of identity with spiritual practice, and psychological understanding, and growing wisdom, starts to recognize yourself that increasingly you are process, not a thing. You know, as Buckminster Fuller put it, I seem to be a verb, process. Things are changing, not so fixed. When in identity there's more of a sense of awe, don't know, child mind, wonder, you know, not so much a fixed view that comes from an identity, an origin, I believe X. Maybe so, then it's held more lightly. And if people attack X, it's not so personal, right? It's more fluid, it's more open. You start realizing that actually, you know, the atoms in your body are continually exchanged, right? Obviously, to the extent that the body is, you know what, 70% water, roughly, you know, all the hydrogen and oxygen atoms gradually circulate out, whatever the scientists tell us. Few weeks, few months, it's not the same body. Kind of looks the same, you know, wears a familiar shirt, but it's not the same body. You know, there's a sense of fluidity. So to the extent that we do practices like we did in meditation, in which there can be a growing sense of identity psychologically, that's more spacious. That's more the whole of the mind. Then we tend to take things less personally. And when we start to experience more and more that this whole moment of consciousness, this whole mind is being made by a vast network, a vast web of processes that we're kind of a local patterning of, take it less personally. It's like, oh, the pain is real, but it's less personal. The injustice is real, but it's somehow less personal. And, you know, people, I think, can get all airy-fairy about that and use this sort of insight into the truth of things. Because what I am describing is actually the truth of things. We're designed to not experience it because, you know, monkeys, they were all cosmic. Chomp, you know, they did not notice the tiger in the bushes, right? Because they were all cosmic. They did not pass on the genes, they passed on genes. So we're designed to feel separated and beleaguered and cranky. But with practice, with wisdom, that can gradually soften and open and our sense of identity shifts so that we take things less personally. And then I want to offer a fifth and final suggestion. So the last one that I've really seen is to take what we normally do when things happen that are an affront or an injury to us or a mistreatment, a devaluing of us. You know, people who are dismissing us, dismissing our worth, understandably. What do we understand we tend to do? We tend to contract around it and get angry, even hateful. We get punishing, we get intense. I have to watch out for it. You know, I'm pretty calm and I'm gonna blame my Scottish genetics because there's a part of me that can get very activated and warrior-like and pretty intense. And as the proverb puts it, anger with its honeyed tip and poisoned barb. You know, we can really get caught up in our reactivity because partly we are justified, you know, and we justify ourselves and yet it takes on a life of its own. It can be very seductive, very seductive, particularly if we're dropping in a lot of righteousness. We know we're right, we know they're wrong. So what's the counter to that? This is the fifth suggestion. As best you can, and sometimes you can't do it in the moment and it needs to take a little time, bringing compassion into yourself, bringing kind of big picture perspective, putting things in perspective, you know, rather than just the perspective of the small part, the bigger picture. And then that opens up the opportunity to bring love to bear. That's the fifth suggestion. Interestingly, when we find our way into love, we take life less personally. And interestingly too, sometimes when we're rested in love, we have more authority in the situation. We have more gravity, we have more dignity, we have more credibility. Our words land more fully when we're rested in love. And the love could be a kind of, it's called undifferentiated, non-specific love, just kind of spreading out a basic attitude of lovingness, kindness, and meeting the world through which other people pass. And they don't earn our love, they pass through the field of it. And it may be that as they pass through the field of our love, we restrict and reduce our relationship with them because we have duties to ourselves, not just to others, and we wanna protect ourselves. Absolutely true. But you just find that when, even though it's counterintuitive, when you've been mistreated, when actually, yeah, something bad happened, to find your way into love as an aspect of your response to the situation, as an aspect of what you say to that person or to other people, then immediately you're moved away from kind of a contracted me, myself, and I, my precious. Love opens us outward. Taking things personally contracts us inward, love. Question, do we need to remind someone who dropped the ball? I just got reactive with my brother who asked regarding my dad's heart attack in 2017 because I was left holding the bag. Every sibling checked out. I wasn't even aware that I still felt a grudge about it. My brother caught me by surprise with the question. I now feel bad that I heard him by reminding him of his absence. Does the person need to be reminded that they dropped the ball? Complex question, I don't know the particulars. I think sometimes we look at another person and we decide that there's no upside in bringing up a topic. They don't have any capacity to process it or they can't do anything about it. It's just gonna make them feel bad or they might recriminate against us. They might, you know, there might be something going on. Other times we realize that if only to kind of clear the air so we can love them more fully, we have an undelivered communication here that would be helpful to mention. Like, yeah, you know, I'm still thinking about that time seven years ago and that's how it looked to me. I don't know, how did it look to you? Maybe I misunderstood something. You know, and there's skillful and not so skillful ways to enter into that conversation. Going forward, it's really an interesting question depending on the setting. To what extent is it appropriate to name what's really going on? And people vary on that, people, cultures vary on that. I came up kind of through the 70s and we said everything to everyone always. And I've kind of learned in my later years to be a little more circumspect. On the other hand, sometimes it really is helpful to just name what's true. And then I think the five suggestions I've offered here can help us name what's true without adding the second darts, including the darts we throw to them of our top spin about it, you know, to share our sadness, our grief, underneath our anger, our hurt, our confusion, our worry, our felt sense of being disrespected. I'm in a situation now, I'll be kind of vague, in which, you know, I've communicated multiple requests and instructions to someone and I get to give instructions in this situation and they're just kind of ignored. And I'm kind of flabbergasted by it because I can't imagine doing that myself if the roles were reversed. I have to talk about it. Even, you know, I need to talk about it with this person. How about when one is physically mistreated? Okay, so Elizabeth, I have forgiven, but it's difficult to send love to a stranger who has harmed me physically and caused psychological pain as well. Really, really important. So when I'm talking about in the fifth suggestion, finding love, I'm first and foremost not pushing you to do something that isn't real for you. And sometimes people will go out to these edge cases. Well, what about Genghis Khan or a more recent, you know, tyrant? I can't do it for them. Okay, it doesn't mean the practice is problematic. Just do it for people that are more in range. And one way to relate to this, which I have found really helpful, is to relate to your unlovingness as kind of like radiating from you like you're a Wi-Fi base station. So it's not about them. How can I experience love for Genghis Khan? Well, you're a loving person and Genghis Khan happens to kind of move through your field. Sort of like that. So part one. Part two, I'm also not, I think forgiveness is complex. And I talk about level one and level two forgiveness. You know, level two forgiveness is the full pardon, the classic full pardon. Level one, you're disentangled, but you're, you might still be seeking justice. You might, you know, be fed up with them, but you're not dwelling on it anymore. You've turned a corner. You're disentangling yourself. So that, particularly if you belong to any group of people or you have any history in which your boundaries, your reasonable boundaries were not respected. I've been, I'm a male, male-bodied, cisgender, so forth. I've just been flabbergasted more and more as I get older by the historic structural systemic mistreatment of girls and women. It's like, and there are other groups as well, but that's an example. So if you belong to any group that whose boundaries have been routinely disregarded, body boundaries, you know, and other kinds of boundaries, then I think it's especially important to find your centered place in terms of the boundaries you've set for yourself. And a way into that is to ask yourself if you were a different person, you know, maybe a person who's more privileged structurally in society, what kind of boundary would you set? What kind of tone would you not tolerate coming at you? What kind of physical treatment of you would you just not tolerate? And then you have to explore whether it's safe physically and otherwise to set that boundary to be sure. But I think it's really important to, you know, stand up for important boundaries, including physical ones. So Bill, very intelligently as usual, what a surprise nod, 20 minutes past the hour, he writes, what about praise and respect coming to you, including opportunities for very rewarding engagement in projects that promise positive, rewarding satisfaction? These experiences caress one's self-identity very seductively. So we would best equally not take positive praise in regard from others personally, right? Fantastic question. So my opinion, I just offer it as opinion, is that there's a developmental process here. In the ultimate, we're able to see praise and blame as equally empty, ownerless, impersonal, and non-binding. We are that far along. And we are so far along that we're not deliberately internalizing praise to fill the holes in our heart. We're so far along. I've known a number of people who pretend that they're so far along, they're not that far along. They're still vulnerable to getting triggered, and they still are carrying a fair amount of suffering embedded in emotional residues deep down inside, somatically in their body. And they would be really served by deliberately looking, Bill, and other people here, for opportunities for praise, and respect, and inclusion, and loyalty to you, and valuing of you, to internalize those experiences, to heal themselves deeply inside, as a major way to reduce craving for those external sources of self-love. And it is true that you are offering a good caution here, Bill. And I find for myself that in practice, and I'm the king of taking in the good, right? In practice, to really be in the present where things are continually arising and passing away, arising, releasing, arising, releasing, arising, releasing, and deliberately sustaining beneficial experiences to train the brain, which needs sustained experience to lead to lasting change inside. So I kind of relate to this more as like a standing wave. The river is fluid, continuously changing, and yet there's a stability to it that is healing to the body and mind. We're giving to ourselves what we would love to give to that little child we once were, if we could go back in time, or to that person we were in our previous marriage, or job, or friendship, or neighborhood, right? And to me, there's a natural givingness of goodness, givingness of goodness to others. Well, it's okay if it's good and wise to give it to others. It's also good to take it inside for yourself. And as you do again and again, then when the oatmeal hits the fan, as someone appreciates my little saying there, it doesn't hurt so much, because you already feel full inside. That's it, I'll finish on this point. As I imagine myself stepping in to this conversation I'm gonna need to have soon, if I can help myself feel already full, a sense of fullness already, fullness of being, fullness of presence, yeah, you gotta work up to it, but still, to the extent that that's present with a kind of lovingness, one is much more able to be direct and real about what matters.