Everyone Has Their Own Inner Struggle

Each of us has our own inner struggle. For some of us it’s like World War III inside. And we don’t always know the details of people’s inner struggles. The only people who really understand are those who are fighting the battle themselves.

We are so ignorant because our minds are like a train going too fast. It generates convulsive thoughts. It turns everything around a thousand times, it formulates hypotheses about what is happening around us.

The mind makes assumptions, creates new ideas and concepts, considers and reconsiders, anticipates the worst and makes judgments about others… And of course about ourselves.

This incessant machine tortures us. And it leaves behind ‘spiritual waste’. Scientists claim that we have more than 60,000 thoughts a day. They estimate that for most people, most of those thoughts (about 80%) are negative, toxic, and dysfunctional.

We are usually on autopilot. Therefore, we are highly influenced by our beliefs. These are beliefs we form during childhood and become anchored in us through experience.

Some of these beliefs lie in our subconscious mind. Our most direct thoughts and judgments arise from those beliefs.

The Ghost and Its Tricks

If some of your beliefs are wrong or unhealthy, so will your thoughts and judgment. We are constantly judging. We judge ourselves and others. And what usually results from all that judging is suffering.

Our minds give judgment to protect us, for our own survival. In fact, judgments serve their purpose.

We tend to think that the other person shares our point of view, and that’s part of the reason we suffer so much. We all see the world through different lenses. What means one thing to me means something else to you. We dare to judge other people because we believe that everyone should see things as we see them.

We even judge ourselves. In doing so, we forget that we cannot judge the past from our present point of view. We now know what the consequences were, but at the time they were not certain, only possible, like many other options.

In either case, other people won’t let you suffer. In the first case, your own expectations of people make you suffer. We expect others to be exactly as we want them to be. It makes us unable to accept them as they really are. That’s the battle.

Acceptance and love heals everything, even inner strife

When you accept yourself for who you really are (including your shortcomings), you view the flaws of others in a kinder way. If we think that someone is attacking us, it may be because they are dealing with an inner struggle. He attacks without being aware of it.

The root causes are the emotional wounds and survival techniques he learned as a child. He got hurt then, when all he was looking for was love and acceptance. Very often that is what drives people to act in this way.

If you’re convinced that someone is attacking you, remember that they probably aren’t doing it intentionally. It’s an error he projects, or you imagine it.

We have to learn to accept that others don’t always do what we want. Nor will they always treat us the way we want them to. They will do it the way they do it.

We are here to love before we judge, and to feel before we reason. So if someone makes their circle smaller to keep you out, enlarge your circle to let them in.

Remember that love grows when we make our opinions more flexible, more empathetic, and more compassionate. Love brings happiness, severe judgment brings suffering.

Don’t think of love as something that you can give as a reward or take away as a punishment. Unconditional love is not so petty.

Victim or fighter?

If we stop judging and start seeing with our hearts, our suffering will disappear. You can choose to be the victim of your struggle or you can be a fighter. A victim justifies, lies, reproaches, complains and gives up.

But a fighter takes responsibility for what he has in life. He knows he can’t blame other people, he knows he created it. And he knows that he is the only one who can change his circumstances.

Life gives you challenging lessons, but you decide whether you become a victim or a fighter.

The truth is that those who do not learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them. They may look like different experiences on the surface, but deep down they are the same.