Everyone is your mirror.
Maybe you’ve heard this before.
It’s a simple principle that can be easy to forget, and, even when we remember it, can be challenging to bring into practice.
What does it mean?
First: Everyone means everyone.
Your intimate relationships. Family. Friends. Colleagues. The people you’ve never met but admire — or detest — from afar. Your greatest love and your sworn enemies. Your heroes. The people you never want to be like. Your children. The stranger on the street.
Everyone is your mirror.
Second: to say that everyone is your mirror means that the qualities you see in them exist within you too.
The traits you dislike in people, the things that annoy you — you’ve got them.
And the traits you most admire in others — the attributes that you wish you could have, the temperament you covet — you have those too.
Keeping this principle in mind can help us turn the corner from blame, anger, and judgment to compassion, forgiveness, and acceptance.
And there’s another place it helps to remember this principle: when it comes to the value of holding space for and truly seeing others.
When we hold space for others we help them feel seen and heard, which facilitates their healing. They no longer feel the need to suppress their emotions. When people feel seen, they come alive.
But the impact of holding space for and seeing others doesn’t end there. Because everyone is a mirror.
We often see in others what we can’t yet see in ourselves.
And so when we hold space for others, we also hold space for ourselves.
When we validate others, we implicitly validate those parts of ourselves that we have pushed into shadow.
When we acknowledge others in their experience, we acknowledge our own experience.
Our compassion for others becomes self-compassion.
By seeing others, we see ourselves.
And by facilitating their healing, we facilitate our own.
When we see others
We facilitate healing
For them and for us
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