Know yourself through your perception of others

If we take any random person then pick five people in their life and interview them about said person we are bound to hear five different perceptions about them. One person may perceive them as funny, kind and warm-hearted while another person may see them as irresponsible, immature, and unintelligent.
So whose perception is the correct one?

We frame our own perception about people that we meet based on our own relationship with ourselves and our own personality traits. For example, let’s say a person has never experienced the feeling of envy, how could they recognize this trait in another person if they have never experienced it? It means turning our attention outward and blaming or judging others is pointless.

If we pay close attention to who or what brings about a strong emotional reaction from us,we can utilize this to our advantage. Negative reactions indicate either one of two things. One that either we are attached to an idea or belief about the way things SHOULD be or the way someone SHOULD behave which means we are trying to force our own agenda on to other people, when in fact, no one has to behave the way we think they should. Anytime we hold people to our expectations of them instead of accepting them as they are, we are sitting in resistance of the present moment. The other thing a negative emotional reaction can indicate is that there is an aspect of our self that we are not wanting to look at, so we are literally finding it in other people as a clue to us that we need to bring awareness to this trait in ourselves.

As Carl Jung said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” 


To truly heal a part of our self that we have become conditioned to hide from the world we must start to practice 100% honesty with ourselves. If we are experiencing anger, we admit and allow our self to experience anger, when we experience fear, we identify the fear and only become aware of it. It doesn’t mean we have to judge ourselves as good or bad because of the emotions it only means that we are aware of it and are then able to send unconditional love to these parts of ourselves. Although, it may sound terrible to always see ourselves as the “problem” and always have to turn our hand and point the finger back at ourselves when we so badly want to point it at another person, it actually is the most empowering move we can make. When we see our self as the “problem” we automatically become our own solution. When we start to see our self in everyone we automatically start making an honest and authentic relationship with ourselves. And when our relationship with ourselves is loving and accepting, we start not only seeing these same traits in other people but we realize that things or people that used to bring about a strong negative reaction from us are now met with forgiveness and compassion. We quite literally change and heal our relationships with others by changing and healing our relationship with ourselves.