I talk to my mother on the phone everyday. This may sound excessive (and it is), but she lives down the street from me, and it could be worse—I could see her everyday.
I love my mother. I do. But most of the time I don’t enjoy talking to her.
My mother is the most negative person I’ve ever known. Ever. She finds fault in nooks and crannies where most of us wouldn’t think to look. She judges. She criticizes. She complains.
I listen to this everyday.
And here I am intending to feel good.
My mother used to be a big obstacle between me and that goal. I could wake up feeling great, talk to her, and be either pissed or just plain down by the time I was done.
Not anymore.
I have come to understand that no one but me can make me feel bad. My mother can complain about everything under the sun. She can harangue about politicians, detail her health issues (she has many), fuss over my dad’s health problems (he has even more), chastise me for some failing or another, and I get off the phone feeling just fine, thank you.
I used to let everyone impact my mood, especially people close to me, like my mom or my husband or good friends.
No more.
What someone else is complaining about has nothing to do with me—it’s just that person creating their own reality. What someone else thinks about me has nothing to do with me … unless I start thinking about it and let it throw me out of alignment.
So let my mother tell me about all the things that went wrong in her life today. I don’t care. I feel good.
And a word about empathy—we’ve been trained that if we don’t feel bad when someone else is suffering, we’re uncaring. We’ve been trained wrong.
When we empathize, we only add to the other person’s negative vibration. This doesn’t help them. Sympathy and empathy don’t help. What helps is seeing the person feeling the way they want to feel, having what they want to have. What helps is sharing our own alignment and good feelings.
Linking into someone else’s “chain of pain,” as Abraham calls it, only makes everyone sink lower.
So bring on my mother. She can’t touch my good feelings.
