If we resentful towards some other devotee, how can we overcome the resentment?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
but we don’t we can be duplicitous so if we are serving if a situation we have to serve in spite of someone then how can we overcome the resentment that is there about that person generally if firstly it is not possible to have very close and wonderful relationship with everyone we are all different human beings if we try to be if we try to be very close and affectionate towards everyone it is not going to work first of all we ourselves have finite finite human finite capacities and we can’t control others so we have to understand that different relationships work best at different distances the one devotee was telling me you know i was talking about another devotee says he’s a wonderful devotee to admire from a distance so now he’s a wonderful devotee in general but when he has to work he’s often quite demanding and then actually that’s not a bad thing sometimes devotees may be demanding for Krishna’s sake but then some devotees may not be able to take it off those are working with them which is fine so the point is that sometimes in a relationship when there is a lot of resentment or negativity it might just be that we have not found out the right distance at which the relationship can function so we may expect a lot of closeness in that relationship but other person is not interested in the close relationship so that’s okay then basically when we work out what is the distance at which this relationship works the best then we will become steady and so sometimes some people you do your service i do my service and both of us cooperate by operating separately by operating separately means not that we have negative feelings against each other but just that you know we are we are some people are just different and then they need to work separately there’s nothing wrong in that but it is just where it becomes wrong or unwanted is if both keep speaking negatively about each other both keep finding faults with others and transmitting that negativity to everyone then that becomes unpleasant but if there’s a sometimes a respectful distance might just be the best way to people function and Prabhupada would do that at a practical level if two devotees didn’t get along so well just tell them go and open two different centers and even now the world is a big place and there are so many ways in which we can serve Krishna having said that that first principle would be to find the right distance that works for that relationship then second point is that if we have negative feelings about a particular person then we can try to change that by associating with someone who appreciate that person and getting a different perspective of the person now our interactions might with them have been very unpleasant but somebody else might have a pleasant interactions and generally our perception our vision is shaped by our conceptions so if we if we have a negative conception about someone then even if they have positive side and negative side we will gravitate towards the negative side as it will be difficult for us to see good in them so if somebody who sees the positive if we associate with them and then let them speak about the person and say oh I didn’t realize they had this this good side also this good side also so that will help us to overcome that negativity if that resentment is associated with a particular interaction then if it is possible then it may be best to talk with them directly and understand why they did what they did generally immediately after the incident that if something is unpleasant has happened the temperatures are too high so that time it may not work but later on as distance passes as time creates a distance the temperatures cool the emotional temperature cools down and then we also gain perspective they also gain perspective and then we might be able to better understand why they did what they did and then again that resentment can go down so by seeing their by clarifying by communicating with them at a one-to-one level it can help in removing certain misconceptions or removing certain conception not which may not be wrong but at least clarifying them another level which we got a thing which we could do is that we see it as there is a certain amount of karma that we have to get so there is adhyatmik klesh, adhibhautik klesh, adhidaivik klesh so there is a certain amount of distress that through relationships that we are all meant to go through by our karma now if we one devotee told me that sometimes i feel that i get more problems through devotees than through non-devotees my non-devotee colleagues are so nice devotees are so demanding i say it’s not necessarily like that often our relationship with our non-devotee colleagues might be very functional and professional so generally in an office people don’t misbehave so much you know because they know it’s a job it’s a place of working so people keep their emotions generally under control so because the relationship is at a distance it’s not that close a relationship so it appears good but devotees become much closer and relatively speaking we are much more emotionally invested in our devotional relationships than non-devotional relationships so because of that we can we it is likely that when some ups and downs happen the ups and downs will shake us much more when they happen in our devotional relationship just like if an earthquake occurs here you know if the earthquake occurs under my where i am it will shake me much more if the earthquake occurs in the center of the earthquake is in the street across that will also shake me but the center is there so it will shake me much lesser so some relationships are like our center although we say krishna should be the center of us but functionally at present there are some other relations that are the at the center of our being so when they’re shaking over there we feel much more distressed by that so also that if we have a certain amount of klesha distress to get through adibhautika through people around us and if most of the people around us are devotees then that adibhautika klesha will come through devotees so it’s not necessary that that particular devotee who is against us it’s just that that devotee is simply delivering our karma to us so prabhupada would say sometimes don’t become angry at the instrument of your karma and beyond that we can also see that sometimes this might just be a way those that resentment processing that resentment is is what we need to grow internally we in general tend to identify very strongly with our mind the emotion that come in the mind the thought that come in the mind just very quickly identify with them every day i write an article on the gita so today morning i wrote an article our thoughts are not always wise we don’t have to always follow their advice so sometimes we just need to create a distance from them so that resentment that is there within us when it comes we can see that this is actually here not because of this person this isn’t there because i am so attached to my mind so one way to create distance from the mind is to simply preface the the emotion with the mind is saying instead of saying i am feeling resentful the mind is saying i am feeling resentful if you just develop this exercise i mean i am depressed the mind is saying i’m depressed if we just do this much we repeatedly start doing this we start identifying that this is not my emotion this is my mind’s emotion now of course the mind is inside me and that emotion will affect me just like say if we have a child and the child is in a very foul mood crying loudly screaming loudly that is going to disturb us but the child just because the child is crying and screaming the mother starts crying and screaming the problem will become multiply manifold isn’t it so if we understand the mind is like a child and the mind is having this emotion then okay this emotion is there how do i deal with it just understanding that this is the mind is saying it that creates some distance from us so okay the mind is saying i’m feeling resentful okay yeah this has happened and this is how i dealt with it this is what i have done this is what i’m planning to do by that we can process that emotion so generally we think of emotions only in two ways expressing them or repressing them but the third way to deal with emotions also processing them so we can use our intelligence to analyze or to evaluate or to okay what all have i done to deal with this reason you know this person did like this but then that person was good at these these these times that person doing so much good over here therefore this is one small blot in their behavior let me not hyper let me not uh become hyper about it let me autopsies on it so like that we can bring our intelligence to bear on that particular emotion and then when we do it this way when we bring our in first we need to distance and then we diffuse if there is an explosive and the explosive if it explodes it will cause damage but then other some people are diffusion experts now they know how to diffuse the explosive sometimes our emotions can be like explosives so first we distance ourselves on the emotion and then we diffuse the emotion we diffuse it by processing it by processing means okay this resentment is there it is because of this this this but we have done this this to address it so therefore this emotion is not that important right we’ve done it so it will not go away but if we don’t pay that much attention to it gradually it will start decreasing and ultimately as we become purified and as we become attracted towards krishna then our service to krishna will become so important that we will not have time for resentment so that will happen gradually but there are other things also which we can which i mentioned earlier which we can do to deal with the resentment thank you desire sometimes the