Knit Sisters

Last week, my sister and I were having a discussion about difficult people. You know the kind we’re talking about. Everyone has had experiences with these types—someone in your family or at work who is irrational and combative, who likes to keep everyone else on the defensive or a little on edge, who throws obstacles in the way what should be the simplest transactions or tasks, who attempts to drive wedges between people and play one person off against another, who is vicious and wantonly cruel, but if called out on his or her behavior will claim that he or she has no idea what you are talking about and that you must be crazy or pathologically oversensitive.

You know the type. You probably have one in your family or office. A person you cannot easily get away from, a person of untrammelled malevolence, someone who makes your days long and fills your nights with dreams of homicide. You know the type?

One of our grandmothers—God rest her mean, twisted little soul—was a
Difficult Person, so we are well acquainted with the territory. Well acquainted.

But as a result, we are also less patient with this type of individual when we encounter her elsewhere because we know from long and bloody experience that nothing satisfactory is going to come of interactions with a irredeemably Difficult Person. Nothing. We learned this lesson as children.

And they can never take that away from us!

Sarah and I were discussing difficult people not only because we were nostalgic for the Golden Days of Yore when Grandma was still alive and could spoil an entire holiday with one exquisitely-timed vicious remark over turkey and cranberry sauce, but also because I—as is inevitable in this imperfect life of ours—had once again encountered a Difficult Person.

My patience and tolerance sorely tested, I was casting about for ways to cope. Then I remembered the lessons of the “Wisdom” column in Yoga Journal. Admittedly, I used to cast the hairy eyeball on the “Wisdom” column because I had come to regard it as—in the immortal words of one of the great philosophic minds in the Western tradition—“windy, New Age horseshit.”

But upon further reflection, I realized that at core, once you (ahem) cleaned out the stable, you really were left with some of the basic lessons I learned in Sunday School. Love your enemy as yourself. Bless those who curse you.

There was in fact a recent “Wisdom” column on the power of blessings, a power, the article claimed, that we all have within us and that would bring us, in return, abundant blessings. But there was one catch: you had to bestow sincere blessings on people you did not like. A Difficult Person, for instance.

A very deep, Sunday-schooled part of me found this mysteriously compelling. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if I could bless this Difficult Person and create a magical nimbus of positive energy and love around our interactions? Instead of, for instance, thinking of ways that the Difficult Person might come to be poisoned with untraceable chemicals and the killer never apprehended by the authorities?

So I set out to become a blesser of the Difficult Person. I’m a morning person by temperament and I start every day by walking my dog, an activity I greatly enjoy at a time of the day I greatly enjoy. What could be a better daily backdrop in which to bless the Difficult Person? The day is new and fresh, anything is possible, I have a steaming hot cup of decaf coffee laced with high-fiber soymilk (The Breakfast of Middle-Aged Champions!), and I am parading about my neighborhood with an overexuberant yellow dog. People, it doesn’t get any better than this!

Thus I set about the sacred task of bestowing blessings upon the Difficult Person. On Monday, I offered this blessing: “Difficult Person, may you be blessed with joy, wisdom, and the love that all of us deserve.”

Not bad, I thought, and certainly in the right spirit, but a little generic.

So on Tuesday, I refined my blessing: “Difficult Person, may you see that the road on which you have been travelling is the road of hatred, not of love, and the road of hatred is full of stones and home to scorpions. May you turn down the road of love at the very next intersection. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.”

And then on Wednesday: “Difficult Person, may you find the right blend of psychotherapy and psychotropic medications to transform you from a monster into a half-way reasonable person.”

Clearly, I had a long journey ahead on the road to enlightenment and ennoblement.

With my program of blessings degenerating quickly, I decided to take a new tack. An earlier “Wisdom” column specifically about dealing with difficult people had suggested that you invite the Difficult Person into your special “Heart Space” (I can only hope that we are meant to understand this as a metaphorical or imaginary space…otherwise, blech…) and once you envision yourself with the Difficult Person within the imaginary of your “Heart Space,” you extend feelings of warmth, compassion, and understanding toward the Difficult Person, inspiring healing, trust, and mutual compassion.

So I invited the Difficult Person into my imaginary Heart Space and I was sitting there with the Difficult Person, exuding imaginary warmth, compassion, and understanding, when I noticed that there were a couple of violent-looking heavies standing at the door to my Heart Space. Since they were guarding the only entrance or exit, I immediately recognized them as the hired muscle of my Heart Space, a pair of spiritual bouncers, if you will.

Though I knew it was wrong, I stopped exuding compassion and motioned toward the heavies. “See those guys?” I said to the Difficult Person. “Maybe they can help you understand that in my Heart Space, it’s my way or the highway.”

Perhaps this was not what I was supposed to glean from this visualization exercise. Perhaps Yoga Journal will learn of my indefensible Heart Space interaction with the Difficult Person and drop me from their subscriber list.

But I think my expulsion from the Garden of New Age Wisdom, should it come to that, would be worth it. Already I find that I feel better about the Difficult Person than I have in months.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 11:06 pm and is filed under The new yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.