Holding your state.

There is a famous poem by Rudyard Kipling that starts:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

And this embodies the theme for this week; keeping your state. How often are we in a good space and yet when someone near us loses their good state we follow suit. Part of living with the bigger picture in mind is being strong enough within to hold our inner state when the world around us goes haywire. One clue to handle these situations is to know that it is not personal. We might be involved simply by being in the same place at the same time, but it is not personal to us, it is not because of us.

For example a work colleague might be going through a tough time and being grumpy, negative and generally not good company. We can either allow ourselves to become effected by this energy and start being grumpy in unison, or we can remind ourselves that this energy that surrounds us is not actually anything to do with us. We didn’t create it and it is only personal to us if we make it personal. In other words it wasn’t any action on our part that created this feeling and therefore we do not have to take the ‘blame’ for it.

This might sound like a technicality but if we can simply have the phrase ‘don’t take it personally’ running through our minds it does help us to take a step back and see the situation for what it is. Someone other than ourselves is going through a challenging time and although we want to be empathetic and sympathetic we do not have to take it on, in fact the best support we can be is to hold our own space of equilibrium. In this way we mirror a different place and hold it for them to move towards.

Another useful tool in this particular box is for us to only focus on what we do like about the situation. Instead of nagging and asking them to stop their negative behaviour – which they obviously can’t or they would – we can simply focus on and acknowledge what we do like. So if they say or do something that improves the situation we can acknowledge it in some way, and the rest we simply leave be. By focusing on the positive we utilize the law of attraction and draw more towards us both.

So, if you are in a situation, be it with friends or your partner, at work or maybe within your family, remember that the best thing we can do for anyone around us who is having a hard time and feeling down is to hold our state, don’t take it personally and mirror an alternative way of being. That’s loving support.


If you would like to see the whole poem, If, go to:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/~apreset1/docs/if.html

If this message has sparked your interest and made you think then please feel free to leave a comment; the more the merrier. If you would like to be informed when a new blog is posted please sign up for the blog alert by clicking the link (above to the right) or emailing me at jessica@jessicamcgregorjohnson.com with alert in the subject line.