TOLERANCE

"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." - Carl Jung

In Rule One, you learned the lesson of acceptance, in which you learned to embrace all parts of yourself. Tolerance is the outward extension of acceptance; it is when you learn to embrace all parts of others and allow them to be and express themselves fully as the unique humans that they are. You will need to learn tolerance in order to coexist peacefully with others. Tolerance quiets the inner critic that chatters in your mind so that you can apply the old adage, "live and let live".

When I was sixteen years old, I remember walking down 57th St. in New York City and being suddenly aware, for the first time, of a voice in my head talking to me. It sounded like a running commentary on everyone within my field of vision. I heard it broadcasting impressions incessantly, and the majority were far from kind. I realized that I could-and did- find fault with every single person I passed. The next thought that came to me was, "isn't that amazing, I must be the only perfect person in the universe, since everyone else apparently has something wrong with him."

Once I realized how ridiculous this sounded, it dawned on me that perhaps my judgements of all these people on the street were reflections of myself as opposed to some objective reality. I began to understand that what I was seeing about each of them said more about me than it said about each of them. I also realized that perhaps I was judging everyone else harshly as a way to feel good about myself. By perceiving them as too fat, short, or strangely dressed, I was by comparison thinner, taller and more stylish. In my mind, my intolerance of them rendered me superior.

Some part of me knew that judging others is a way of covering up feelings of insufficiency and insecurity. I decided to examine each judgement I heard in my head and think of it as a mirror allowing me to glimpse some hidden part of myself. I discovered that there were very few people whom I viewed as "acceptable", and the majority of them were very similar to me. Since I rarely allowed myself to relate to anyone who was not exactly like me, I had put myself into an isolated box. From that day on, I used every judgement as a gift to learn more about myself.

Making this shift meant that I had to give up judging the world. Giving up my righteous intolerance meant that I could no longer deem myself automatically superior to anyone, and the result was that I needed to take a good look at my own flaws.

I recently had a business lunch with a man who displayed objectionable table manners. My first reaction was to judge him as offensive and his table manners as disgusting. When I noticed that I was judging him, I stopped and asked myself what I was feeling. I discovered that I was embarrassed to be seen with someone who was chewing with his mouth open and loudly blowing his nose into his linen napkin. I was astonished to find how much I cared about how the other people in the restaurant perceived me. I consciously had to shift from perceiving the situation as being about him to it being about me and my embarrassment. This allowed me to use this man's actions as mirror with which to see my own insecurities about being seen with a person  who was less than perfect, and how that reflected on me.

The ultimate goal of making such a shift in perception and learning tolerance is to get to the moment of saying, "So what if this person is..." and thereby taking your power back. If I had allowed my lunch partner to continue to disgust me, I would have given all my power to him. I would have allowed his actions to dictate my feelings. By recognizing that my judgement of him had everything to do with me, I neutralized the effect his manners had on me and took back my power.

Whenever you find yourself intolerant of someone, ask yourself, "What is the feeling underneath this judgement that I don't want to feel?" It might be discomfort, embarrassment, insecurity, anxiety, or some other feeling of diminishment that the person is evoking you. Focus on actually feeling that feeling so that your intolerance can evaporate, and you can embrace both your own emotions and the actions or behavior of the person you are judging.

Remember that your judgement of someone will not serve as protective shield against you becoming like him. Just because I judged my lunch partner as offensive does not prevent me from ever looking or acting like him, just as extending tolerance to him would not cause me to suddenly begin chewing my food with my mouth open. As tough and rigid as judgement and intolerance may be, it can never protect you from anything but Love.