There’s a psycho-spiritual question I’ve been asking myself recently: does deliberately exposing myself to things and people I have an aversion to lead to spiritual growth? Put another way, does avoiding things and people I don’t enjoy stunt my spiritual growth?
I don’t think spiritual growth requires deliberately subjecting ourselves to people, situations, or experiences we dislike simply because we dislike them. In fact, I think there’s a spiritual trap in thinking that way. The feeling that if I’m sufficiently evolved, nothing should ever bother me, and so if I feel an aversion, I need to override it by exposing myself to it, instead of just asking myself why I have that aversion and working on it without exposing myself to it. Do you see the difference? Does that make any sense?
Aversion is just information. It’s not necessarily an instruction telling you to go and do something.
This is a question that confused me for a while, especially since what bothered me changed after Bix died. I had a higher tolerance for some things and people and less for others. Weird. There was also something confusing about a teaching of Ram Dass’ that made me wonder about this. It was something in a speech. Someone told him, “I can’t live in New York City, what is your advice?” And his advice was, well, “You need to go live in New York City.” It always stayed with me. It struck me, puzzled me. Does this mean that if I hate something, I have to deal with it or I will remain spiritually defunct?
As I thought about it and studied more, I concluded that what he meant is that running away from things you dislike does not always bring you peace. If you believe you need a quiet place to be calm, it might mean your peace is very fragile—and entirely dependent on outer circumstances. Moving to the city could help you face loud, hard things, see where you still get mad or scared, and then work on those things. But I don’t actually think he meant the person had to pull up roots and find a tiny apartment in Manhattan they probably couldn’t afford. I don’t know if you’ve checked rent in Manhattan lately (or maybe you pay it now).
It’s not easy to find an affordable place in a nice part of the city with a working toilet. Maybe this person could take out a second mortgage, stay in a midtown hotel for a week, and see how it goes first. I lived in New York for 30+ years and found a great deal of peace there. The hum of the city, the breathtaking range of humanity, the culture(s), and the visual excitement captivated me. But I also found peace in the country, in the mountains, and at the beach. Location isn’t my Achilles heel; people and specific situations are.
At any rate, it’s not really about that. I don’t think you have to go toward things that hurt or break your heart. I do think it’s about how you watch your anger and anxiety when things are loud or messy, or too quiet—whatever it is you have an aversion to. Ask yourself what the root cause is: why is this person or that environment throwing me off?
You can also accept it. Ram Dass had an expression, “and that too.”
Ram Dass meant that you should accept all parts of life, good and the bad, without putting up a fight. He did not say you should intentionally seek out the bad in favor of the good. Bad and good happen in the course of life; no sense looking for trouble. When you’re in an unpleasant situation, instead of getting mad or turning a feeling into behavior, we can say, “and that too,” to remind ourselves that joy and pain belong to life on the human plane.
Don’t push the hard feelings away; acknowledge them. Allow your sadness, anger, and pain to sit next to your joy and peace. Suffering comes from clinging to the way we think things ought to be, not how they actually are. This is what really causes our pain. “And that too” can help end our attachment to outcomes. Life is a school, and we designed our curriculum for ourselves. How we react can change it—but acceptance brings peace and comes before behavior. Letting anger become destructive behavior isn’t going to rack up good karma.
When you feel upset or uncomfortable, identify it. “I’m feeling anxious (or whatever) right now,” without giving it a negative value. Breathe in and out slowly. Quietly to yourself, say, “And that too.” Next, look around and see if you can’t find something pleasant in the situation, or find another person to talk to. Excuse yourself with an open heart. Don’t try to fix your pain. If you acknowledge it and move on to something more restful for your soul and your mind, it will dissipate more quickly than you think.
Let me talk about some things I'm averse to.
On Tuesday, I published a piece about sound sensitivity and emotional backlash. I have sound sensitivity. It would be very foolish for me to expose myself to sounds that agitate me.
I don’t think Ram Dass or any spiritual teacher would want me to damage my nervous system by exposing myself to sounds that present a quantifiable biological challenge to me. That’s not a spiritual hurdle I need to cross. His advice about moving to the city applies to psychological preferences, not to physiological things that could overwhelm us or harm our health.
Annoyance, judgment, and impatience with city noise or chaos can be worked through mentally—they can be used as information about other things that are really bothering us. But sound sensitivity that causes immediate, involuntary nervous system distress should be avoided. It’s like a food you’re allergic to—you shouldn’t eat it, you could get very sick, you could die. That would be foolish. Eating tree nuts when you have an allergy to them would not be a spiritual championship-winning move.
What about people you have an aversion to? No, you don’t have to be friends with people you don’t like. Treat them with kindness and love the soul behind the behavior. But don’t put yourself in their path if you don't need to. That’s not spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is about honesty, not pretending. You can wish someone well spiritually and not hang out with them. You can set clear boundaries with people, and you can also do your spiritual work on why they trigger you. That’s what Ram Dass meant when he said working on yourself is the best thing you can do to alleviate suffering in the world.
Keeping an open heart, especially around those we don’t feel good about, contains some magic. Untangling my own triggers and reflections around difficult people, or people I have an aversion to for whatever reason, is information meant to keep me safe. But I can stop projecting my own wounds onto other people with an open heart. They’re not responsible for my pain. When I feel good and calm, I am of service to other people, and that’s how I need to be.
Working on healing my own wounds means I won’t project them onto other people, or expect other people to be responsible for them.
So no, you don’t have to engage with or face things you have an aversion to. But you do have to think about why, and that’s just good information to have when identifying your triggers.
I’ll tell a story about someone I was hesitant about, but it’s too helpful not to share. I had been asked to work on a volunteer project that involved someone I had concerns about. The person was known for being unreliable and having substance abuse problems. I did not want to expose myself to that, because addictive people have, in my experience, been agitating to my nervous system. So I declined the project. But then, on another project, I was thrown into working with this person. Ok, God, I’m listening. I am keeping my heart open. Over time, this person would come to me and talk. He was so civil and sweet. I was open to it.
As the weeks went on, he shared a lot about what he had overcome. He looked me in the eye one day and said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” and I said, “Because God has a sense of humor.” He didn’t know what I meant, but I did. God was having a good laugh over my insistence that this person wasn’t a good fit for me. We’ve since become very good friends. If we leave ourselves open to people without necessarily intentionally exposing ourselves to them, these kinds of things happen. See what happens. Go with the flow. Miracles of the universe will happen.
There is another person who is in the full throes of alcohol abuse. There are other problems there too—he is a nasty drunk, a crashing bore, and a narcissist. I witnessed him have a one-sided shouting match in a public parking lot not long ago, his victim standing there, mute, trying to figure out what he had done wrong (nothing). Everyone around heard the loud, drunken, angry rants. It was ugly. This is bad karma, and while I wish this person well, he is not welcome in my home, and I don't want to socialize with him. I know why he makes me uncomfortable: he is nasty when drunk, self-involved, uninterested in people outside of himself and his wife, and he has a hair-trigger temper.
Ram Dass doesn’t expect me to expose myself to him or have him in my home as a sign of my spiritual advancement. In fact, he often talked about setting fierce boundaries, noting that you don’t have to invite everyone to dinner just because you see the divine in them. I will keep an open heart and pray for this man’s peace because it is obvious an ocean of fear, anger, and resentment is churning inside of him and has been for some time.
One of my new BFF’s, Krishnamurti, believed in something called intelligence. He wrote that if you are aware and awake, you can observe your relationships clearly, and so will be able to naturally walk away from a toxic person without needing to build an angry, defensive wall in your mind toward them.
What would Jesus do? When people became hostile, aggressive, or unsafe, He routinely left the room or village (Luke 4:28-30). When dealing with people who were self-involved, demanding, or had clear bad intentions, Jesus refused to engage or simply left (Matthew 16:4). Jesus also taught his disciples that if an environment was hostile or unwelcoming, they should not stay and suffer (Matthew 10:14).
“Love your enemy” does not mean giving them unfettered access to your life or your home. In the great spiritual traditions, truly loving this kind of man means wishing for his sobriety and deliverance from his addiction and whatever demons caused it—none of which requires me to sit him down with him in my living room or next to him in a bar. Welcoming a nasty drunk into social settings enables their delusion that their behavior is acceptable. It’s not. Setting a hard boundary is sometimes the most loving, truth-filled thing we can do for an addict and for ourselves.
Ram Dass has important teachings on being a compassionate witness when we watch the movie of someone’s life as they self-destruct. One of his core principles is that we have no right to take away someone else’s suffering, nor can we save them from it. By trying to force change on someone, you actually strip them of any dignity they may have left. I know many people find this wisdom counterintuitive—aren’t we supposed to save people? Yes, when we see an immediate injustice, we should fight against it with an open heart. We should try to save someone from a burning building. But when someone is self-destructive, we can’t really help them until they are ready to come up for air. It’s not our place to decide when that should be.
Drop the rescue mission. That’s your ego talking. “Aren’t I morally superior, aren’t I the fixer of problems?” True compassion and love mean letting go of control, focusing on your own peace, and trusting the other person will eventually find their way. If they don’t, well, can we trust that this is part of their curriculum, their journey?
Try not to judge their actions, but observe the situation as a quiet reflection, which allows them to see, if they are looking, where they are caught. The addiction, the temper, and the narcissism are the “spacesuit” or the “role” the person is trapped in at the moment. As a witness, we can see it, but we can also understand that the soul underneath is still an integral part of the universe, and it’s teaching us something through that person. What do we see in them that we have to work on in ourselves?
I can’t get out of this so fast because there are things we have to do or predicaments we find ourselves in that do lead to spiritual growth. Ganga Stone, the late founder of God’s Love, We Deliver, and author of the book I acquired, edited, and published at Warner Books in 1996, Start the Conversation: The Book About Death You Were Hoping to Find, told me a story about Muktananda, her guru, and how he made her clean the toilets in the ashram when she lived there.
I remember telling her how I thought that sounded pretty distasteful, and she said, no, it was what she needed, and Muktananda knew it. “I was this privileged white woman from Manhattan. It was an ego-crushing job that I actually came to appreciate,” she told me. Ganga spent two years on her intense spiritual retreat at Swami Muktananda’s ashram in Ganeshpuri, India, in the mid-to-late 1970s. During those two years, she immersed herself in Seva, or service, cleaning toilets, doing the laundry, and washing the ashram’s stone floors.
This story beautifully illustrates Seva (selfless service) and how a Guru uses specific, uncomfortable tasks to crush the ego. There is a spiritual difference between Ganga scrubbing toilets under Muktananda’s guidance and exposing yourself intentionally to dangerous situations or allowing a volatile, abusive person into your home. The distinction lies in the nature of the container, the presence of safety, and the root of the discomfort.
Cleaning toilets challenges pride, entitlement, and attachment to status—something Muktananda Americans may be especially prone to (just saying…). It deals with inner resistance. Facing a volatile, screaming individual deals with outer safety, psychological abuse, and unpredictable danger. Ganga was in a structured ashram under the watchful eye of a peaceful teacher whom she trusted for her spiritual evolution. The parking lot shout-down was uncontained, chaotic, and destructive. Spiritual growth requires a foundation of psychological safety; chaos traumatizes.
Ganga also translated her ashram lessons into her incredible work founding God’s Love We Deliver, working with people dying of AIDS through her course on death and writing a book about it.
You can see the difference between scrubbing the toilets in an ashram and allowing a volatile narcissist into your living room, right?