How to Love Even When You're on Fire
Or, Sleeping Beauty and the Dunya Fever Dream
What happens when you extend an olive branch to someone and they send it back to you in flames?
What I’m going to say here is not going to be welcome in every quarter. That’s fine; not everyone is ready for it. I am learning that to be one’s truest self sometimes – maybe often – triggers an abreaction; people sneer, roll their eyes, or resort to insults to tear down your attempts at living a more real, more heart-centred life. (I’m already cringing.)
Sometimes it does look cheesy. There are people who try to fake their way into it, whose journey to self-love is obsessively documented in a curated Instagram feed of meditating on tropical beaches, hashtag showingupasmyauthenticself. That’s not what I’m talking about.
I was recently told, amid a stream of spiteful remarks from someone I had tried to repair a relationship with, that I needed to stop embarrassing myself on Instagram. (This was from someone who I’d blocked on that app, so this really came from leftfield.)
Bemused, I had to ask myself: what exactly was this person be referring to? Most of what I share is photos of craft projects, old cities, books I’m reading. I do occasionally share goofy videos with things that make me laugh…could that be it?
The whole pouting, posing, flawlessly made-up image thing is like nails down a chalkboard for me. If I bother to watch a video all the way through of someone talking, it’s because they seem natural and candid. They stammer, they have wrinkles, but they have something important to say and that matters more.
Looking at another face is actually a kind of looking into a mirror, and when what you see is too different from what you know of yourself, it’s jarring. One study showed that 5 hours of social media use per day increases symptoms of depression in teen girls by 50%, and 35% in boys. Body dissatisfaction was a major part of this problem.
If your goal is to be sincere and unpretentious, you will sometimes make a fool of yourself. Laughing at your own silliness, and allowing others to laugh at it too, is very healing. We are human, imperfect, works in progress; the only shame in that is expecting yourself to be perfect and being shocked that it isn’t true.
Bullies were always bullied themselves, but not all of the bullied become bullies. The trouble is that most of our reactions to other people are projections from our own state.
In my therapy session last night I went to an astonishing place of healing inner child wounds. (I told you this post would be annoying.) Approaching my wounded inner little girl from the perspective of my “sage self”, the part of me that is constantly connected to the infinite Divine resource, I realised that she was mistrustful that anyone would want to love her and keep her safe. And that I’d made a life of being self-reliant, aloof, unassailable but also mistrustful of love – not because I was kept chained in a basement all my childhood, but because that’s just how I dealt with my circumstances, before I was able to make an informed choice.
Everyone wants to be loved. Anyone who protests that they don’t need love is lying. But to be able to accept love from another, you have to feel worthy of it, bodily feel it, in that deeply-stored vulnerable self that usually doesn’t get a look in.
To say that a meditative experience of finally loving and accepting that love – because I am both of these selves simultaneously – was healing would be…an understatement. On a chemical level, the brain doesn’t know the difference between a real experience and an imagined one. It’s all lived.
So how does this relate to loving someone even when they hurt you? Patience! I’m coming to that.
When you try to relate to another person, you are actually (at least partly) relating to yourself in some way: the people in whom you can see yourself tend to be the ones you feel an affinity with, right? So the way we treat other people is, on some level, a direct manifestation of the way we treat (or view) ourselves. Like they say, when you point a finger at another, you’re really pointing three back at yourself.
Now, this argument that “whatever you say sticks back on you” can easily be weaponised, especially in the current climate of therapy-speak. The whole point of therapy is surely to get healed! But sadly it can end up moving around the furniture, entrenching an idea of our own victimhood, remaining in blame-and-attack mode but just with more sciencey-sounding justifications.
What I mean is this: when someone lashes out at you, it hurts. That’s the whole point; they’re trying to hurt, consciously or unconsciously.
But in fact, most of the hurt stays inside them. It’s like a blob of lava leaping out of a volcano; it singes the other, but the source of it is still bubbling away inside. And ultimately the one who suffers the most is the one who has to carry it around inside them. What you do to another, you also do to yourself – because you’re already doing it to yourself, all the time.
So the way to develop the capacity to love another, even in the extreme circumstance of them behaving in a hurtful way towards you, is to find that lost, abandoned inner child and love them until they know they are safe to be loved. It may sound like a distraction from the real work, but from that deep place of feeling safe and loved, the volcano of hurt can turn to a well of fresh water from which you can take again and again. And attacks from the outside don’t sting for long.
Of course, none of this is possible while you feel under threat. The self-defensive reflexes won’t allow for it. In this situation, you do the sensible thing and block that bully before they can say “How dare you prevent me from trampling you like a herd of rhinos!”
From behind that defensive structure, though, visualise them as their best, kindest, calmest, most loving self, their real self that’s being strangled by their unexamined trauma, vines as strong as intergenerational patterns.
To reclaim the Sleeping Beauty narrative from whatever psychosis Hans Christian Andersen was undergoing, we can see it as the challenge to cut through that barrier of thorns and be reunited with our own innocence and beauty, which has been anaesthetised into oblivion by the fever dream that is the Dunya.
It’s not just a positive feedback loop: it’s that you already have whatever you give, and the giving just amplifies it.
It is said that when you send peace and blessings upon the Prophet, he ﷺ sends them back to you. And he ﷺ said that when you praise someone, you partake of that praise. It’s like when, during Ramadan, you gain the same blessings of fasting when you give someone food to break their fast with, without detracting from their blessings in any way. So it is possible, in fact wholeheartedly advisable, to give the good that you want to receive, because you’ll have it before anyone has the chance to return it.
One last anecdote I want to share: the Algerian Sufi master Emir Abdelkadir, who united tribal groups to fight French colonial forces, was asked why he treated his captives well when the French had been so vicious towards the Algerians. He replied: “Because they are not our teachers.”