See Your Self in the Context of Community
Have you ever had the experience of feeling like you had really grown up and then spending time with your family? All of a sudden did you find yourself engaging in the same patterns you did when you were in high school? Me too. Welcome to your shadow (or one view of it, anyway). There's a famous idea that I've seen attributed to many spiritual teachers. In the form that the Baal Shem Tov, the spiritual teacher of the Chassidic movement, expresses it, "when a person sees bad in another person, he is really being shown the bad in himself." It might be easy to feel all enlightened when we are independent from everyone else, living in an untouchable box, it might be easy to meet our goals with serenity and calm. It gets more complicated when you add a whole community of other people (family, coworkers, your spiritual group, all the people you interact with on the bus, etc) to the mix! They annoy you, they make demands on you, and they have a view of you that reinforces the you that you used to be - after all, that's the you that they saw the last time you saw them. That's why being able to hold your growth in your group, in your social ecosystem, is a sign that you're really growing. When we are able to free ourselves from an old pattern of how we relate to others, that's a huge shift. Because other people are a mirror to what's going on inside us.
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