I was doing some classwork for one of my witchcraft apprenticeships over the weekend, and I came upon the concept of blessing one’s enemies. The idea is that you wish for so much awesome stuff to blossom in your enemy’s life that they no longer have time for nor interest in bothering you.
Thankfully, I don’t have anyone in my life at the moment whom I would consider an enemy, but while pondering this concept I was reminded of situations in the past–for example, after a particularly nasty breakup–when it was very difficult, if not downright impossible, to think about the other person experiencing happiness. I certainly wasn’t wishing it upon them myself!
This train of thought felt intriguing so I meditated on it further, and I was reminded of a post I wrote called Putting Away the Family Battle Ax, the main point being that when we resent our parents for the wounds they inflicted on us as children, it can be hard to see them experience the very healing that we wish for ourselves. As an example, if you see your parents as having screwed you up in the intimacy department, making it difficult for you to forge healthy, adult relationships, you might secretly (or not so secretly) resent the hell out of them if they’re able to build a healthy relationship for themselves.
As I discussed in that earlier post, if we allow our parents to heal we, too, can experience the benefits. You can look at this from the vantage of we are all One, or you can zoom into your immediate family and look at it as, if the members of the family are healthy, the family unit as a whole benefits. In this context, it’s clear that wishing ill upon others and blocking their well being does nothing to further our own peace of mind.
But let’s get back to blessing our enemies. It was interesting to watch the resistance that came up when I thought about doing this for certain people, even when the situations had long since passed. Part of this resistance came from the false belief that forgiveness means condoning the behavior in question. But I felt like there was something else under the surface, so I kept digging.
I discovered some very old beliefs, rooted deep in my childhood, about what it means to be a “good” person versus a “bad” person. As a child, I absorbed messages from the world around me, particularly from the adults in my life and stories that had very clear delineations between the good and evil characters. A “good” person, in these limited paradigms, was someone who never did anything to hurt another. And if they did hurt someone, they had to go on a lengthy, difficult journey to repent and change their evil ways.
If you did something hurtful, then you were a bad person to the core, and only a thorough scourging could ever hope to cleanse you of your wickedness. Hmm. This is all starting to sound a bit melodramatic and extreme.
Well, like all “good” children, I absorbed what I was taught, and as an adult I have struggled with the concept that good people can do bad things and still be good people. And I can be a good person and still do bad things.
This strict good versus evil dichotomy fuels destructive perfectionism, and it also makes it much harder to look at ourselves (and others) with clear-seeing.
If you want to view yourself as a “good” person, you probably have a whole list of behaviors and thoughts that are acceptable for a good person such as yourself. If you do or think something outside of that list, there’s a very good chance that you will not be able to see it, because to do so would challenge your sense of self.
This is where things get weird, as we project our issues onto other people where they’re much safer to see and judge, and we engage in other mental contortions to avoid seeing ourselves in our complexity as inherently good and imperfect. I see this time and time again in my own life and in the lives of those close to me. We remain baffled as to why we are dealing with yet another person or situation who is bugging us in the same exact way as the last twenty annoying people or situations, forgetting to look at the common factor: ourselves.
As Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
So what does all of this have to do with blessing our enemies? Well, my weekend pondering has led to the conclusion that when we resist blessing our enemies, whether because we feel like doing so is condoning their behavior or is taking them out of the bad person bucket and allowing them admittance to the good person club, we remain tethered to them and to the hurtful situation.
If we are stuck in the paradigm that good people don’t do bad things, our enemies are forever tainted. They are evil to the core–why else would they hurt us? And if we release them from this judgment we are loosing them upon the world to cause further damage. Better to keep them pinned down with our judgments and anger.
But in order to engage in this vision of the world as right/wrong, good/bad, we must see ourselves as all good or all bad as well. This is like walking a tightrope over a pit of tigers. Stressful much? I don’t see this fearful tightrope walker having much freedom to dance or laugh or play without risking a tumble into the pit. In order to step off the rope and plant our feet firmly on the earth where we are fully supported and nourished and have freedom to move joyfully, we must release our strict pronouncements of right and wrong, good people and bad people.
We must give ourselves, and others, the space to fully express who we are as complex humans who can be miraculously kind and occasionally cruel, overflowing with compassion and stingy with fear. (And this also means we take care of ourselves with boundaries and other means if someone is being less than kind to us.)
In so doing, we begin to see ourselves more clearly.
We begin to relax.
We forgive ourselves.
We accept imperfection.
And we release the ties that bind us and hold us down.