People see in us a reflection of who they are. As we see ourselves in others. We are all mirrors for each other. The positive qualities people see in us are the positive qualities they feel in themselves. What we reject in others is what we don’t accept about ourselves.
Different people reflect back different facets of ourselves. The people we feel instinctively pulled towards, mirror what we like about ourselves. People we feel rejected by mirror our shadow—our alter-ego, the person we’d rather not be, the things we don’t like about ourselves.
Naturally, it’s easier to be in the presence of the people that reflect to us the person we feel proud to be—the worthy, the loving, the powerful, the kind, caring, intelligent, funny—whoever that person is. It’s very difficult to be with people who judge us and reflect our dark side. But the benefits of learning to be with this, and not just learning to be with it, but accepting to be with it without resistance, are invaluable.
We are all that life is. We contain all qualities of life within us—generosity and greed, diligence and laziness, fear and courage, kindness and rudeness, humility and arrogance. We tend to prefer one of these polarities and reject the other, but the positive can’t be there without the negative, for they are the same thing and only exist in the opposition to one another. And each quality—whether we desire it or not—has a benefit.
We feel compelled to anchor ourselves around the qualities we think highly of. But we are the most potent expression of ourselves not when we align with one of the polarities, but when we learn to contain them both, with love and grace. It is when we integrate our shadow, and we hold our multitudes and controversies, with love and grace, that we become the most powerful version of ourselves through the embrace of our uniqueness.