Holiday Blues? Don’t Blame the Mirror
Changing/healing our world starts by changing/healing our being, not by what we do
The hostess planned a big holiday bash. Being budget-minded and diligent, she did the prep work herself. After a long evening of baking, the next morning she scrubbed the floors, washed the windows, vacuumed, and dusted the living, dining, and family rooms of her home. She arranged the decorations in these rooms, and made sure the guest bathroom was sparkling clean.
Then she started on the cooking. By afternoon, she needed a break. In the hall on her way to the kitchen, she caught her reflection in a mirror. She was not happy at her disheveled hair, grimy clothes, and sweaty face.
She rushed to the kitchen faucet, wet a dishtowel, and returned to the mirror, swiping vigorously. She cleaned and cleaned that mirror, but it still showed her as dirty and unkempt.
She returned armed with a vinegar solution and new towels, but her reflection did not improve even after another thorough cleansing.
Suddenly she thought, “I’ll simply change the mirror. That ought to do the trick.”
She yanked that mirror off the wall, and went to the attic to look for a new one, which she hung in the old mirror’s spot. To her dismay, however, her reflection did not improve, and now had the added dust from the attic.
“What’s going on here!” she cried. “I even changed mirrors, yet my reflection doesn’t get better. What’s wrong with that darn mirror?”
This simple parable makes it easy, of course, to spot the holiday hostess’s real problem. If she doesn’t like her reflection, she needs to take a shower, not switch the looking glass.
Yet when it comes to our own reflections, many of us behave exactly like the hostess. We look outward and rail at the mirror instead of inward. Indeed, we blame anyone and anything except ourselves for the loneliness, pain, ill health, and general lack in our lives.
A wise teacher named Jesus once discussed this very human tendency to look outward and fixate on others’ problems instead of looking within self to solve our own. We do this as individuals, and we do this collectively. We rarely realize that our bodies, our relationships (or lack thereof), our lives, and our world are simply mirrors that reflect who we really are right back to us.
Unnerving if not scary, isn’t it? Considering the state of the world today, that reflection can at first seem a hopeless mess. We see (and often experience) violence, hatred, injustice, poverty, intimidation, dehumanization, pollution, tyranny. How in the world can any of us ever make a difference in all of that?
Appearances, however, can be deceiving. Look past the mirror and connect the spiritual dots. Maybe this world collectively, and our lives individually, merely show us what is going on within ourselves that we prefer to ignore.
In other words, if we change something within ourselves for the better, we may just change the world for the better, too. We are all that connected, at the level of energy-love-consciousness.
That’s what be the change really means. It’s about our being—who we are—not our doing, or actions.
That’s not such a tall order after all. By embracing the mirror’s message instead of ignoring it, we can start the self-change ball rolling. Should we care to pay attention to it, the reflection tells us a lot about what’s going on within us.
The outer world world reflects our inner lack
It can be summed up simply as lack of love. Specifically, self-love.
Despite our protestations to the contrary, we do not feel loved, even surrounded by our families or within a relationship. The holidays tend to magnify this sense of profound lack, which is why so many of us find this season painful instead of joyful.
Nor do we feel especially loving. We may even suspect that loving our neighbors is for chumps or dupes, even if we dare not voice that thought aloud.
Time to wise up about love. That is, if we truly want to feel and experience the change we hope that love can make in our lives. And if we don’t want to be fooled.
Love always starts within self. We cannot give to others what we have not claimed first for ourselves. That includes love.
What keeps us from claiming love for ourselves? In a few words: Self-judgment and vows. I recommend two books that explore the deeper nature of love and how self-judgment blocks and hampers love.
One of those books is Right Use of Will: Healing and Evolving the Emotional Body. The other is one I co-authored with my late wife. Hope is in the Garden: Healing Resolution Through Unconditional Love.
Both books in different ways explain that the reflection we experience in this physical world exists to help us back within self. The pain and struggle in the reflection ultimately moves us past our fears. We go within and begin to release the thousands and thousands of self-judgments/vows we hold against ourselves.
Self-love, then, and ultimately a more loving world are possible by freeing ourselves from our self-judgments. Instead of being scary or hopeless, the mirror and its reflection are part of the solution.