Continued from What Your Social Circle Reveals about You.
May I carry my light to the darkness.
May I have courage to see what I’ve hidden.
May I be open to hearing the unthinkable.
May I remember to be kind.
May I grant mercy that I might receive mercy.
May compassion guide me.
May wisdom protect me.—Cybermonks
The qualities on your lists actually reveal your own qualities. We tend to project our shadow material onto others, both the “positive” and the “negative.” So those qualities you really admire and wish you had, they’re already yours! And those qualities you’d rather avoid? Well, they’re yours, too. They reveal aspects in our characters that we really don’t like about ourselves and would rather pretend belong to others. We either turn a blind eye to evidence that they exist in ourselves, or we aggressively try to root them out.
We now know what qualities to look for and the next step is to pay attention to ourselves. Do we see these qualities? If we do, we’re already on the path toward bringing them back into the light and thus healing ourselves back into wholeness. If we don’t… well, that just means we need to look harder ;).