Letting Go of Grievances
Photo by Mel Poole on Unsplash.com
Two years ago, I started the New Year with a post called, “Peace Be With You,” (published January 16th, 2022). It was right after the first anniversary of the attack on the United States Capitol Building by protestors who wanted to stop the ratification of the 2020 election results. Shortly after that post was published, Russia invaded Ukraine. Sadly, since then, the world has not become a more peaceful place. Fortunately for all of us, a peaceful world is not necessary for experiencing personal peace. In “Peace Be With You,” I focused on experiencing peace by offering peace to others in one’s own mind. Since minds are joined, offering peace to others is a gift we give ourselves. In this post, I focus on the experience of personal peace that comes from letting go of grievances with people in our lives.
The definition of, “grievance,” I use in this post is drawn from two dictionaries, one on each side of “the pond.” The Collins Dictionary (based in Glasgow, Scotland), gives the first definition as, “a real or imagined wrong causing resentment and regarded as grounds for complaint” (quoted from https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/grievance). The Merriam-Webster Dictionary (based in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA), gives the first definition as, “a cause of distress… felt to afford reason for complaint or resistance” (quoted from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/grievance).
I have an on-again, off-again relationship with grievances. Like hangnails, I would rather not have any. But also like hangnails, grievances seem to arise inevitably, simply through sheer interaction with the world. (For two definitions of “grievance,” see note above). Here is a recent example. At the beginning of the month, neighbors in our building bought a bunch of furniture. The empty cardboard furniture boxes are quite large, but the neighbors collapsed them, and left them outside the gate on recycling day for pick up. The boxes were not picked up. That day, it rained and the boxes got wet. The next day, about a 1/3 had been stuffed into our paper recycling bin, filling it almost to the top with dense, wet cardboard. The remaining 2/3 of the boxes were moved off the street and sagged against our building. The next pick up would not be for another two weeks. As the neighbors do not have a car to drive the boxes some distance away to the recycling center, it seemed likely that as soon as the paper bin was emptied, they would fill it up with some of the remaining boxes.
While experiencing grievances is practically a universal one, particular circumstances or events will be experienced differently by different people. For some, the situation at our building with the full paper recycling bin and the wet boxes leaning against the wall, would bring little distress or cause for complaint. For others, this situation might be so charged with wrong-doing and resentment, that it could well herald the start of an all-out feud with the neighbors. In my case, my initial reaction was a strong sense of inconvenience, a twinge of resentment, and a measure of distress at the expectation that this situation would take weeks to resolve. With any grievance, the question quickly arises of what to do about the situation. For some, talking to the neighbors would be an immediate, non-negotiable first step. For others, taking no action at all, at least at first, would come most naturally. Depending on how long the problem were to continue and how much resentment or distress it caused, there might be some action in the future, such as getting the landlord involved.
Although my first impulse upon seeing the full bin and the boxes leaning against the building was to act, I knew better than to immediately march up the stairs and knock on the neighbors’ door. This has taken years of practice! While my primary goal in any situation that causes me distress, is to return to a state of peace, putting the focus on changing the situation itself is a kind of trap. It makes a peaceful state of mind depend, in this case, on the “correct” behavior of others, as defined by me, and on a “proper” physical environment, also as defined by me. My state of mind is then under the control external factors. This means that I either have to make people behave properly, and if they don’t behave, it leaves me doubly upset because they won’t do what I am asking. Alternatively, I can choose not to act, but then be left at the mercy of the physical environment, with the risk that I will experience more and more resentment every time I see the full bin and the boxes leaning against our building. (For an example of the former—trying to change another person’s behavior to fit my preferences—see the post, “Forgiveness, My Dog, and Me, Part 2,” published December 12th, 2021.)
There is another path to returning to a state of peace that does not depend on the neighbors’ behavior or on the boxes at all. It begins with a willingness to see things differently. According to the Collins Dictionary (see above), the definition of “grievance” is “a real or imagined wrong causing resentment and regarded as grounds for complaint.” It may sound strange to say this, but viewing the situation as one involving a wrong is a choice I am making. This is not common, everyday thinking, but then, the usual or commonplace way to view the situation is what lands me in the middle of all the distress, inconvenience, and resentment that a grievance can generate in the first place. Instead of deciding that the situation with the boxes involves a wrong, I can make a different choice: I can choose to look at the situation without judgment. To do this, I choose to no longer focus on the “shoulds”—that the neighbors should not have filled up the communal box, since it is emptied infrequently, or that they should not have leaned the empty boxes against the building, where I see them each time I leave and return home. By not putting attention there, the power of the grievance to cause me distress or to lead to resentment is diminished. Practicing non-judgment moves me in the direction of letting go of the grievance.
There is another step I can take to move me further along the path of letting go of grievances and experiencing more personal peace. Here I find ideas from A Course in Miracles to be invaluable. The Course teaches,
Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that. But though it is no more than that, it is not less. Therefore, to you it is important. It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition. (T-21.in.1:1-5)
What this means is that the perception (interpretation) of the situation at my building is coming from my own mind. I am imposing it on what I am seeing. Like a movie projector that shines light through a film which is then visible on the cinema screen, it is the film “playing” in my mind that shows me a world in which neighbors behave “wrongly.” If I want to get to the real cause of my unease, then, I have to look inwards. This is the advice that follows on from the words quoted above, “Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world.” (T-21.in.1:7)
What exactly is in my—or in anybody’s—mind that becomes apparent during experiences of grievances can be difficult to think about. This “inward condition” is not joyful, peaceful, and loving, or it would not be seen as an “outward picture” of wrong-doing justifying a grievance. Instead, it has to be something dark, something unkind, possibly even something cruel. A Course in Miracles talks a great deal about what is in our minds, and just how dastardly our inner world can be. In lock-step with this, it talks about a radically opposite, completely independent, “inward condition,” that co-exists quietly alongside all the raucous, vicious, blackness that we see projected outwards during times of distress. We can choose with which “eyes” to look out at the world. When we turn to our quiet center, we connect with the peaceful and loving thoughts in our minds. If, in the moment, we cannot turn to our quiet center, we can practice stepping back from our dark thoughts and practice observing ourselves without judgment. (For more about the two thought systems in our minds, see “On Needing a Lover who Won’t Drive You Crazy,” published June 9th, 2020).
Although we experience two opposing kinds of thoughts in our minds, when we invest in letting go of grievances, we are making changes in how our minds work. At the very least, we are “rewiring” our brains, from readiness for grievances to readiness for peace of mind. If we believe in a path to awakening, letting go of grievances is part of that journey. Teachings like, A Course in Miracles, make clear that our minds are joined with others. That means that it does not matter whether our thoughts are directed outward to people and situations, or inwards towards ourselves. If we judge or condemn the behavior of others, we cannot escape receiving those judgmental thoughts ourselves, because of the deep connection between us. The other side of this medallion, is that all of our compassionate, kind, and inclusive thoughts benefit others as well as ourselves. When we let go of grievances, we do healing work, healing our minds of our investment in unkind thoughts. As one of the Workbook Lessons of the Course highlights, “When I am healed, I am not healed alone.” (W-137.14:3)
The situation with the cardboard boxes at our building has no longer been a grievance for some time. The initial distress that I felt lasted just some hours, all told. Whenever I caught myself judging the situation, I stepped back from those thoughts. By returning to my quiet center, I quickly disinvested from the meaning I had given the situation and from the importance of the boxes being gone. Very soon, I noticed that, although my eyes inevitably fell on the boxes still leaning against the building, I did not experience any upset about them. Then the next paper recycling day arrived. I had set aside some bags of paper and I heard the truck enter our street, along with the minor hub-bub of the bins being emptied. I snatched up my bags and went outside to put them in the now-empty paper bin, only to run into our neighbor of the large boxes, who apparently had also been waiting for the bin to be emptied. We had a very brief conversation about the bins and the boxes in which it became clear that he felt at a loss. On the original pick-up day, when the loose boxes where not taken by the workers, he had looked into other possibilities for removing the boxes, but had not been able to find a solution that did not require a car.
That night at dinner, I told Matthias about my conversation with the neighbor, and we agreed that we would offer to take the boxes to the recycling center. He emailed our neighbor, who wrote back in thanks. Early the next morning, we loaded up our car with the boxes and off drove Matthias on his errand before work. He laughingly called it, “the guilt trip to the recycling center,” but what I felt was only positive. A lesson late in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles is, “Today I learn the law of love; that what I give my brother is my gift to me.” (Lesson 344) It made me feel truly happy to load those boxes in our car and to be of help in this very concrete way. Early on in the Text of the Course, it says, “You have no idea of the tremendous release and deep peace that comes from meeting yourself and your brothers totally without judgment.” (T-3. VI:1) Although such immensely deep peace is still off in the future, I do know that letting go of grievances brings it closer, while also increasing peace of mind right now.
A Course in Miracles is published by The Foundation for Inner Peace. All the books comprising the Course, along with the supplemental pamphlets, are now found online:
https://acim.org/acim/en
All quotations of A Course in Miracles in this blog post are drawn from this version of the Course.