Spirituality/Eastern: Loving Your Enemy

The other day I was talking with an associate about a mutual acquaintance. In the past, both of us had experienced difficulties with this person, although my associate had experienced much more grief from this man than me. My friend said, “I had a lot of trouble getting over the way I felt about him. It took a lot of work, but I finally learned to ‘love my enemy.’”

That this person did the work to let go of his anger didn’t surprise me, since I know him to be a devout follower of the 12 step program. But this conversation got me thinking about exactly what it means to “love your enemy.”

Many people think that learning to love ones enemy is something that you do for the sake of the person that you consider an enemy. After all, forgiveness is the basis of Christian theology. In fact, learning to love your enemy is something that you must do for the sake of your own well-being. As long as you hold hate in your heart for another person, you cannot be a fully healthy person.

Most of us in this culture know about the Christian viewpoint on this subject. Other religions offer similar advice, and by studying what they have to say about the subject we can gain insight about why this is necessary.

The Buddhists believe that the root of our difficulties in getting along in this world is that we divide other people into the three categories of “friends, enemies and strangers.” They believe that having enemies arouses the emotion of anger, and modern science has proven that anger, if not dealt with, will eventually lead to physical disease.

In the book How to Meditate, American born Buddhist nun Kathleen McDonald offers some suggestions on how to deal with the anger you might be feeling toward another person, or how to deal with the anger that another might be directing toward you. She suggests that you put yourself in their place and attempt to see the situation from their point of view, to try and determine what drives their behavior.

“They are human just like you,” she says, “with problems and worries, trying to be happy and make the best of life. Recall your own experiences of being angry and unkind to get a better idea of what they are going through.”

She also recommends that you are probably not blameless in any situation involving anger. “According to Buddhism, any misfortune that comes our way is the result of harmful actions we created in the past. We reap what we have sown. When we can accept problems in this light, we simply won’t feel the need to get angry.”

Buddhist doctrine has a very interesting solution to the problem of learning to love your enemies that is tied into their beliefs on reincarnation. According to this theory, all of us have been through countless reincarnations since “before beginingless time.” Therefore, everyone in our lives has, at some time in the past, been our mother - the person who gave birth to us and nurtured us. If we can see our enemies as people who have mothered us, then we can begin to understand and love them.

Interestingly, this same concept is found within the spiritual practices of Native Americans. Several years ago, I was talking with an Iroquois spiritual guide who told me, “Everybody’s been your friend, everybody’s been your lover, everybody’s been your enemy. Just let it go.”

Indeed, just letting your rage go is one of the best ways of dealing with the hostility that creates enemies - a lesson I learned several years back while in therapy, dealing with my own anger issues. During a counseling session, I told my therapist of an incident in which I expressed my anger toward another in a particularly ugly manner, making an “enemy” out of someone who had been a close friend in the process.

After listening to my story, the therapist asked, “When did you decide to get angry?”

“I didn’t decide,” I protested. “I just got mad. I couldn’t help it.”

“Wrong,” he said. “When you felt the anger arise, at some point you made a conscious decision to buy into it and to express it in a destructive fashion rather than to simply let it go.”

I’ve found this to be true. These days, when I feel anger arising I simply make the conscious decision not to express it in a way that I’ll later regret.

The Christian admonishment to “love your enemy” is sound advice, echoed by nearly every other religion on the planet. If you are able to do so, not only will you free the person that you perceive as “the enemy,” you will be taking a major step toward making yourself a healthy, self-realized person in the process.

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