Spirituality/General: Friends, Enemies, Strangers & Hugs

Both the Buddhists and the Native Americans believe that one of our problems in dealing with other people is our tendency to divide the people who inhabit our lives into categories. The Buddhist say that we tend to put people into the boxes “friend, enemy and stranger,” and that we treat people according to their respective box. This, they say, is the cause of many of our social ills.

In an attempt to rectify this, many Buddhists perform the “mother” meditation. Since Buddhists believe in reincarnation, believing that our spirits have been around “since beginingless time,” they reason that through eternity every person has been every other person's mother. If you were a Buddhist, you would be admonished to remember that an enemy in this life used to be your nurturing mother. The person may be an enemy now, but that's just a temporary aberration. In the overall scheme of eternity, the person has been both your friend and your mother, and no doubt will be again in the future.

Native Americans have an almost identical belief. Several years back an Iroquois shaman told me that the elders of his tribe used to tell him, “Everybody's been your friend, everybody's been your lover, everybody's been your enemy. Just let it go.”

We usually think that it's a good thing to regard another person as a friend. Often, however, we judge our friends much more harshly than we would an enemy or a stranger, a fact that was clearly demonstrated to me recently. It all started over something as inconsequential as a parting hug.

In my circle, the touchie-feelie world of the New Age, we're always hugging one another. We hug when we meet and we hug when we part. We hug our friends, our lovers and our pets. Sometimes we even hug the trees in our yards. We believe that an embrace holds great healing power. As far as tree-hugging goes, we believe the practice can bring to us the healing power of mother nature, and help put our feet back on the ground in the process.

But like many southerners, I'm not always entirely comfortable with the full body hug. My family was rather puritanical about matters of bodily contact, and hugs were basically an intellectual exercise performed with as little physical contact as possible. They were given around the neck, with no more than the top of the shoulders touching. This lack of physicality was spoken as well as implied. As a child my paternal grandmother, a frail woman who was devoutly Primitive Baptist, would tell me to “come here give me a hug around the neck.”

Because of this early training, I still enter into the full-blown body hug with a certain degree of trepidation. Although I've learned to share hugs freely and often, I'm still more than a little uncomfortable with the process. When I find myself in a hug, I usually feel like running and hiding; my instinct being to get out of the situation as quickly as possible. In other words, the New Age hug is something I tolerate because I know it's supposed to be good for me and the other person. It's not something that I would choose to be a daily part of my perfect world.

The trouble is, in the New Age the hug can quickly become mandatory, something that is not given freely but something that's “shared” because it's expected. To decline a hug because you're not in the mood can have dire consequences.

A couple of months ago, my friend Gary stopped by AlternativeApproaches.com's store, The Unicorn Shoppe, at Cooks Marketplace in Winston-Salem, North Carolina to visit. Earlier that week the poor fellow had been bitten by a rabid bat and was facing a month's worth of rabies injections. I consoled him and we talked about the attack and other things – pretty much your standard I-just-stopped-by-to-visit sort of thing. When it came time for him to go, he asked me for a hug. I wasn't in the mood, and admittedly concerned about the rabies, so I declined. When he acted hurt I told him, “It has nothing to do with you, it's me. There'll be plenty more hugs in the future.”

The next week, I noticed that he and his wife were shopping at Charley the knife man's booth, just up the aisle from mine. When they completed their transaction they walked the other way instead of coming to visit me, which I'd been expecting. I hurried from my booth to catch-up with them to say hello, but was met with a stare that was colder than dry ice. Gary, it seems, was angry because I'd declined his invitation for a hug the week before. He wished to have nothing to do with me.

Later that day, as I thought things over, it occurred to me that this was exactly what the Buddhists were talking about when they said we shouldn't categorize people as friends, enemies and strangers. If I'd been a “stranger” in Gary's mind, he wouldn't have expected a hug from me and probably wouldn't even have asked. But because I was “friend,” I was held to a different standard and became, at least temporarily, “enemy” because I spurned his embrace. Hmmm....

I also realized something else. Since I only truly enjoy sharing hugs with my lover, my dog, and the trees in my yard, they'll be the only one's to get hugs from me in the future. Hugs, you see, should be given freely – or not at all.

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