After she taught me the basics of physical self-care, my dear spiritual mother began to show me the next vital responsibilities I had - taking care of myself mentally, emotionally and spiritually. At that time I was prey to intense fear, anger and guilt. I was in emotional pain pretty much all the time. I seemed to have been born that way (me and Lady Gaga). So she taught me the tools for dealing with myself.
We started with the resentments (coming from chronic anger) that were torturing me. She told me to pray for the people I resented every single day until I didn't resent them any more. She said to pray for them even though I didn't mean it and to pray that they have everything I wanted for myself. And that helped - a lot.
Next she pointed out that my thinking patterns were really what caused resentment - not the actual behavior of other people. That seemed incredibly obscure to me. So we took specific incidents that had caused me to resent someone - incidents where I felt victimized - and looked for ways that I could use the new information, support, and spiritual help I had recently acquired but didn't have at that time in the past.
In every one of those incidents, we were able to identify several ways the problem could have been solved without having to try to make someone else change their behavior. A very simple example is that when someone is talking to you in a negative, critical, hurtful way, you can just excuse yourself politely and go to the bathroom. If they persist, you can leave the whole area. If you don't stay there and listen, you are taking care of yourself and don't need to get a resentment.
This strategy will work on bigger problems too. Talking to a wise person when you lack ideas will work too. It is never necessary to try to protect myself by getting resentments.
Little by little I learned how to take care of myself. By doing that I stopped blaming other people for my problems and began solving them myself.
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