Honoring yourself and your lessons
QUESTION: Masters, I have had some problems with a friend. She’s very afraid of abandonment and loneliness so she was very clingy. I myself am not afraid of being alone since I find happiness from myself. She was quite possessive and jealous, and she admitted that to me but continued without change. I love helping others but after she was threatening me and made me feel bad about myself I cut off our friendship. I feel like a horrible person for doing so, I really hope she’d find happiness from herself but I don’t know everything about her condition, so I feel like I’m judging her. What are your thoughts? ~Juli, Finland
ANSWER: A lesson that presents itself to you does not mean that you have to follow through with the difficulties after you recognize it and make choices concerning it. Your choice here was to continue to let yourself be abused or to do something to move away from it. You chose to separate yourself from the problem and therefore completed that lesson.
Your feeling horrible is only because you have a desire to help others, although you have no spiritual responsibility to do so. Send love to your friend that she might understand her lessons and take the time to work on them. That choice is hers alone.
Finding happiness comes only when one can love the life they have and accept that they have an opportunity to fill it with joy. She has a long way to go to reach such a point, but there is always the possibility for awareness.
You understand that it is important to love oneself, which is why you have no problem being alone and your friend can’t stand being alone; she hates herself and her life. She also depends upon her interpretation of what she believes others are thinking for her own piece of mind.
You appreciate that to enter fully into your spiritual potential, you need to walk away from ego judgment and into loving evaluation. What you have done here is to evaluate that you could no longer subject yourself to her demands and negativity and needed to walk away. That does not make you a “bad” person because there is no judgment here.