What To Do When People Upset You - A Meditation

Do you ever notice how you feel when someone gives you a zing? A zing is what I call the feeling I get when someone does something that I think is icky. Maybe it’s a harsh tone, or maybe they haven’t responded to me the way I wished they would have. Or sometimes a zing can happen when someone is being plain old-fashioned mean or rude for reasons I can’t understand.

When I pay attention, I can feel these sorts of behaviors entering my body. It makes me feel like something is wrong. Like something toxic is happening. And I want to do anything I can to make the feeling go away.

Maybe I tell myself that the person is a bad person or that I am better than they are. Maybe I try to convince the other person that they are wrong until they apologize. Maybe I go and eat a cookie to fill myself with something more sweet, or maybe I turn on a show to take my mind off what happened.

But there is also another, perhaps more empowering way to handle another person’s difficult behavior: that is to shift the way I’m seeing the situation.

One way I like to see a situation differently is by imagining I’m on the top floor of a building looking down at the difficult moment, even if it’s been a long time after the actual moment.

Have you ever been on the top floor of a building looking down at traffic? It feels different than being down there in one of the cars while another one is beeping at you.

That’s because from up there, we’re no longer in the traffic. From up there, we can begin to notice that what’s really happening way down there is that everyone is trying to get where they’re going at the same time—and sometimes there are red lights and sometimes vehicles get in each other’s way and sometimes vehicles aren’t even paying attention to one other.

While we’re in traffic we have no way of knowing where each of us have been or where we’re hoping to go, or even if we’re completely lost... But from an aerial view, it’s easier to grasp that we’re all coming from somewhere and trying our best to get through various kinds of traffic to some destination with enough or not enough fuel in our tanks. And sometimes, people blow their horn.

From up on the top floor, I can see that some people blow their horn to prevent accidents, while others blow their horn because they’re having a difficult time coping with the stress of being surrounded by so many other vehicles who don’t seem to understand or care where they’ve been or where they’re trying to get to.

When I pay attention to traffic from this new perspective, I have an easier time understanding that if someone is beeping at me, it doesn’t mean anything about who I am. It’s only a reaction to what’s happening in the chaos of traffic.

I can begin to notice that reactive beepers have been beeping long before my vehicle came along, and I can also notice the times I have been unintentionally creating more chaos by not making enough room for others to easily pass.

When I practice seeing things from a higher-up perspective, I have an easier time seeing that other people’s proverbial beeping often has very little to do with me. And this changing of perspectives helps me to be a bit more relaxed in the traffic of life—by staying focused on where I’m headed in my own vehicle while also finding more compassion for all the different kinds of jams our different kinds of vehicles may be stuck in.

I might not have control over another person’s behavior but I do have control over how I choose to respond. And I can respond in a way that represents my best self without needing so desperately for the other person’s behavior to change.