Think of a person you have difficulty dealing with. Or a person from your past who hurt you deeply. Got one? Now bless them.
What??!! You may ask. Blessing the difficult people in our lives is the premise of Pierre Pradervand’s book “The Gentle Art of Blessing – A Simple Practice that Will Transform You and Your World”.
“A constant reminder of spiritual masters is that you cannot grow spiritually if you are burdened mentally by the habit of judging others.” Pradervand writes. “By ‘blessing’ , I mean wishing from the bottom of the heart, in total sincerity, the very best for those people – their complete fulfillment and deepest happiness,” he adds.
I liked how Pradervand includes many real life examples of how blessing has worked in people’s lives. One story was particularly meaningful to me. A Jewish lawyer, liberated from the Nazi concentration camps, had an unusually positive attitude when meeting the Allied troops. The Allies learned this lawyer had watched his wife and five children murdered by the Nazis five years earlier. “I had to decide right then whether to let myself hate the soldiers who had done this. It was an easy decision, really,” the lawyer said. “In my practice, I had seen too often what hate could do to people’s minds and bodies. Hate had just killed the six people who mattered most to me in the world. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life – whether it was a few days or many years – loving every person I came in contact with.”
I’ve read many books and have heard many sermons on the importance of forgiveness for personal peace. Sound advice, but this whole “blessing” business goes beyond forgiveness alone as the Jewish lawyer’s story shows. I tried it out on meeting one person I have had difficulty communicating with in the past (mentally blessing this person before we talked). Surprisingly, I felt this encounter went well and I felt lighter afterwards.
“No one can be our enemy unless we ourselves stick such a label upon them,” Pradervand writes. “Ultimately, no outside event, encounter, or person can harm us unless we give it the power to do so.” This was another statement from the Gentle Art of Blessing that stuck with me. If you want to try the “blessing” approach Pradervand advocates I recommend reading his book and trying it out yourself.
