5 Ways to Take Things Less Personally

So I'd like to talk with you about one of the most intimate and useful and yet still potentially airy-fairy topics of all, which has to do with who are you and how can we be in this life while taking good care of our persons without taking life so personally? And so to get into this, I want to kind of frame things here and include a couple of kind of classic stories.

So I want to make a distinction between the person that each of you are.

I am a person as well, by which I mean a, a particular body-mind process unfolding over time.

That's a person.

Your little kid is a person.

When you were a little kid, you were a person.

A cat is a person in a certain sense.

Persons exist.

Human persons certainly have rights and responsibilities.

Human persons like you as a whole deserve to be treated well.

It's important, and they deserve and have the duty to treat others well too, and as well as enlightened self-interest.

So persons are real.

There's no question about persons.

If you have any question about whether you exist, just ask me and I'll tell you, you exist.

You as a person.

That's what I mean by the word you there.

Then there's that sense of self.

The self that possesses, that identifies with, that reacts, that feels injured and affronted, indignant.

How dare you treat me that way, right? Now, developmentally, little children need to develop a sense of self, a sense of an inner executive process, a kind of center of choosing, a fundamental kind of stability of witnessing their own experience, of witnessing the world.

You know, a link between willed action and the sensory feedback of willed action, like reaching for a cup to get the apple juice they want.

This is absolutely necessary.

And I think it was a great therapist, I think it's Richard Epstein.

I should know.

Jack, Jack someone.

It'll come to me.