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I hate bullies. I have no tolerance for them whatsoever. I have neither time nor patience for them and I am not willing to make any space for them in my life.

One of the most powerful, and relatively recent, discoveries in my spiritual journey is the power of kindness. Developing a kindness practice is one of the best turns I ever made in my long and winding spiritual path. And bullying is about as far away from kindness as I can imagine. I want a world filled with kindness, so bullying is the opposite of what I want in my life.

We have a bully in our neighborhood. I hate him, and he knows I hate him. And because of that, he avoids me. He keeps himself as hidden from me as he can manage. If I catch even a glimpse of him on the street, before I know it, he turns the corner and disappears down the alley. He seems to have an almost magical ability to disappear.

Every once in a while, when I’m not around, not watching the neighborhood so vigilantly, he gets a little of his bullying done. I hear about it afterwards; I find out about it from other people. He never does it in front of me, because he knows I wouldn’t tolerate it, but honestly, I can’t watch him constantly. So eventually, he bullies someone, and I hear about it later.

When that happens I go looking for him with the urge to kill him, or at least punch him in the face, and he disappears, completely. He’ll go underground for months or even years at a time. He’s become as expert at hiding as I am about watching for him, and our neighborhood has lots and lots of good places to hide.

The neighborhood I’m watching is my own heart, and the bully is me.

The bully is a piece of me that is verbally aggressive, bossy, intimidating, pushy. It happens relatively rarely these days, but I have zero tolerance for it happening ever. I find this behavior completely unacceptable. The bully knows that I will kill him if and when I find him, and because of that, he hides from me. The only time he can do his work is when I’m not watching, when I’m unconscious, and I often don’t even know he’s been out doing his thing until I hear about it from someone else.

I’ve been doing the most fascinating shadow work these past weeks. (Working with our “shadow” is a form of spiritual and personal growth where we try to dig beneath our “persona“–that part of us which is public, visible, and proudly displayed to others–to dig out the deeper, hidden parts of ourselves.) Shadow contains the pieces of ourselves that we consider unpalatable, unattractive or unacceptable. You can read a good summary about shadow here, or check out your favorite bookstore for a variety of books on the subject, or read online articles about working with your own shadow.

The irony about this particular shadow work for me is that unless I become tolerant of bullies, my own bully is not going to make himself known and I won’t be able to engage him constructively. The true test of my kindness practice is here: how do I welcome a bully? What does kindness look like when it meets a bully–how do I warmly invite a bully in, make him feel comfortable, coax him to come out of the shadows and convince him that he is safe with me?

Now, the idea of creating safety for a bully, or giving him a warm welcome, would strike me as insanity if the bully were some other person, outside of myself. But I’m faced with a dilemma with the bully inside, because if I don’t create some safety for that guy to come out and make himself known, to show himself, then I will never have a chance to work with him, moderate him, and engage him constructively. I can banish him for a while, but I can’t make him go away forever. I can make him invisible, but I can’t kill him completely.

Our shadow side is more dangerous when it is banished than welcomed; the unacceptable parts of ourselves pose a greater danger when they are imprisoned in the unconscious mind than they would if we consciously welcomed them into awareness. So this meeting of myselves–”kindness practice, meet bully; bully, meet kindness practice”–is a great big dilemma for me. The part of me that I value the most and the part of me that I am deeply ashamed of have to become working partners, somehow, if we’re all going to get through this together, with what we call “integrity.” Integrity is the act of having it all together–but in the opposite way from which we tend to think of it. Having it all together means you intentionally go looking for the pieces that you’re missing, and we’ve lost track of those pieces for good reason: we find them disgusting, unacceptable, and embarrassing.

So going out to make peace with my hidden bully is some interesting piece of work. It’s a bit painful, but not terribly so. It’s more embarrassment than anything else.  I’ve started keeping a journal of when, where and how I bully others, or, more frequently, when, where and how I have the URGE to bully: those moments where I feel like I want to cut someone off with a remark, or have a passive-aggressive thought for revenge, or wish ill on someone.

Am I suggesting that I try to make space for bullying behavior? No, not at all; I’m not trying to welcome that. But see, I’ve already suppressed the behavior. I’ve done a remarkably good job of getting rid of the behavior, sweeping the evidence under the rug. Most people who interact with me frequently would not say that I bully people on a regular basis, and some would probably experience some surprise, even astonishment, that I wrestle with this at all.

It’s precisely the fact that I’ve done such a relatively good job of suppressing the behavior that I can’t get to the core of the issue, as though I’ve cut down the tree and ground up the stump, but this enormous, buried root system remains. Like the sound of one hand clapping, what is a bully who no longer behaves like a bully? What’s left of the bully once we eliminate bullying behavior?

Fear.

One thing I’ve noticed in my journal is that my urge to bully people surfaces when I am afraid I am about to be bullied. It’s a kind of defensive preempt; I get harsh and verbally aggressive with someone in anticipation of them running over my needs, my rights, my well-being. I get aggressive with them as a form of defense, lest they manage–intentionally or accidentally–to tread on me. I become “high and mighty” when I’m afraid. When I’m not afraid, my natural state is to feel very gentle but very strong.

It’ll be interesting for me to see if I can make it safe enough to coax my inner bully completely out of the shadows, enough to get to know him, enough to become his friend. If I’m successfully, it should allow me to become more comfortable with other people who behave aggressively when they’re afraid, and perhaps it will even equip me with tools to engage active bullies, scared people who act aggressively from the anticipatory fear of being aggressed. We’ll see. I have to clean up my own neighborhood first.

Have thoughts you’d like to share?

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