Love to Disarm And Humor to Soften
If there are two key ingredients to maintaining better mental health, better relationships with others and being happier overall, they are love and humor.
Many times we tend to get into heated arguments with other people, get defensive, stress out too much about a single event, etc. And we realize in the end that perhaps our attitude has not been correct and we are the ones who end up losing out.
Let’s show an example of this: There are couples who tend to criticize each other without ever coming to an agreement, because usually, when we “attack” or are attacked, we raise a barrier and try to defend ourselves so our ego doesn’t get hurt.
But in reality, this is a mistake. If I defend myself with the same weapon the other attacked me with, it will end up creating a war. It’s not worth it and will not lead to anything more than leaving us with a bad taste in our mouth and a bad situation.
Gandhi provides a very clear and radical example of the use of love as a powerful, disarming weapon. He achieved independence for India from Britain without firing a single shot, without aggressiveness, by simply using the “Ahimsa.”
What is “Ahimsa”?
Ahimsa is the strategy of discovering the loving and wonderful side of the aggressive person.
It is about expressing love for the other person regardless of how they are behaving with us. Reminding them they are a great person, who deep down is very good and whom we love unconditionally, even though they are currently not acting appropriately or are being very aggressive towards us.
“Love is the force that is most humble but is the most powerful one available to a human being.”
-Gandhi-
Ahimsa is a weapon that acts in a slow yet extremely powerful way. We must be persistent in giving love until the other person begins to reflect on their behavior and begins to transform.
We can practice this technique in our daily lives and check the powerful effects that occur. We will see that when we break down the barrier between ourselves and the other, the result is that eventually the other person will begin to treat us well.
If our partner, friend or family is very angry with us and yells at us, criticizes us, etc., the wisest thing would be avoid entering into this absurd fight, but rather to get close to them and caress them, or give them hug or a kiss.
They might reject it at first, but if we persist, without getting distracted by their words or attitude, we will be able to radically win them over.
And what about humor?
On the other hand, the use of humor becomes a great buffer to any huge blow. Like love, it also improves personal relationships and makes difficult life events much more bearable.
“If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.”
– Stanislaw Lem –
A sense of humor makes us aware that nothing is that important. Most of the time we make things seem worse than they are and dramatize incidents in our lives which makes us feel very bad.
It’s true that there are circumstances where there is no room for humor, but they are a minority. Whenever possible, we must open our minds, be more flexible and laugh at adversity.
First of all, adversity is inevitable and it will happen to all of us throughout our lives. And secondly, because it is almost never as bad as we think, we are almost always the ones who inflate these situations with our thoughts.
In addition, humor stimulates creativity and the search for solutions as it allows us de-stress, helping us solve the problematic situation and unblock our minds.
It sounds simple, but practicing humor and love in our life often becomes an arduous task. The key is to persevere in order to make it part of us. We will become loving people full of laughter and this will make our lives much easier.
