Do No Harm

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope … and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples … build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” —Robert F. Kennedy

 Wow, “a tiny ripple of hope” … that when combined with other ripples can “build a current,” one that can knock down oppression and resistance.

Those are powerful words and while I’ve been thinking about this blog for a while it’s taken me a very long time to get started writing it.

You see, what I want to write about isn’t about hope, it’s about what happens when evil and destructiveness are involved in the midst of something that’s supposed to be good and healing.

You may know what I’m trying to say. I’ll give a few examples.

Have you ever been involved with a group of people that was trying to do something good for a cause? And all the while the group is trying to do it there is one person, or a handful of people, who just continue to bring negative energy into the situation. There’s bickering amongst the group and soon few people show up to help.

I think about jobs I’ve had where one supervisor continuously said bad things about his supervisor to his staff. I felt the tension and negative energy in that situation and I often wondered if it bled over on the project we were doing. 

It’s the same thing in some churches. Those who claim to be doing God’s work are often not really doing that at all. Because if they were really doing what God commanded there would be love in their hearts instead of constant gossiping, lying, judgment and just overall bad feelings. How can a person say they are serving God and praying for good things to happen, when they spend more time putting down others and lying?

It happens at jobs, clubs, churches, and in families.

Do no harm

We’ve all heard that over and over and I discovered that it’s used in some religions as well as in the oath doctors used to take:

• The Golden Rule in Buddhism is: Do no harm.

• When John Wesley gave the General Rules to the people called Methodists the first thing he told them was to do no harm, and

• The original Hippocratic Oath, once sworn by all doctors required that its adherents “do no harm” to their patients.

It’s used in many more places than I listed, but the point is made, it is used in different religions and by the medical community.

How do we do harm? We don’t do harm by focusing on love which encompasses all things good, but we do harm when we focus on all that is wrong. We talk about it to whoever will listen and we keep the evil energy alive.

We do harm when we don’t show love. If I look someone in the face and smile really big at them when I want a favor, yet I won’t give them a passing glance when I don’t need something, that’s not love and I find it unlikely that many folks would think it was.

It’s easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar, and so it is with people, with success, with doing right.

We do what we know is right to do, even when it would be easier to do wrong.

What I’m saying is that if a small act of kindness — a ripple of hope — can spread out and have a snowball effect for good, then too, can a negative act have the same impact.

To me, if there’s negativity behind the scenes, then the energy from that is going to show in real life.

If sending up prayers can heal, then can’t also speaking evil harm? Does it harm even if the person spoken about never knows it was said?

It takes just as much energy to say a bad thing about someone as it does to say a good thing, maybe more.

Another thing to remember: the majority is not always right.

Just because you may have found a group of people to befriend who support your negativity, that doesn’t make it right.

Most people would probably say that it matters not what they say or do in private, that it doesn’t reflect upon their public work. I disagree. I think that our negative energy shows up in our lives and causes us not to succeed where we are most striving for success.

I implore you to always strive to do the right thing no matter what. Yes, we all fall short — I never claim to do the right thing all the time. But I do know that the attitude of frustration that says if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, has never worked for me even though I’ve followed that path before.

Do no harm in person or behind another person’s back.

Good Energy

“Our mental and emotional diets determine our overall energy levels, health and well-being more than we realize. Every thought and feeling, no matter how big or small, impacts our inner energy reserves.”
—Doc Childre

Who we spend time with, how we use our time, and what we think about are what affects a great portion of our lives. If we control others or let them control us we suffer. When we spend time with people who have negative outlooks or gossip constantly, we’ll walk away from each encounter feeling down and icky.

We can spend time on positive things: reading uplifting books, helping others, meditating, praying, or exercising. In doing these things we will not only have more energy, but we’ll feel better mentally and physically.

Stress and negativity bring us down and zap our energy. Just recall when you’ve spent time with someone whose life is full of drama, or someone who talks bad about everyone they can think of. How do you feel when you walk away from that? Then think about times when you’ve been around someone who is full of joy, or think of a time when you did volunteer work. You most likely walked away from those interactions with a smile on your face and a song in your heart.

We can choose who we spend time with in our free moments. And in those times when we are close to negativity because of work or some other obligation, we can choose how much of that to take on us and with us.

When given a choice to involve our time in negative or positive thoughts and energy, choosing the positive will go a long way in keeping us healthy mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Take the high road when given a choice and you will find life easier and lighter.

Words Can Hurt

“Gossip needn’t be false to be evil — there’s a lot of truth that shouldn’t be passed around.” 
—Frank A. Clark

Talking about our friends and enemies is a pretty common thing to do. We don’t always mean to be evil and hurtful when we pass things around amongst our acquaintances, but we still do it.

Most of us feel a tinge of guilt when we find ourselves in the middle of a situation with friends where things have been passed around amongst those involved and those who have no part in the incident. We hear something, we repeat it, and then it gets passed around. By the time it gets back to the person who is being talked about it is a hurtful thing.

It’s like the secret game we used to do in elementary school where someone would whisper something into the ear of another and then go around the whole classroom repeating it to the next person in the row.  Once it got to the last person and they repeated it out loud it never came out the way it started.

So it is with gossip. And even if gossip were repeated exactly as the incidents happened, it still becomes hurtful to those involved.

Even the truth does not need to be passed around by us if it’s not our issue to talk about.
It is a difficult thing to keep secrets or not to repeat things that we know about another. However each time we do it we hurt ourselves and the person we talk about. It’s just hurtful, negative energy that we don’t really need to be putting out there.

Spend more time showing kindness than you do gossiping.