How many times did someone say something and you felt it was disrespectful or it was respectful? It is kind of a learned thing isnt it? What is respectful and what is disrespectful is relative to each person’s own experience and their memory.

See, what someone says is not about disrespect or respect. It is about survival.

If I say derogatory things to you, but with a smile on my face, and your ears are not working. You hear no sounds, but you see a smile. So you think, “Hey he must be saying some nice things about me” so you feel happy. But now you have a powerful microphone in you, it is picking up sound signals, and you understand them, so you process them and put them into respectful or disrespectful buckets. The sound from outside, you process inside and make stupid conclusions about it and choose to (or automatically force to because of memory) respond in a certain way based on memories of similar input. So it is all made up inside and it is not really about what’s said is respectful or disrespectful.

It is about survival. If I say mean things to you all the time, you may hang around for a bit, but soon you don’t want to hear mean things anymore and you move away or avoid me. Nobody wants to be around someone who says mean things. But if I say sweet and kind things, you want to be around me and other people will also want to be around me. Whether I say mean things or kind things is a matter of whether I have the right capacity inside to respond kindly and sweetly, isn’t it? Whatever someone makes out of what I say is their problem. But what I say is completely my doing.

So to survive and thrive we must develop the right kind of internal structures and processes and make sure what is happening inside is capable of producing sweetness and kindness outwards.