6/15/18

Today's Horoscope

All signs:
The stars want you to know that empathy isn't easy. When you are able to put your own feelings aside and imagine what others are going through, you give up a lot of coping mechanisms. The good news is, those coping mechanisms are usually bad anyway. They provide you a moment of release or self pity, but do nothing to resolve any problems.
You lose the ability to feel smug and superior. You can't just let your own insecurities or blind rage inform your opinions and actions. You can't dismiss or blame whole groups of people you've never met for your problems or the problems of society. You can't just jettison people from your life because they are a challenge at times, or because they lashed out or hurt you or let you down.
In essence, you have to give up all your own petty feelings and prejudices and desire to hurt back. When you put yourself in someone else's skin, you start to realize that maybe they are suffering too. When you think of others as whole people, with an entire lifetime of their own trauma and issues and what went into making them who they are, you give up your ability to treat them like so much garbage.
That doesn't mean you have to let them abuse you or mess up your life, it just means that if you can't resolve those issues, you just let it go or walk away rather than add to it. If you can't offer constructive solutions to a problem, you don't just disparage groups of people indiscriminately.
While it's not the easy thing to do, it is so much more rewarding. Sure your heart may break all the more because you understand not only your pain, but theirs. Yes, you don't get the initial rush of adrenaline and satisfaction of retaliation. What you get is a deeper understanding of the way the world works. You get an inner peace and deeper connections because you are able to strip away the drama and all the reactionary mess that we create, and see what's really going on.
You grow, you gain wisdom, and you understand how to fix the things that are wrong in your personal relationships and the world, in a real and lasting manner. You become more complete, and that's worth any amount of work you need to do to achieve it.