Imagine that there is a room inside your heart, and in that room, there are rows and rows of jars.
Each jar represents a relationship, including your relationship with yourself.
The size and shape of the jars are determined by how important each person is to us - and, yes, that includes ourselves. The people who are important, the people we give the most room to, have the biggest jars, and the ones that don’t mean that much to us have much smaller jars.
Every jar is filled, bit by bit, with pebbles and stones and coal. Big important relationships have big stones that go in big jars, and the space around that big stone is filled in with smaller pebbles representing the interactions and attitudes and words that we share.
Less important relationships are smaller jars, but they’re still filled with pebbles representing our feelings and engagements. When something good happens with someone - we have a loving moment, we share a victory together, we have a wonderful time at the cinema - we add a bright shiny pebble to their jar. When something bad happens - we get mad at each other, our feelings get hurt, we feel slighted or offended - we add a dark lump of coal to their jar.
And, those people add pebbles to our own jar. When someone praises us, we get to put shiny stones in our jar, and when they disapprove, we get lumps of coal. When we’re emotionally injured as children by our parents not giving us the right kind of nurturing pebbles for our jars, we can end up looking everywhere else for something, anything to fill up our jar with something that makes us feel good (even if it’s not really healthy). When we’ve been emotionally neglected as children, the emptiness of our jar can feel so massive that we strive to fill it up with anything at all, regardless of whether it’s good or bad or even honest.
What our jars are filled with indicates the health and value of our relationships. When a so-called friend has made so many cutting remarks and veiled insults that we hardly see any shiny pebbles in their jar anymore, it’s probably time to let that relationship go, to cover up the jar and put it away. That happens for us, too: if we don’t have enough shiny pebbles in the jars that represent our Selves, we feel unworthy, blank, dark, unlovable.
In today’s world, relationships can come in lots of different forms and can mean many, many things, so we have lots more places to gather our pebbles. This means, though, when we’re desperate to fill up our own jars that it’s easy to inadvertently fill them up with terrible things, with coal and pyrite and worse - and if our jars are filled up with all these terrible things, that often means there’s no more room for shiny pebbles, even from the people we love the most.
So, how do we fix that? Obviously, we have to start taking coal and useless things out of the jar to make room for the good stuff. Think about the person who gave you this lump of coal: are they someone you respect, someone you admire? Do you believe that you deserve this lump of coal? No, you do not. So, get rid of it. It doesn’t matter anymore.
If you know them personally, you can put that lump of coal in their jar to remind you that they were unkind at that point. If you don’t know them personally, then use that coal to fuel some art or write awful poetry or do anything to demonstrate your authenticity - or even just throw it away and detach any meaning from them.
Next, start being very mindful of the kinds of stones you’re letting into your jar. When you feel angry or hurt by a stranger, consider how much room they should be allowed to have, if any at all. In the digital age, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by a massive inundation of seemingly tiny lumps of coal no bigger than grains of sand that build up and even fill up your jar until there’s hardly any room - but it’s just coal.
You can use it as fuel to warm yourself, to create, to nurture yourself and others, or there’s always the option to scoop it out and throw it away. There are times that this is the greatest vengeance: to treat those sand-givers with absolute indifference, unable to produce enough energy to even make a rude doodle.
Yes, this is not an easy thing to do all at once. It takes practice, especially when we’ve spent so long letting other people fill up our jars. It is important, though, and completely possible to take control and think consciously about who is allowed access to your jar at all.
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This is a visualization based on cognitive behavior therapy methods for learning to compartmentalize, quantify, and qualify the energy we invest in our relationships. When we talk about relationships, we are referring to every type of interaction that affects us - which is all of them, from business to family to online groups to friends to complete strangers.
We want to be open and compassionate and giving to the world, often in the hope that we can demonstrate that we ourselves are worthy of receiving that compassion, but the practical truth is that we must act with compassion to ourselves first - and that means establishing and defending boundaries.
Start with strangers. Practice observing your emotional reactions to posts, comments, and replies. When one starts making you anxious or angry, pause and examine why it’s making you anxious or angry. There is always a fear underneath these responses; identify it, and then reexamine the item that activated your emotion. Does this item validate your fear, is it relevant at all, or is it irrelevant? Most of the time, it is irrelevant, and then we can choose to dismiss it, to breathe it back out into the ether.
Likewise, when we post, comment, or reply to others, are we giving them pebbles of honesty or are we spreading coal lumps of reaction and vitriol? This is the true meaning of getting back what you put out into the world: people respond in kind. If you only want to accept pebbles, then only give out pebbles.
(Does this mean that you'll only get pebbles for pebbles? Of course not, because some people act like jerks and throw coal around no matter what - but that's much more about them than it is about you.)
It should be noted here that pebbles are not just “good feelings” or bits of praise. Pebbles represent any piece of positive and constructive feedback: hugs and kisses, legitimate critiques of work, truthful and honest engagement, and, yes, also praise. Healthy interactions make the shiniest pebbles.
When you’ve gotten practice with this, you can start applying it to your closer circles, to your friends and to your loved ones. Observe your “pebble-to-coal” ratio, and for those who are the most important to you, if you feel there is too much coal (the ideal amount is as near to zero as possible), instead of fighting to keep them from giving you coal (which just results in more coal), give them pebbles. Think back over what you hold in your jar for them and see if there are any lumps of coal you can take out, hurts or wounds that you can resolve and heal and forgive. Make more room for pebbles.
With practice and mindful attention, one day your room of jars will be a bright and shiny treasure trove of love and healthy community.