Try your best to avoid negative People

Yesterday I described people who are actually impossible to satisfy because they are tremendously negative on the inside. In this way, they often make themselves and the ones around them unhappy. As I told you, we have been in the situation that we had such negative people at the Ashram but it actually happens rarely. Why? Because we try to find out in emailing already whether we can satisfy the person coming to us or not.

The normal way of communication by anybody wanting to come to the Ashram is usually by email. We get inquiries for people wanting to stay with us and we answer them, offering our retreats and journeys. In their emails, people usually already express what they are looking for and expecting and if not, we ask them clearly. We also clearly say who we are, that we don’t believe in god or any religion, that we don’t have any guru and are very free without certain times when you have to get up or go to bed for example.

This already filters the regular pilgrim who wants to come to Vrindavan for practicing his devotion. It filters anybody who is looking for a guru to tell him what he should do. That all is people who have a certain expectation but what about those who are just negative but looking for something that could help them find satisfaction?

Well, you have to read emails with care. Wait, maybe not so much reading with care – you have to pay attention to the feeling you get while reading the emails. Sometimes it is not fully clear but often you will get a lot of doubtful questions with which the person is indirectly already criticizing you before even having met you in person or seen what you do.

If you already have the feeling that someone is being unnecessarily negative while he or she is still thousands of miles away, if you already feel like you have to defend yourself and would rather go back to your normal, peaceful work instead of starting an argument, you know this person is not the right one to spend time with. Not the right one to invite to your home for living there several weeks at a time, being quite close in this way physically, too!

We try our best to say no to any case like this. We try to scan, watching our feelings during our email conversations and checking whether we believe it will be difficult or easy to have that person at our Ashram. We know we cannot satisfy everybody. That is a fact of life you have to accept. But we try not to make it difficult on us by inviting those people whom nobody can satisfy!

In spite of all this, it is sometimes not possible to read all of this out of an email. One gets better at it and so it happens rarely now that we have someone like this at the Ashram but it is part of the game that this also happens.

So what to do if you find yourself together with such a negative person? That’s something I want to write more about tomorrow.