Photo by Aaron Burden
Many people have offered interpretations of this quote from Jesus, and I’m offering mine.
To me, turning the other cheek doesn’t mean that if someone hits you on the left cheek, you turn to be hit on your right cheek. This would not be loving to yourself, and Jesus was all about love – both for yourself and for others.
As many of us know, Jesus often spoke in parables in order to help the people of his time understand what he wanted to communicate, without getting himself into more trouble than he was already in with the people who were in power at the time. In the time he lived, there was much control and judgment from the powers that be, and he was teaching love and compassion – quite the opposite of control and judgment. By speaking in parables, he hoped to keep the priests and Pharisees – the people who were threatened by him – away from him long enough to get his message of love and compassion across to enough people to have an impact on his society.
To me, turning the other cheek means a couple of things. First, it means to turn and look at the situation from a different perspective. If you can see it from a different perspective, then you have the opportunity to open to compassion rather than judgment. So to me, turning the other cheek means primarily that we move away from judgment and into compassion.
Turning away from both self-judgment and judgment of others, and toward self-compassion and compassion for others, is very loving to ourselves and to others. Since love and compassion was Jesus’s primary message, I believe this is what he meant when he said to turn the other cheek.
This is Vitally Important…
One of the main choices that people make that causes them much pain and suffering is self-judgment and judgment toward others. Judgment has a very low frequency – a very low vibration – so when we make this choice, we are lowering our frequency too much to access our higher guidance.
If there is one thing you can do that will shift your life significantly toward wholeness, peace and joy, it’s to move from judgment to compassion, from control to love. Judgment is all about trying to control yourself and others. The wounded self believes that it can motivate you to do things ‘right’ with self-judgment, and it believes it can motivate others to do what it wants with judgments. These are major false beliefs, because self-judgment and judgment of others causes much misery and suffering.
It’s Not So Different Today
While today we certainly have more freedom than we did in Jesus’s time, there are still the powers that be who want to control, such as politicians, corporations, food manufacturers, drug companies and insurance companies. These powers are threatened by those of us who think for ourselves and are connected with our own sources of wisdom. When we are connected with our own source of knowing, they can’t control us. We are not inclined to be pulled in by their TV ads that tell us that devitalized foods are nutritious, and drugs will cure us, and that the new car will give us the sex appeal we may be seeking.
Staying connected with truth occurs when our frequency is high enough to access our higher self, which occurs only when we are compassionately open to learning – not when we are judging ourselves or judging others.
I hope you start practicing loving yourself by turning the other cheek away from judgment and toward compassion.
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