There is a meditation teacher who always begins her talks, “With great respect and love…” Why respect? A declaration of respect from a teacher to students, from an authority to ‘subordinates’? That is something not heard every day. In my cultural inheritance, respect was not a concept coupled with love. ‘All you need is love, love is all you need’ was more what I heard. Stephen Stills did not sing, ‘Respect the one you’re with’, it was ‘Love the one you’re with’. I am sure you can think of thousands of songs on love, but can you think of another popular expression of respect besides Aretha’s plea for R-E-S-P-E-C-T?
When talking about respect, 90% of the time people explain it as something that sounds like lines from ‘The Godfather’, as if respect is an injunction forced upon children or subordinates to grant authority figures so you would obey without question. You must respect your parents, elders, superiors, and furthermore, as a subordinate you don’t have it, you have to ‘earn’ respect. Well, think about that. As a child, we can have the darndest time trying to figure out how to give authorities something they declared we do not have.
My teacher did not use the word as something that had to be earned. Rather it was more like beauty – a power that was in the eye of the beholder. She used the word as if respect was inherent in any relationship, in both subject and object, and that shone when reflected. She was saying we could all relax in acceptance. Her respect was a point of view that everyone was inherently worthy as a miraculous, powerful sovereign creation. It was a statement that she had the perspective to see inherent value, capability and beauty in all beings. She practiced respecting instead of reducing her students, or demanding it from those she did not have respect for.
So first, can we respect ourselves enough receive that we are respectable, and to see that we are capable of this perspective? We can practice seeing a wider, deeper, view of ourselves and others, just like practicing seeing beauty. We can pause and breathe when we’re in reductive vision. We can expand to a 3rd dimension simply by allowing in a space of ignorance. The part of others we may not be privileged to witness. There is always a bigger perspective, more than what we are seeing on the surface. Perspective invites a space for that ‘more’. That space is one of openness, not knowing, not reducing, and in that space value, capability, beauty, respect can appear in the eye of the beholder.