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Tolerating Spiders and People
A spiritual practice that opens us to compassion
Spiders. Yuck. Most people hate them. We hate them because we have been taught to fear them. Spiders bite people and then the bitten person dies, or gets very sick, right? We don’t stop to examine our prejudice against spiders because it is accepted that spiders are bad. Spiders are scary. We hate spiders just because they are spiders.
I see so many parallels in our view of spiders and our view of people. We have been taught to fear certain groups of people because we perceive them as a threat to our safety, our lifestyle and our place in society. We label people as bad and we hold them in contempt just because they are who they are. It’s just accepted that we have a right to hate them.
When I embraced Buddhism as my spiritual path, I became much more aware of the interconnection of all beings. For me, this awareness especially extended to things that I normally did not think much about, like insects. Buddhism teaches that we must care for all sentient beings — beings that are alive and can feel things.
Before, I never gave it much thought when I squashed a spider under my shoe. Then I started thinking about the fact that it is a living being who can feel. Suddenly, I found myself thinking twice about my practice of automatically…
