Tough Skin or Tough Heart?

A friend has recently asked me, "How do you find the balance between toughening your skin, but NOT your heart?"

This was my response to him: You should practice more allowing instead of defensiveness. Toughening of the heart is a natural form or self-defense and self-preservation against that which you deem as hurtful. Allowing melts away your resistance to what it is and less bothers you as a result. Is it possible for you to allow people to be ignorant, mean, selfish and deceiving without disturbing your inner peace or changing the core goodness of who you are? Is it fair to the unspoiled fruit out there to have to deal with a fruit that used to be good until it got infected and changed by hurt? This is what it comes down to. I always feel sorry for jerks anyway, for it must be tough to live 24/7 with the annoyance I only had to endure for a few moments. I'm also thankful to occasionally run into jerks, because they help broaden the pool of things I am able to allow by stretching my patience and thus giving me a better chance at peace. Every major prick I run into helps me to deal with more tolerable pricks with ease.

Whenever someone gets me angry or hurts my feelings, I tell myself that I'm growing and these are just its growing pains. After that I don't stay angry or hurt for long. I hate to liken it to sex, but don't practice preemptive resistance and defensiveness or high expectations and not expect to be served pain and disappointment. Just relax and enjoy each moment as it comes to you in the present moment. Keep enjoying each moment as it comes to you in the present moment without concern at all for the future one way or the other. It doesn't matter in the present. Keep doing that until it is no longer enjoyable or helping you grow as a person. Once the relationship is taking more away from you then it is giving to you and helping neither of you grow, it is time to pull out and move on without resentment. The relationship has served its purpose. Not every relationship is meant to last as long as you two shall live. Many of them come only teach you lessons about yourself and about love you could not have learned otherwise from anyone else. Learn to be okay with this. Life comes to you only through the present moment. It does not exist in the past, because that is done and cannot be changed. You only have the choice of accepting the past for what it was if you want peace. Life does not exist in the future because it has not happened yet and depends in large part on what you do with the present moment. Yes, plan and prepare for the future, but there's no reason to feel one way or the other about it. Take all of the energy of those anxious concerns or feelings of high hopes and bring it all into the present moment so that you can fully experience these fleeting moments of right now in all its richness and not miss it being concerned about the future. Do this and the future will take care of itself.