by Richard C. Michael, Ph.D.

Gossip begins with someone building someone else up and making them more important than themselves. The problem with listening to gossip is that you do not just listen to it with your ears or see it with your eyes, you hear and see it with your heart, and that eventually wounds the heart. The heart becomes wounded because you have temporarily filled an empty space within it with someone other than yourself and your own individual importance. Therefore, you have filled that space with words and sights that you heard, read, and saw about others. This leads to a longing to learn more about this person, much like an addiction.

You want to hear more about that person and the importance that the gossip is centered around so you can continue to fill more of your heart with your praise of them. The more you hear and build them up, the less you become, and the more you identify with them. There has to be a checkpoint for this and it usually is an event you created that will lead to feelings of devastation, pain, anger, hatred, and revenge, towards the person you let into your heart that severely disappointed you. Disappointment, because your respected idol did not live up to your expectations nor your trust. Therefore, your praise has turned into disdain.

A good example is the reporters or journalists who theoretically make the career of actors and athletes by their rave reviews of something they did or said. The same person who built them up is usually the same person who eventually tears them down. Why does this happen? Those that hear the gossip and who write or talk about it, are the same who never filled themselves up with their own importance. Therefore, someone else filled the heart's empty space. The heart will not allow this to happen and will remove the gossip from itself. The reason the heart will remove the gossip is because it is taking up more space in the heart by the more it hears. The heart removes the gossip with fire and cleanses itself free from it. This is usually done in a painful way and leaves a feeling of disappointment and an absence of trust deep within the heart that causes the heart to ache. You perpetuate the heart's cleansing by hearing others or you talk about those that you gossiped about, not in an affirmative but in a degrading way. You discovered their actions were not perfect.

In this process of removal and cleansing, the heart becomes wounded because the words of anger do not only produce heat which eventually results in fire but the words of hatred and bitterness penetrate and cut like a knife within the heart. After this process, the heart space is once again empty, but the heart is now feeling a hollow pain and becomes scarred from the experience.

You heal this issue by choosing to fill the heart's empty space with the truth about you, how important you are. You will no longer identify with others -- now you will enjoy others because you are enjoying yourself. As you learn how to enjoy yourself and stop taking life so seriously, others will learn how to enjoy you. Consequently you will see others as being important because their importance is a reflection of you and what is in your world.

The next step is to readjust your place in your world. By readjusting your place, you will discover that those who stood before you are now beside or behind you. You will then at that moment begin to see, hear and feel your importance. There will then be no more room for gossip because your heart and world will be filled with the truth about you. The pain will then diminish and the scars will begin to heal.

Once you begin to fill your heart with truth, you will see and feel your importance and how much of a difference you make in your world. As you do, one of the benefits will be that you will stop trying to make other people happy and start creating your own happiness.