March is celebrated as Spiritual Wellness Month. It is a time to reflect on the values, ethics and morals that add value and give meaning to your life. Here at diGJamaica, we’re going on a quest for 30 days of inspiration: extracting the common principles from different religions and systems of belief that help their followers to find inner peace, purpose and direction. Each day for the month of March, we will be sharing another principle with you. Join us as we embark on this journey to spiritual wellness.
What we’ve covered so far:
Show Respect
To show respect for a persons is to have consideration for someone’s feelings, wishes and rights. Synonyms for respect are: appreciation, consideration, courtesy, deference, dignity, esteem, honour, recognition, regard. Respect is necessary for peaceful coexistence with other persons in our world. We are all so different, and our cultures and tastes and modes of expression are so varied that we must exercise respect daily if we are to maintain harmonious balance in our relationships.
Respect means understanding and appreciating that ‘different’ does not mean lesser or greater. Different just means different. Jamaicans may prefer jerked chicken. Chinese may prefer chow mien. Each culinary tastes are not better or worse than the other. It’s just different. Respect understands that and allows the Chinese to express their ‘Chinese-ness’ and the Jamaicans to express their ‘Jamaican-ness’ without putting derogatory labels on either.
How do you show respect? Here are two key ways this practice must be cultivated:
- In speech. Watch how you talk about things and persons, especially those who are different from you. Ensure that you express dislike and disagreement without being offensive.
- In attitude. Exercise caution in your behaviour toward differences. Be respectful. Understand that something that may not be important to you could be very important to someone else, and honour that.
