By being answerable to yourself in this way for your life, you no longer give the power to anything outside yourself to dictate your experiences of life. Rather, you claim the power and the freedom to make the changes in your life, in order to have the life you want.
In the quest for happiness and peace the first and most important key is to take personal responsibility for your life. I believe that we are 100% accountable and
responsible for everything in our lives, even if we don’t like it. By being answerable to yourself in this way for your life, you no longer give the power to anything outside yourself to dictate your experiences of life. Rather, you claim the power and the freedom to make the changes in your life, in order to have the life you want. If you are not taking responsibility for your life then you are most likely feeling a victim of something or someone that you feel is dictating your happiness or sadness, your circumstances in life. Or you are working really hard at “controlling” your life, that is likely, over time, to create a build up of stress, that will eventually take its toll on you physically, emotionally and mentally.
WHEN WE DO NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
The experience of any negativity in us is where we are not taking responsibility. Anywhere, anytime we are complaining, blaming, being in a bad mood or grumpy, feeling sorry for ourselves, making wrong, judging people or circumstances where we are feeling the victim - we are ignoring the choices we always have to have it different. The moment we remember to take that responsibility we shift into the peace, power and freedom that having a choice gives us. Taking responsibility for everything in your life - even if you do not like it- really is an act of maturity and love that transforms, frees and empowers rather than a resistant reaction of blame, fear, judgment to what is happening, that keeps us at the seeming mercy of external factors.
Taking responsibility means we always have a choice, because we are taking the power of our lives and our reactions back to us, rather than giving that power to anything or any one outside of us.
We can still take responsibility for our experience even if we cannot see how we are responsible at the time. To just assume you are responsible and go from there – yet not to then “pull the blame onto ourselves” but rather take that responsibility as an adult who has the power to deal with what ever is in your life, rather than feel a victim of what is happening. Blaming yourself is NOT taking personal responsibility, which is really punishing you. It is beating yourself up directly rather than having someone or circumstances do it for you indirectly, so you can feel like a victim! Beating yourself up, blaming yourself, feeling guilty and making yourself wrong is not the purpose of reclaiming the responsibility - it is not that you did anything wrong anyway - you were just learning. Yet too often are we ready to judge others and ourselves wrong for learning. And this is the bottom line for our suffering. In this dualistic world when we judge something as wrong or bad we withdraw our love from what we have judged and we separate from it. The reason why we suffer is because we have limited our view of the world by judging it. We limit ourselves thus too, by judging ourselves as having ever done something wrong.
To understand what taking responsibility really holds for us it is useful to explore what we do instead, when we do not take responsibility for everything in our lives.
DENIAL
(Not just a river in Egypt!)
At the bottom of the scale when we do not own our experience is that we tend to go into denial. We do this to the point that we negate and deceive ourselves that there is anything that is uncomfortable or out of integrity. We instead lie and pretend that everything is OK. When asked how we are…we say “I am fine –yes, of course I’m happy” being even indignant that it would be questioned when what we are not acknowledging to ourselves first is that really: “My daughter has not spoken to me in a year, and I have not spoken to my sister in 4 years, I do not sleep well at night, I am addicted to
prescription pain killers, my husband has not slept with me in the last 6 months, one of my kids is a heroin addict, and I do not have any close friends and I over eat as well to compensate.” And I insist that everything is fine.
That is called denial. What often happens to get us to grow past this is that some sort of breakdown occurs which is really a call for a breakthrough. We are being invited into more truth and integrity with ourselves by having the courage to tell the truth to ourselves about how we feel about what is going on in our lives.
BLAME
The next stage up that we do in not taking responsibility is that we blame everyone and everything else for our woes. Blame is pointing the accusatory finger in every other direction - crediting no responsibility for the discomfort and pain we feel or the things that we say and do that impact other people’s lives in a limiting, burdensome, negative way.
After denying that there is anything happening in our lives that disturbs us, and then eventually having to admit there are things going on, we continue to disown our experience and then blame someone or something for what is happening in our lives. Blame - of all human activities this is the one that is most popular when not taking responsibility. It often occurs when we feel the most powerless in our lives. It is often where we feel limited, restricted or wherever we feel a victim of anything or that things are unjust, or we just do not get our own way, or things do not seem to go our way. It is when we accuse our parents, our upbringing, our family, our teachers, our partners, our friends, our enemies, anyone in our lives, any condition or experience, even and often our concept of God, for any condition in our lives that we do not like, or feel powerless to change.
What usually goes hand in hand with blame is condemnation and criticism. The blaming can be both blatant and subtle and contain elements of denial as well. I see this most often when in dealing with what is contributing to the unhappiness or disagreements in a relationship -one partner in a relationship says things like, “It is your problem, not me, you go and fix yourself up and everything will be fine.” When we take anything less than 100% responsibility in a relationship then that leaves 50% or more room to blame your partner with. When you have two people each taking 100% responsibility for what is happening in the relationship (Not as guilt though) then that is 200% responsibility being activated that can only bring truth, clarity and settlement. Then the relationship will move through issues very quickly into appreciation and growth and deepening of intimacy, peace and love.
Blame is projected guilt. Blame is when we say - “That’s not fair!” or you point the finger and say “You done me wrong”. Blame is where you feel like a victim of something or some one, and really think that they are doing things to you that you do not think you deserve. It is where you disown your experience of something and the fact that you had everything to do with it and give the power of that situation to someone or something else outside of yourself and thus feel powerless to change it. Blame is where you are so righteous and indignant about something, where you feel so right in your judgment of right and wrong.
There is an American Indian saying, that says when you accusingly point your finger at someone literally or figuratively, that at the same time, there are three fingers pointing back at you, revealing to you the mirror of looking at yourself, showing you yourself, or how you, perceive yourself at an unconscious level. The truth is, you are not separate from what you see outside yourself. Blame is really only a place or thing that you have withdrawn your love from after you have judged it and have not embraced with your love yet. Blame reveals where you most need to forgive yourself, or allow yourself to be whatever you are “seeing out there” without the harsh judgment you impose on it.
Denial is where we say “There is nothing happening here.’ in order to cope with what is really happening. Whereas blame is the attempt of our psyche to show us what is really going on with us that we have denied by throwing it “out there” in the form of projection so we can see it. We do this because it is often too close to us to perceive it clearly, we are not conscious or aware of it until we do this.
JUSTIFICATION
(Or Arguing For Your Case In Being Right!)
We can then get more sophisticated at blaming and move into excusing our experiences and predicaments that are anything other than loving, by justifying why things are the way they are and the way we are. We exonerate ourselves by defending our experience of being the victim of circumstances. We may not directly blame, yet we learn to reasonably justify why our lives are the way they are. This form of not taking responsibility is usually a partner to blame as a condition for not taking responsibility e.g. “I cannot pay you your full fee because not enough people enrolled in the course.”
‘I will be more forgiving when he is shows he is sorry!”
What is more these arguments appear to be quite convincing and logical, these justifications and excuses are often quite eloquent, as we argue for our case of why we are so hard done by and why we should not take responsibility for what we are experiencing. What makes our case even more convincing is that we have all the evidence to prove why our lives are the way they are without anything to do with us.
We have collected the evidence to prove that: nobody loves us, that other people do it to us, that other people are to blame, that it is other people’s stuff we see, not anything to do with us, that we are not good enough, that we are bad or unwanted or guilty or not enough, or that the world is a cruel, unjust, hellish place to be or to be just tolerated by struggling to survive,- by creating experiences that prove this to ourselves and anyone else.
NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR OTHER'S EXPERIENCE
Taking personal responsibility for your life also does not mean that you are to take responsibility or are to blame for other people’s experience. You are responsible for your life and your experience. You are not responsible for other people’s learning, money problems, love life, jobs, being on time, emotional stability, healing, addictions, etc. etc. You are, however, responsible for how you respond to any situation, person, and circumstance, which you are in and that you contribute to.
The more you take responsibility for your life and how you feel and everything you have created in your life including the struggle, burdens, pressure, and thus act from that in starting to tell your self the truth about your self, the more you will free yourself of the punishment of a hard life, of feeling like a victim of anything.
Taking responsibility is indeed taking a step up and out of previous ways of thinking and acting. It is a conscious decision to go beyond what you have formerly experienced to experience the freedom, security and personal power that leaving blame, denial and making excuses behind brings you.
Julie T. Way is an Adelaide Breathworker and Personal Development Consultant well as the author of the book Personal Mastery in which she expands on the above subject. She is now writing her second book The Miraculous Life and presents a workshop series of that name. She can be contacted on PH. 8443 9162 or julieway@ozemail.com
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