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  • 5 GREAT things to know

Dear Blameless One,

blamelessI was just thinking that we need to see if we can get something straightened out.  It’s the tendency among spiritual people to feel it’s their fault… that they’ve done something wrong when there are hard or “negative” things in their life.

This tendency is another in the same group of human conditioning that I call the Pack-of-Lies Life Lessons.  Most of them are relics from religion.  Here’s the truth:

Taking responsibility for negative or difficult situations in our life is not the same as taking the blame. 

We tend to do self-blame instead of self-responsibility.  Taking the blame isn’t the same as taking responsibility, nor does it equal becoming accountable … this got a tad twisted up in us.  In those faux life lesson classes that happened while we weren’t looking.

We get off to an ok start when we say, “Whatever is in our life is, in important ways, our own creation.    We need to take responsibility for what happens in our lives.“  Alright.  But. Then we follow with, “My life is crappy and it’s my fault.  What did I do wrong?” 

It goes downhill from there sadly, because of the self-blame.  What did I do wrong?  We usually feel discouraged and fearful when we say this.  It works its way under our skin like this: difficulty = wrong = blame = guilt = self-punishment.  There’s a lot of faulty reasoning in that equation.  And it creates the classic Viscous Circle. 

How did we get here, anyway?  We used to feel like things were happening to us.  That made us victims with little control over our lives. 

Then we had a group AHA and began to realize that we created the circumstances of our lives.  Better, yes?

However, in the excitement of this revelation we didn’t notice that we grafted a little bit of a nutty old idea onto it.  The bit where we feel like we are bad because of the bad stuff in our lives – we have the feeling that there’s something wrong with us or “bad” stuff wouldn’t be there.

That’s nutty and it triggers deeply embedded survival fears about powerlessness.We know better but this goes to subterranean levels, leaving many of us stuck in the self-blame game.  

Self-blame is definitely one of those Bardo patterns I’ve been talking about that is ingrained in us and active at sub-conscious levels that play out from the survival aspects of self.

It’s important to get beyond this because it makes it nearly impossible for you to ask more and better of yourself when you are defeated by beating yourself up with a lot of silly questions that boil down to versions of  “It’s my fault; what did I do wrong?”    That’s not taking responsibility, that’s judgment and assigning blame.   Self-responsibility doesn’t equal self-blame. 

So here’s five good things to know about real responsibility taking:

1) Self-responsibility is a no-fault deal.  It comes with a no-fault clause.

2) If you’re assigning self-blame and feeling guilty, you can never take responsibility for your life, no matter how hard you try.  Blame can never equal responsibility. 

3) For blame you have to go back.  For self-responsibility you must move ahead.  In fact, if you are blaming yourself for what’s in your life, you are avoiding responsibility.  Blame stops action.  Responsibility takes the lead.  That’s worth reading again.

4) Self-responsibility requires taking charge. Taking charge of your life is a whole other ball-game.  Taking charge means you assess what is, in a simple honest way and in a relaxed and self-compassionate way.  Then you move on and you do what you can.  

5) Self-responsibility  = Self-leadership.  In taking charge, you lead yourself into a new situation.  Take the lead.  Leadership.  Self-leadership.  Yes.  To take responsibility you have to lead yourself forward.

So.  Blame.  That old hanger-on from days of fire and brimstone. Handed down from all those Puritanical ancestors, probably.  Blame causes havoc with the responsibility concept. 

Getting done with blame is a good spiritual practice for 2021, a year of completion, of moving past the personal tyranny of limiting patterns.  It’s not a bad new year’s resolution either, because it’ll help prevent us from blaming ourselves for not meeting unrealistic levels of perfection on our other new year’s resolutions.  LOL.

Blamelessly yours,

X♥️MaHuLiLi

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