Responsibility 101

To start, forget about responsibility as related to blame.  “You were responsible for this and it didn’t happen, so you failed and you are bad” has no place in any discussion of responsibility from the spiritual context.  From the spiritual context, responsibility means power.  Responsibility means freedom.  So, understanding and accepting the responsibility you have is vitally important!

Whether you know it or not, whether you want to be or not, you are 100% responsible for everything you say, think, do, and feel.  We tend to have this outer focus in life - looking “out there” to determine what to feel, how to think, what we can do, etc.  This is completely backwards to how our experience actually functions.

Where ever you are right now, look around you and find something to focus on that is distant from you.  It appears to be “over there” but where are you experiencing it?  Are you experiencing it outside of yourself, “over there?”  No.  You are experiencing it right where you are.  Furthermore, your experience of it is conditioned by you - you are not actually experiencing it as it truly is.  Perhaps the object is an orange umbrella.   Your perception of the color is based on how your eyes and brain interpret the light waves bouncing off it.  My eyes are different and therefore MUST interpret those light waves differently.  Perhaps you loved being under an umbrella and playing in the puddles, so this object triggers happy memories.  Perhaps another person was struck by lightning while holding an umbrella and gets upset at the sight.  

The umbrella didn’t make one person happy and another frightened.  What made one happy and the other not is how they have umbrellas associated in their consciousness.  What if, after being struck by lightning, this imagined person had a life changing insight and completely turned their life around?  Now, that same person would feel grateful when seeing the same umbrella.  The umbrella didn’t do it.  This is easy to understand with an inanimate object like an umbrella, however…

The things your boss said to you didn’t make you upset.  Your partner doing or not doing something didn’t make you upset.  These are just like the umbrella.  Anything anybody ever says or does is just like the umbrella.  It / they can’t determine how you feel - only you can.  You are responsible.  You were gifted with complete authority over how you interpret the events around you.  You can choose to interpret an event as, “see, this proves how mistreated and disrespected I am,” or, “wow, I am deserving of so much more than I realized and have been allowing myself to accept less.  No more!”  

No matter your experience, ask yourself, “what is this telling me about how I’ve been thinking?  Is this way of thinking serving me?  What could I do to change my thinking about this so that I feel better?”  

Whether you like it or not, you are responsible.  You can use that responsibility to lock yourself in bondage to those around you, or you can accept that responsibility and use it to free yourself.  Nobody else has any authority.  Nobody can do it for you.  I’ve been diligently accepting my responsibility recently.  

Every time I notice I’m upset, I know I’m not accepting my responsibility.  Once I do accept my responsibility, look at what I’m thinking / feeling / believing and change it, I feel better.  

I encourage you to accept your power, your freedom, your responsibility.  It takes practice and effort, but it is well worth it!