What Should We Take Responsbility For?

This is a response to the question of taking responsibility for our lives and how it applies to something like being raped.

If you can imagine: there have been probably millions of rape victims throughout the whole of history. Can you imagine all the different ways that rape has been responded to in each victim? Some have been devastated and committed suicide, some have retaliated with murder, some have retaliated with taking the person to court.

Some have gone to therapy, some have started rape-awareness organizations to help others, so the point is that we can't always control the things that happen to us, but we can control the way we respond to them.

So, does a person who is raped have to feel like a victim for the rest of their life, or can they use the experience to grow in compassion for themselves and others, can they use the experience to empower themselves and others...You have to learn to think more subtly about these things, to really acknowledge the difference between what happens and how we respond to it. Anything can be a blessing if turned into one, anything can be a curse if turned into one.

We live in a paradigm that sets up being in blunt and unsubtle ways. Oftentimes it can be hard to begin the process of separating out the things that happen to us and our response to them. And when someone tells you to do so, your first reaction is, "Well, someone did this to me, someone hurt me...why should I take the responsibility for that?"

The process of transformation usually begins with really seeing how we've been hurt and misused in our lives...it all comes to the forefront and it hurts. It doesn't feel fair that we should take responsibility for our parents hitting us, or being dumped, or how mean kids were in middle school.

But, the farther on this path you go, and the safer you feel in your own skin, the more you can look back at these things and kind the value in them. And you can see that although these things happened to you, they are over, long over, yet you still suffer from them. Why? Because you made them mean something about you, and now every day you re-create in your mind a life in which these things have happened to you and they mean something about you. So, in a way, now you are the one hitting yourself, being mean to yourself, rejecting yourself.

I have had to think about this a lot, because my mom was a tyrant when I was young and I can trace most of my deepest fears back to those times. But I'm 28. She hasn't even lifted a hand to me in many, many years...in fact, she's the most loving, settled person now. Yet, when I get nervous, scared, sad...I can easily blame those years, when the world wasn't safe for me and blame her. Sometimes I do...and that's okay.

But that blame doesn't help me. It just continues to make me a victim. It doesn't really help me to become free. What I have to acknowledge...and it's a process that has and will continue to happen in stages...is that I made a story about what being hit as a child meant about me, i.e. that

I was bad, weak, that the world was bad and scary, that I couldn't trust the people who were supposed to love me, that confrontation had to always be painful, that I couldn't do anything right...etc. etc. etc. and so as I grew up, whenever anything related to these ideas happened, I used it to reinforce these "truths" about myself. It takes a lot of psychic power to continually reproduce these stories every day, that is part of what has made just simply living so difficult.

Most people never know they have a story, much less that the story is a lie and can be overcome. Overcoming the story is the work of a lifetime, but it's the only way to become free. You can become free of your diagnosed mental/emotional problems, and that's something that psychology and medicine doesn't understand. I would submit that your borderline schizophrenia and your manic depression can both be overcome with time, if you can learn to be who you really are in every moment, and not your story.

The crux here, especially for those who tend toward the over-analytical, is that it can't be solved with our minds. And so, all these words here are just words. Our mind is a function of the small self and therefore a function of the same self that is built on a "story." There is no 'figuring it out' with this little mind. We have to return to the breath, to be in the moment, to chant, to learn to change in our very being, not just in the mind. That is why meditation and chanting are so much more profound than thinking and reading about this stuff. Thinking and reading is just the finger pointing at the moon.