Taking Responsibility

A few weeks ago, out of the blue, a dear friend sent me links to videos by Andrew Cohen that she watched in her meditation class. The videos were on the basic tenets of Evolutionary Enlightenment, which he wrote a whole book on. I’m not an expert on this stuff, but I walked away with some helpful new insights.

The concept that transformed me the most, and what I keep coming back to, is the idea that we must take responsibility for everything that happens to us. For our lives to be driven more by our authentic selves and less by the ego, and to end all the things that cause us to suffer, we must choose to accept unconditional responsibility for every experience that has happened to us, and for everything we have done to hurt others.

It took me a while to wrap my head around this, and honestly, my first reaction was NOOOOOOO! I am not to blame for all the bad things that have happened to me and all of the bad relationships and encounters in my life! I resisted.

However, I began to see that while others did play a role in these bad experiences and relationships, it is also true that I participate in this world and in all of my relationships, and I am at least partly responsible for them.

So I started to look at those bad experiences from a place of partial responsibility. And do you know what? It was actually liberating.

I began to see that I have the power to change those relationships, and make things better. If I had behaved differently in my relationships and interactions, perhaps I could have changed them entirely. When you take on full responsibility, you cannot be a victim. Ever. You are empowered to change things.

One way that I've found helpful in applying this to my life is to look at the most difficult relationships in my life - the person or people I have the hardest time being around. I began to think about how MY actions had made that relationship worse, had created tension, had triggered mean things to be said. I started to see that I was responsible, and then I began to see how I could start to repair the relationship. I have even begun to see these people with more compassion, and I've been able to take the bad interactions less personally.

It is certainly a work in progress, but so worth it.

He goes on to say that if we take responsibility for all the bad things in our lives, we can move to a place where we are more aware of our true and authentic self, and we can stop living in a guarded way - afraid of being hurt, afraid of what the world might send our way. When we take responsibility, we are in control. We are free!