On healing through taking responsibility for our lives

My healing journey began when I was able to take responsibility for my life and move out from under the “victim” mind set. I had a traumatic childhood and I worked really hard at trying to heal it for many years through traditional therapy - and indeed spent many years talking about my childhood and its impact on my life. It was a band aid. When I was finally asked “why did you choose those parents” by a wise and trusted counselor I was at first triggered. Once the question, that became a koan for me to work with, set in and I realized what it meant - I was set free. I was able to walk out from under the protective layer of being a traumatized person and start building a relationship with true roots to support my healing.

Here is a beautiful discourse from Osho on taking responsibility and being grateful for life’s challenges - they are the doorway to healing, finding depth within, and ultimately truth. This discourse is taken from the Book of Wisdom, which I have been reading and listening to off and on for a few years. I have taken it on my last two meditation retreats and continue to work with the teachings. So blessed to have this guide showering me with love and truth. The Book of Wisdom is an exploration Of Atisha’s 7 Points of Mind Training.

As a compassionate inquiry facilitator I have found that when we look at our adaptive patterns that protect us and make friends with them by putting them in their rightful place - the past - we can then take responsisibity. We cannot live in the present without doing so.

“The ordinary mind always throws the responsibility on somebody else. It is always the other who is making you suffer. Your wife is making you suffer, your husband is making you suffer, your parents are making you suffer, your children are making you suffer, or the financial system of the society, capitalism, communism, fascism, the prevalent political ideology, the social structure, or fate, karma, God...you name it!

People have millions of ways to shirk responsibility. But the moment you say somebody else – X, Y, Z – is making you suffer, then you cannot do anything to change it. What can you do? When the society changes and communism comes and there is a classless world, then everybody will be happy. Before it, it is not possible. How can you be happy in a society which is poor? And how can you be happy in a society which is dominated by the capitalists? How can you be happy with a society which is bureaucratic? How can you be happy with a society which does not allow you freedom?

Excuses and excuses and excuses – excuses just to avoid one single insight that “I am responsible for myself. Nobody else is responsible for me; it is absolutely and utterly my responsibility. Whatsoever I am, I am my own creation.” This is the meaning of the sutra.

Drive all blame into one

And that one is you.

Once this insight settles:

“I am responsible for my life – for all my suffering, for my pain, for all that has happened to me and is happening to me – I have chosen it this way; these are the seeds that I sowed and now I am reaping the crop; I am responsible – once this insight becomes a natural understanding in you, then everything else is simple. Then life starts taking a new turn, starts moving into a new dimension. That dimension is conversion, revolution, mutation – because once I know I am responsible, I also know that I can drop it any moment I decide to. Nobody can prevent me from dropping it.

Can anybody prevent you from dropping your misery, from transforming your misery into bliss? Nobody. Even if you are in a jail, chained, imprisoned, nobody can imprison YOU; your soul still remains free. Of course you have a very limited situation, but even in that limited situation you can sing a song. You can either cry tears of helplessness or you can sing a song. Even with chains on your feet you can dance; then even the sound of the chains will have a melody to it.

Next sutra: Be grateful to everyone

Atisha is really very very scientific. First he says: Take the whole responsibility on yourself. Secondly he says: Be grateful to everyone. Now that nobody is responsible for your misery except you – if the misery is all your own doing, then what is left?

Be grateful to everyone

Because everybody is creating a space for you to be transformed – even those who think they are obstructing you, even those whom you think are enemies. Your friends, your enemies, good people and bad people, favorable circumstances, unfavorable circumstances – all together they are creating the context in which you can be transformed and become a Buddha. Be grateful to all – to those who have helped, to those who have hindered, to those who have been indifferent. Be grateful to all, because all together they are creating the context in which Buddhas are born, in which you can become a Buddha.

Osho, The Book of Wisdom, Talk #5