Channeling: Blame
Blame disposes power from yourself. It is a way for you to eschew personal responsibility. It is a tool of the ego to ensure that you do not accept your own role in the way events unfold or in the way that you may respond in a situation.
The ego does not want to feel at fault for how something unfolds. It feels threatened by the idea of having done something wrong. You see, there is great judgment that underlies the energy of blame. Not only are you refusing to see the situation clearly or to take responsibility for the situation, you are acting upon judgments of what is ‘right’ or wrong in a given moment.
Your mind will want things to be right according to its narrow definition of what is right – what feels familiar, what feels safe. This is the normal behaviour of the ego. When something deviates from this definition, or something unexpected occurs, there is an experience of having lost control. The mind faces its illusion head on: it is not in control. Thus, fear, thus blame: creating stories to explain, rationally, how this event or experience had nothing to do with you.
But the very fact that your ego labels that which it does not control as ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ is laced with judgment, and it reveals a distrust of oneself, of the Universe. As is often said, there is no right or wrong, though thinking makes it so.
Blame allows one to make another wrong. It creates a narrative where another had the power in a situation and misused it. It creates a story to benefit the mind, who is likely acting out of a wound, out of a fear. And this story will ensure that you feel blameless or that you are the victim in the situation. This is a favorite story of the mind, and an energy in which many feel safe. Self-pity negates the power you have as a protagonist in your life, and many are fearful of claiming their power. They feel safer feeling victim to the choices and behaviour of others, or as blameless agents in a cruel Universe, or of fate.
Blame teaches us that others are responsible for how we feel. We might say that someone ‘made’ us upset. This allows the ego to hide very well. It obscures the truth; if we are feeling upset in our bodies in response to what someone said or did, then there is a wound within us that needs to be addressed. And it just so happened that the mirror which revealed to us that wound was the words spoken from another. But the thinking is distorted when we say that they ‘made’ us any particular way. We are made the way we are, and it is our responsibility to continue making ourselves, to continue to make the choice to go inward and examine where our own triggers lie. Blame is a mask the ego will use to hide our pain. It seeks to hide those triggers from us so that we do not see them – so that we do not feel the pain. It does not want us to see how badly we may be hurt, because it does not feel safe to confront that pain, and the ego believes it is its job to keep us safe. The ego fears the consequence of confronting that pain, too: if we heal it, if we change, how will we be safe? The ego will often equate such changes with fear, with being unsafe, as if such acts of vulnerability threaten our security or ability to navigate the world safely.
The ego can create a convincing story very often. When we do not realise how powerful we truly are, it can feel like the world is happening to us and not for us. We see painful experiences as obstacles rather than opportunities, and we resort to blame to keep in hiding – to keep the truth of who we are hidden by the lie that we are not responsible for our well-being.
It is important to have compassion for this urge. We were not taught otherwise. Our childhood instructed many of us that we were not the powerful inspired beings of light who are in charge of our own lives and livelihoods. We regularly gave our power away, by necessity or habit, and the lesson we often learned was that other people do bad things or say bad things and they are bad. If we examine this a little further, again you can see the judgment. When someone says something ‘bad’, very often it is something that hurts or offends us. While it is true that someone can say something which is insensitive or unwise, it is also true that the response that we have to anything that happens in our world comes from within us. It could not be otherwise.
And, when we blame that ‘bad’ thing and judge it as so, we simultaneously give away our power and feed into a lie of separation. In truth, such a ‘bad’ thing is very good: it is showing us a truth – something that we need to heal, words that may hit upon a wound that needs addressing, a boundary that needs to be expressed. And there need not be any judgment in that. Whatever has been done ‘outside’ you simply is, and it is being expressed to you at this time and in that way for your benefit and enrichment.
Another way that blame can manifest is more internal in expression. One might blame themselves for all things that happen in the world or in their world. They feel everything is their fault, and they suffer feeling shame and guilt and constant worry and unworthiness. Their ego has created elaborate story lines that insist that they should be better, that there was more they could have done, that for some reason, the way that someone is acting is their fault.
This expression of blame comes from an ego who is wounded around the idea of self-responsibility. Yes, we must take responsibility for the emotions that arise from within us in response to the outside world. And this same principle applies to others: it is other people’s responsibility to take responsibility for the emotions that arise within them.
The person who blames themselves for all of the circumstances in their life and in others beats themselves up. The ego takes a regular situation and turns it into an immediate reflection upon them and their perceived unworthiness. If someone else is sad, they blame themselves for not being warmer or more observant as to their gestures earlier in the day. The pain it causes them to feel such responsibility for others causes extreme vigilance; because they feel others’ well-being is their responsibility, their ego makes it their job to ensure that nobody suffers any sort of problem, for the pain of that circumstance is too much – it causes too much shame to rise in that person’s body, in the body of the person who feels responsible for others’ well-being.
Thus, it is vital to understand the truth of this arrangement. In believing you are personally responsible for others’ feelings, you also give your power away. You scatter your life force in many directions, and you compromise your own well-being in order to be ‘perfect’ for other people. In doing so, you fail to express your authentic self, express your truths, or feel free to be who you want to be, lest it make others uncomfortable.
This compensatory behaviour distracts you from achieving your soul’s purpose: to be who it came forth to be. Rather, you misuse your power by attempting to control others. And that is what is happening: if you feel to blame or you feel responsible for others’ feelings and path, you will find yourself attempting to manage situations and circumstances in a way that controls or manipulates the experiences of other people. Even if you believe you are doing this from a place of care, the truth is that you are misusing your power in a way that is detrimental to both parties: you give your power away, and you are also taking away someone else’s power – their power to take responsibility for their own well-being, which is vital.
The power to be who you are fully must be expressed in the physical. And this means you must also see who you are clearly. Blame is an obfuscating force that distorts our vision. It makes us feel we have no power over our circumstance, and it can make us feel like we – wrongly – have the power to control others’ circumstances. In both instances, this distortion brings us pain, and it hides from us our wounds.
When you are unwilling to see how your wounds have contributed to your experience, you sacrifice your ability to know yourself more deeply, to have compassion for your pain, to heal, and to choose better actions in the future. You fail to meet yourself and your inner child with honesty and truth, and you continue to live in the illusion that others have control over your inner world. For as long as you are determined not to see your inner responsibility for your experience, you will allow your mind to convince you that you are a victim to life, and you cannot step into your true power, or consequently, your greatest joy and most authentic, liberated self.
When you are unwilling to see the truth that you are not responsible for other people’s feelings, you will continue to live in the shame of feeling not good enough, for you can never truly ensure that everyone and everything around you is arranged to the state of being that satisfies your mind’s idea of perfection. In trying to manage everything so that you never have to feel you failed this standard, you will twist yourself and lose yourself in the process. You will forget to monitor and know how you truly feel, for you will become so lost in feeling responsible for other people. The impulse to control the environment or other people to ensure you do not experience the shame of feeling you were not enough will limit you. It will limit your ability to embody your own truth, your own power. And, it can distract you from seeing the truth of the situation when something truly is not your responsibility. Your boundaries will suffer and you leave yourself vulnerable to those who will take advantage of your susceptibility to be ‘perfect’ for another.
Though the idea of self-responsibility may sound serious or disciplinarian, it is actually the door to freedom, joy, and expansion. When you are clear about what is your responsibility, and what is not, you give yourself permission to be more in direct relationship with your power. You are no longer casting away your power in protest against others or the world who continues to ‘do’ things to you, and you are no longer scattering your energies attempting to modify the world, believing that it all reflects back to you your failures. You set yourself free by knowing that the only thing you are responsible to is yourself; the only thing you are responsible for is yourself: your own feelings in your own body, your own emotions, and your own truth.
While you will continue to be in relationship with the world, you will no longer feel you are combating it or needing to manipulating it in order to feel safe and secure. Self-responsibility, and a clear understanding of your right relationship to it, will ensure that you can enter and exit relationships and situations with a knowing of what is yours and what is not. It helps your inner child know that it is being held in a manner that is stable: not reactive or in constant response to the outer environment, but focused and clear about the boundary between self and other.
That which is within you is your responsibility. That which is within others is theirs.
It sounds extremely simple when it is stated in such clear words, and to a certain extent, it is profoundly simple. It is only the mind, the ego, who wants to complicate this and make you believe it is confusing so – again – you do not see clearly where you are wounded, or where you are misusing your power.
Commit yourself to seeing this clearly. Let go of your desire to hide from the pain. Blame only increases this suffering as it pushes us further from the inner truth, and it reinforces our judgments about wrongness – pushing life away from us, too.
Set yourself free by choosing to see and know truly what is your responsibility to attend to within yourself.
That is all.