To Change Your Life You Must Take Responsibility
How Your Ability To Respond Can Break The Connection With The Past And Create The Conscious Connection With Your Future
Whether you consciously recognize it or not, we are always responsible for our experiences. It’s impossible not to be.
See, the problem is that sometimes we are afraid to take responsibility for our lives. So we avoid and deny our responsibility.
The problem with this is that it is a “false promise” generated from the illusion of separateness.
When we believe that we are separate from life we are unable to recognize the interconnectedness of consequences. And without this awareness, we fall under the illusion that what we do won’t affect others or ourselves.
In essence, we choose unconsciousness.
When we choose denial or avoidance we are choosing to remain unconscious about our problems (not aware, not responsible).
By doing this we allow our problems to fester, build, and mutate into something far worse than what it originally was.
This is because whether you like it or not you are always choosing and always making decisions.
To not make a decision is still a decision.
So the question is: do we choose to live in fear, avoid and deny our responsibilities? Or do we take conscious control of our lives and take responsibility?
One leads to suffering and a self-created hell, where you never feel in control of your life and breed resentment towards everything.
While the other leads to a life of joy and wonder with you ultimately making life the way you want it.
Responsibility Response-Ability
Responsibility — Response, Ability. One’s ability to respond.
Responsibility is how you manage your focus, attention, and awareness.
How you manage your attention and your focus is what influences your perception of reality. Your perception of reality is what creates your beliefs, which ultimately dictate the actions you take.
Action is incredibly multidimensional:
- There is the physical action. I.e., picking up groceries, asking someone out, taking a shit.
- Then there is the action that you take mentally: the way you think, how you plan or make decisions, how you form a belief.
- Then there is the action that you take energetically, which essentially boils down to your intention.
- Is your intention altruistic and compassionate towards life? Or self-centered in personal gain? This is what dictates the structure of your energy.
In essence, these are the actions that you must take responsibility for. Because consciously or unconsciously, they are going to happen anyway.
You can allow them to happen unconsciously and turn a blind eye towards them. Or you can make them a conscious process. The choice is always yours.
Understandably, what is scary about taking responsibility is: that once we realize the magnitude and consequences of our actions. Of course, we are going to get scared
We don’t want to fuck up, we don’t want to destroy ourselves through poor decisions. So of course, if the ‘false promise’ of avoiding and denying responsibility presents itself we take it.
But the huge issue with this is, whether you like it or not shit is still going to go down. And you can pretend that you don’t play a role in the creation of it, but you do.
So the best thing to do is face your responsibility head-on, this way you will have a conscious say in the direction of your life.
However, when you are acting out of alignment you won’t be able to deny or avoid it. See, it’s easy to act like an asshole, be self-centered, and make shitty decisions when you can pretend like the consequences don’t affect you.
But when you are fully aware that consequences do affect you, the only thing left to do is transform into something greater than yourself.
Fault Vs Responsibility
Your problems are not 100% your fault, but 100% your responsibility.
Whether you hide your problems, run from them, deny them, or avoid them, your problems are always going to be with you. Because in essence, your problems are you.
Have you ever traveled somewhere thinking: “This trip is going to change my life, I am going to become a new person”.
And while the place you travel to may change you temporarily, you quickly start falling back into the same compulsive habits and patterns.
You realize that just because you are somewhere new you are still carrying the patterns and behaviors of the past. And once again creating a predictable future from a predictable past.
This is because you are the same fucking person, with the same fucking problems.
Genuine transformation takes a lot more than just traveling or moving somewhere new –Although I do not deny it does help. True change comes from authentic acceptance of your responsibility.
A lot of people refuse to take responsibility for their problems because they don’t believe they are at fault for them. Thus they give themselves an excuse to remain a victim and hold onto negative states of being.
And although this may be partly true, ultimately it is not the truth.
Yes, you may have had a shitty past, and yes you may have not been served the best childhood with the best resources. Yes, you may have been “done dirty” on multiple occasions.
- This is not your fault.
But ultimately it is up to you whether you want to become wise or wounded.
The question is do you want to be a product of your past? Or the conscious creator of your future.
The Present Moment
The truth that many of us are unaware of is that the past only exists within our minds. The only thing that truly is and always will be is the present moment.
Think about it: when the past happened, it happened in the present moment. When the future happens, it will happen in the present.
Time is psychologically generated, past and future are just phantoms of the mind. They have no inherent existence.
The beautiful thing about the present moment is that it is a “present”. It is unobstructed by time and your stories, it is always brand new.
Meaning that you always have the possibility in every single given moment to make yourself brand new. Through the act of taking responsibility, response-ability.
Most of life we move through in an unconscious state. Meaning that instead of using a conscious response we are primarily using our: habits, patterns, and compulsions to respond to life.
If something pisses us off, we act out. If something triggers, we feel the need to respond aggressively. If life gives us a reason to feel sad, we feel sad.
The point is these things are not consciously happening, they are unconsciously generated.
We become so used to acting a certain way, so used to our identities, that we don’t even question them.
Once you question them and use your response-ability. Instead of getting pissed off for no reason you can go, “Hmm, maybe this isn’t a big deal”.
Instead of getting depressed over something small you can think, “Maybe I don’t need to feel sad, maybe I can see it in a new light”.
Or perhaps instead of getting triggered and feeling the need to stand on your moral high ground, you can think. “Maybe I can take time to understand where this person is coming from instead of taking it personally”.
In essence, this is your ability to break out of wired compulsive habit and into present response-ability.
Changing your life from one of predetermined shackles of behavior, into one of conscious creation.
Our Stories Are Our Lives
Responsibility is empowerment.
Our stories are what define us, our stories are what give us a sense of identity. However, most of the time our stories weren’t even written by us.
They were written by our past, they were written by our circumstances, they were written by a deep state of unconsciousness.
And these stories can bring us so much pain and suffering. They can destroy our hope and make us feel victimized by life.
But ultimately the truth is: consciously or unconsciously you are the only one who wrote this story, and you did it through how you interpreted life.
you are the one who used your response-ability to interpret and form life into your story.
At the end of the day, you are always choosing, whether you like it or not. To not make a decision is still a decision.
And you can choose to hold onto these stories, remaining in a state of unconscious avoidance and denial. Or you can choose to write a new story.
The new story arises from you taking responsibility for your life. It comes from you sitting in the driver’s seat of your experience and consciously shaping your life to your will.
We will never be able to control everything that happens in our life. In a universe this big and this magnificent with so many other people living their own lives, do you really expect to?
But what we can always control is our internal state, how we interpret, perceive, and experience life.
This is what ultimately leads to our actions. Actions that either create us or destroy us.
So the choice is yours: live in fear, deny and avoid responsibility, or take conscious control of your life.
