7 Steps to Change a Shitty Life, Step 3:Stop taking responsibility for other people`s shit.

Step 3: Stop taking responsibility for other people`s shit.

I said in the previous post,  that most of the shit in our life is controlled by us,  and we need to take personal responsibility for cleaning our own act up.   This means, , that EVERYONE needs to take care of their own shit.  There is no reason why, after taking care of our own shit, we need to worry about what others do with theirs. 

In fact, we have to stop all of our frantic efforts trying to solve the problems of others, and concentrate on our own issues. We have to clean up our own backyard, then  let others to figure out what to do with theirs. We need to see and take care of the boulder in own our eyes, before giving advice to others as to what to do with the splinter in theirs. 

 This does not mean we cannot help, support, or teach others.  However  we must never work harder than the person we are trying to help.

It  takes only one person to change a shitty diaper, but the diaper must want to change.

Taking responsibility for other people`s shit takes three forms:

Making Excuses, Taking the Blame, and  Blaming

Making excuses for ourselves or others, taking the blame or placing the blame on others are just other forms of complaining, and like complaining, all three of these are done for the same reasons:  attention seeking, validation, or to get Someone Else to Do Something About IT!

Like Complaining, Making Excuses, Taking the Blame and Blaming  are completely useless.

Making excuses, taking the blame and blaming others are just other forms of complaining.  When we are making excuses for ourselves, we are in fact blaming or circumstances that we believe are beyond our control. 

When we are blaming others, we are complaining about others.  

When we are taking the blame, we are making excuses for others: we blame their upbringing, their experiences, their circumstances, that bitch of their first wife, that asshole of that second husband, we make excuses for and find blame Somebody Else for what others feel, think or do.

By blaming, taking the blame or making excuses for ourselves or others, we are basically ascerting and complain that things are not in our control. 

Making excuses, blaming, and blaming others either create a sense of guilt or a sense of anger. Anger and guilt are twin sisters: they are both illicit complains that our needs for comfort, validation, or attention are not met. Guilt and Anger are both born out of the same sense of helplessness, and, not surprisingly, along with learned helplessness, are the major cause of anxiety and depression.

Let me make this clear: making excuses for someone, including ourselves is not the same, as exercising compassion, empathy and understanding to ourselves or others. 

Everyone and I mean EVERYONE is born with the same potential, with the same innocence, with the same need and ability to love. All  human beings who rely on others for comfort, for protection, for care and for love. We all (maybe with exception of psychopaths) WANT and intend to be nice people, we WANT and intend to do our best, we want to love and we want others to love us.

We do our best based on what we have learned to be best, and we do our best according to the information that we have. Unfortunately, since none of us grew up in a perfect world, raised by perfect parent, in a perfect neighborhood in a perfect community, since none of us lives in a perfect world and none of us perfect, we often end up making the wrong choices, we often end up hurting ourselves and others in the process.

It is my belief, that everything we do, everything others do, we do in name of Love: that perfect sense of comfort, peace, connection and the feeling that we are safe from physical or emotional discomfort. This is true for even psychopaths, narcissistic and sociopaths except their love is a misplaced and misguided love. They think of themselves so much, they need their needs met so much, there is no room left for empathy, compassion or love of others.

When we blame others, we are asserting that we are good and others are bad. When we blame ourselves we are asserting that we are bad and others are good. The  word is not either good or bad, it is not black and white and neither are we.

At the end, all we can do, all we HAVE to do is to take responsibility for our own actions, to learn from our mistakes and to do good whenever and wherever we can.

If we all took responsibility for our own actions and choices and support others, but refuse to make excuses for ourselves, or for others, if we refused to blame ourselves or others, we could clean up all the shit in the world, and indeed, this planet would be a heaven on earth.

Mind over Matter of the Hearts: Welcome into My Love

I was talking to a girlfriend the other day, about what us, women mostly -not always, but mostly-talk about: men, relationships, love and Love with a capital "L".

My friend, a sexy, intelligent, beautiful inside and out, yet (or perhaps "thus"?) single, was describing the man of her dreams, the man, who would win her heart, mind and soul, the man, whom she she would, she said, "Welcome into my Love"

We noticed and laughed about the apparent Freudian slip; of course, she meant "the man I would welcome into my life", but long after I hung up with her, I could not get this notion out of my mind: I mean, we welcome men, women, friends, children, pets and even appliances into our life, but, how many of us welcomes anything, anybody "into our love"?

Come to think of it, how many of us have ever met love, how many of us known love, how many of us welcomed love into our life? Furthermore, and perhaps it is an even more rhetorical, but important question: how many of us invited and welcomes LIFE into our LOVE? In other words: do we give life to our love, or do we give love to our life? Sadly, I assume it is neither; most of us think of love as something that will, one perfect day, "find us", enter our life, and stay forever, cherish us, honor us, sustain us, till death do us part, love will stay with us, until the end, we hope, but many of us, most of us, do not have the commitment, the courage and the wherewithal to stay in love, let alone stay and live with love.

We seek love, we crave love, we fall in and out of love, we love love, and most of us, except certain psycho or sociopaths would agree, that we can't live without love: yet, , many of us never "met" love, many of do, and live without.

Since the beginning of time, philosophers, poets, scientist, theoreticians and every day people tried to define, explain, and sometimes control the concept, energy, feeling, this "thing" we call "love". Depending to whom you listen to, love either does not exist, it is "in our mind", it is in our heart, or, at the other end, it is what makes the world go round, love all there is.

Some would argue, love is nothing but a chemical reaction to certain hormones, designed by evolution for the survival of the species: it is "love" that makes us hunt for a partner to have over for dinner (hopefully followed by desserts, vine and various acts of procreation), instead of having her for dinner. It is a rush of certain chemicals that makes us -especially women- feel good, "in love" after the physical act of procreation (a.k.a. sex), and it keeps us, unlike some spiders and other species, from consuming and digesting our partner, immediately after consummation of our love affair. "Love hormones" keep us from eating our young, and from kicking them out the nest before they can fly.





Love is an emotion, a thought process, and our notion of  Unconditional Love, strongly conditioned by our culture, society, and personal experiences, others argue: it is all in our mind, a construct of our thought processes, a matter of perception, and thus, it can never be truly shared or communicated: even two people deeply in love with each other are not "in" the same love.

Love is an action, others will say, it is a behavior, mostly learned, a conscious act. We "make love", we "act lovingly", we "share love" we "love others" and others, hopefully will love us back.

Do we have a choice over love? Can we control with whom, where, and why we are going to fall in love with? Are we responsible for "staying in love", do we "fall" out of love, or do we walk out on love?

Some say, you can not truly love others, until you've learned to love yourself. Others say,that you can not love yourself, unless you experienced at least once, even if for a short period of time, how it feels to be loved. Truly, some people who never experienced love as being accepted, cared for, safe, might even confuse being controlled, or even abused as being loved, and they end up abusing themselves and others in the name of "love".

Personally, I tend to believe that love is as much an instinct as it can be constructed, learned and practiced mindfully. I believe, love is a word of action and a state of mind that can be developed, cultured, an experience we can create, and a choice we can make.  a conscious choice. As long as we have a mind, body and soul, we can choose to evolve toward a conscious, mindful and soulful experience, feeling and action of love: all we have to do is to open our heart, mind and body, to welcome love into our life and to welcome life into our love.

Thoughts Effect Reality: The Proof is in the Rice Pudding

Perhaps, you've heard about the famous Emeto experiment featured in the What the Bleep Do we Know Now movie series? Dr.Masaru Emeto subjected water to different mesesages of emotions: participants were asked to think and send messages to ordinary tap water, such as hate, love, thank you, gratitude, then Dr. Emeto photographed the water chrystals that formed in the water receiving the message. The results were truly magical: positive emotions and messages transformed the water chrystals into beautiful designs, and the negative emotions had an effect of creating  an ugly, chaotic, disorganized mess.

What is even more interesting and miracolous, that water also appears to respond to mere words, not intentions in the same way, and this is something that you can observe, and prove or disprove for yourself, without the need of expensive or ellaborate equipment. The proof is in the pudding, rice pudding that is.

Well, not pudding, exactly, just ordinary, cooked rice. Cook a pot of rice, divide it into three containers (to avoid contamination, the best is to use brand new, never used containers) and seal the container with the kind of tape you can write on. Next, write positive words on one of the containers: "Thank You, I Love You, You are Beautiful" are some of the examples. Write hateful, negative words on the next container:"I hate you", "You Fool", "You are Ugly" and others like that. You can write just one message, or several. On the third contaner, write nothing at all. This will be the container that will be simply ignored: it will receive neither bad or good attention.

Now, store the three containers at room temperature for a minimum of one month, and up to three months. If your experiment goes anything like the tens of thousands of experiments conducted (and reported) by people all over the word, you will see a result something like this: the rice that was marked (subjected to) positive messages, even without thoughts or attentions, will show some signs of "going bad", but will look remarkably good even after three months of storage. The container with the "bad" messages will not do as good: chances are, there will be a lot more signs of rot and mold than in the first container. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the third, ignored and neglected container usually does the worse. As one observant, but not entirely scientific observer remarked, the rice, after 141 days in the ignored container looked like a bowel movement. (He actually used the "S" word).

Rice absorbes water while being cooked, and apparently, the water in the cooked rice responds to the words even without intention. Conclusion? Words and thoughts might not break your bone literally, but at the cellular level, they can make or break your body, and ingorance, neglect, inattention and indifference is the worst form of abuse a person can inflict on others, on their selves, on the environment, and everything contained within. Food for thoughts, isn't?