24 Facing the Music | Self-Responsibility

About: Taking responsibility sets us free

We often have only a vague awareness of our negativity, dimly sensing the hurt we inflict on others. So we end up hooking others who have their own unconscious conflicts. We go on to blame and punish them for our own lack of love, using their shortcomings as our excuse.

Then we build cases against them.

Building a case against another is always a clear indication that we are in our Lower Self.

Conversely, when we admit to our negativity, we set the other free. In doing so, we perform the most fundamental act of love.

Honesty, in fact, is the rarest form of love among people.

We can admit our negativity directly to the person we hurt, or to a healer or therapist who is not personally involved. Either way, our honesty is an act of love toward the universe.

Our healing work is really the work of becoming humble. To become humble, we must become honest.

Re-centering ourselves within

Humility is a divine quality. And indeed, it can be quite humbling to look at the parts of ourselves still in darkness. These are our imperfections.

This spiritual journey, then, is not about claiming moral high ground. In fact, the Lower Self does not respond well to a moralizing attitude.

Our healing work is really the work of becoming humble.

To become humble, we must become honest. For without honesty, we cannot find the truth. This keeps us stuck in the illusion that we are separate and more perfect than we are.

We incorrectly believe this is a “me versus the other” world of the ego, instead of a “me and the other” true world of our Higher Self. As such, we are always working out ways to win.

This, however, is not a winning approach for life. It’s a formula for pain.

Spiritual laws, in fact, are constructed in such a way that each choice taking us away from God eventually causes pain. Pain, then, becomes the medicine that motivates us to heal ourselves. In a way, it also gives a roadmap for finding our way back home.

Persistent inner pain tells us we’re moving the wrong way—away from truth.

The Pathwork Guide says humans think that pain is the worst thing in the world. But we’re wrong. It is worse to be numb. Amazing acts of cruelty can be perpetrated when one is numb.

On top of our numbness is the untrue belief that we are alone in our misery and pain. At some point, we must realize it’s time to stop running from the truth and chasing the illusion.

That’s when we turn and face ourselves. We want to transition from centering ourselves in our ego to living from our own inner light.

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Learn more in:

The path to freedom

It is a spiritual law that we can’t cheat life. So if we have spent our lives avoiding the feeling of pain, sooner or later we must face that music—we must deal with the consequences of our actions.

The good news is that the pain we fear feeling is not nearly as bad as our fear of it. In other words, the fear of the pain is infinitely worse than the pain itself.

It is also a spiritual law that we can’t skip steps. This means there is no “spiritual bypass” that will allow us to transcend the work of painstakingly discovering what we really think, believe and feel.

It is actually a deeply freeing realization to discover that we are responsible—in some way we may not yet understand—for our pain. Once we take responsibility, there is a way out.

It is possible to set ourselves free.

This work we are doing—to see ourselves and others as we really are—builds self-respect. It also leads to a real tolerance and real acceptance of others.

This is not a “mask of tolerance” based on not seeing another. Rather, it comes when a person clearly sees another’s faults or differences and does not love or respect them any less because of them.

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Learn more in Bones, Chapter 19: The giant misunderstanding about freedom and self-responsibility.