When you plant lettuce, if it does not grow well, you don’t blame the lettuce. You look for reasons it is not doing well. It may need fertilizer, or more water, or less sun. You never blame the lettuce. Yet if we have problems with our friends or family, we blame the other person. But if we know how to take care of them, they will grow well, like the lettuce. Blaming has no positive effect at all, nor does trying to persuade using reason and argument. That is my experience. No blame, no reasoning, no argument, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change.
- Thich Nhat Hanh
When you blame others you blame yourself. Your unconscious mind doesn’t know the difference because in any given moment when your consciousness is in the mentality of blame or fear, all your psyche can know in that moment is that you have all these negative emotions clouding up the images in your mind and clogging up your neural pathways with the muck of your fight or flight response. Blame does not serve you.
When you are a parent, blaming your children for their misbehavior is simply blaming yourself, because they learned their patterns of how they react and interact from you. When you are in conflict with your loved ones, blaming them for their character defects is like blaming the deepest part of you that feels so connected to your loved ones, because the essence of your love is to know your connection and oneness with another being. When you are blaming yourself and feeling depressed, you are simply feeding the illusion of your inadequacy and digging the hole of your negative emotions deeper.
When you or your loved ones are making poor choices, blame does not protect you. Blame simply makes others defensive and more reactive to your negative emotions, and consequently they will reflect this blame back to you. Handling the situation with empathy and good judgement works so much better than blame.
The problem with blaming is that when you are blaming another being, they blame you in return and the conflict escalates. In addition to this, in the moment of criticizing yourself or others, your neural synapses are taken over with the storm of your anger, frustration and fear, and by allowing this to happen in your brain, you have lost your awareness of your connection with the love of the Divine Source of your being.
You are a child of God. You are a precious being made in the image of the same Spirit that in this very moment permeates every atom of creation. You are a prince and a princess and your inheritance is profound joy and clarity that can infuse every moment of your life if you just allow it to be so. Your inheritance is waiting, patiently waiting for you, but you can’t take up your birthright when you allow your mind to be clouded with anger and fear and blame, because these negative emotions lock you in the prison of your own personal hell and in that moment, you lose your awareness of the love that is at the core of your being. Conversely, when you know the greatness and wonder of your true Nature, then blame becomes impossible, because you know that the essence of yourself and your loved ones is so much bigger and more beautiful than you can ever imagine.
You and your loved ones are not defined by your character defects and by your poor choices. Granted, your character defects and your choices will define the results you get in your life, but your nature is still Divine. No matter what you do, you can’t change your nature any more than a rock can stop being a rock or a tree can stop being a tree.
Allow yourself to let go of your blame and your fear and begin to see the beauty and the symmetry and perfection of creation in this moment. Allow yourself the see through the character defects in yourself and in your loved ones to the beauty and perfection of the unconditional love of the being in you and in front of you. You do this, and whatever the situation or the conflict with the loved ones in your life, these situations will clear up like magic and the conflicts and the hurt that used to define your consciousness will simply not make sense anymore.
Last fall, one of my sons told me of a dream he had of his five year old daughter who is as yet unborn and is still simply an image of beauty in his mind. He told me he felt such a profound and overwhelming love for his daughter that was so moving and was so much more than he had ever felt before. All I could say to him was, “Yep, I know how you feel,” because, of course, this is how I feel about him and his brothers, and this is how every parent in the world feels about their children.
In the final analysis, there is only this love. There is nothing else. All your anger, all your fears and all your blame towards yourself and others is simply an illusion distracting you from the truth of the eternal nature of your beautiful essence. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors clouding your eyes to the exquisite loveliness of the Spirit of pure love in you and in everyone you see.
Namaste,
Steven Fisher
