Self Responsibility

“You are holding a cup of coffee when someone comes along and shoves you or shakes your arm, making you spill your coffee everywhere. ‘Why did you spill the coffee?’ ‘Well because someone bumped into me, of course!’ Wrong answer. You spilled the coffee because coffee was in the cup. If tea had been in it, you would have spilled tea. Whatever is inside the cup is what will come out. Therefore, when life comes along and shakes you (which will happen), whatever is inside of you will come out.

It’s easy to fake it until you get rattled. So we have to ask ourselves….what’s in my cup? When life gets tough, what spills over? Joy, gratefulness, peace and humility? Or anger, bitterness, harsh words and actions?” – author unknown

When we walk through life, many people will bump us or shake us; we can not avoid this. However we have the power to change our reaction to it when people or situations bump or shake us. We have the power to change what is inside us.

Most of the time we start to blame others: you made me angry, you did that or this to me. Blaming others is much easier to do because if we want to change our reactions, to change what is in the cup so to speak, we need to step into that space of self-responsibility.

Self-responsibility is taking a step towards healing ourselves, towards empowering ourself. But this takes time and practice. The practice part means to start doing some self enquiry about why we are holding on to the anger, why we are so bitter and harsh. It means looking at our own issues, bringing up our anger and bitterness so that we can soften them and maybe one day transform them into joy, love, and gratefulness.

This transformation can be done in many ways, through many practices. Meditation practice is one of my own favourite ways as it helps us to rest our mind so that we can look very clearly at our anger and bitterness. In that quiet space of meditation we can slowly let go of our grasping of the past, present, and future. This kind of letting go is needed to empty our cup. The more we grasp at the past, present, and future, the more we hold all our anger and bitterness in our cup, there will be no way to empty it. Thus whenever someone bumps us, we will spill anger and bitterness instead of gratitude and love.

Self-responsibility is therefore about looking within instead of looking outside of yourself, blaming others. So take that step towards self-responsibility and let go of the anger and bitterness in your cup. Start practicing meditation practices so that you can transform that anger and bitterness into gratitude and love, so that when next time someone bumps or shakes you, gratitude and love spill out.