I find it kind of funny that a lot of the time people will tell me that they feel like I'm trying to teach them something. Maybe I am, honestly I don't really think about it like that though. I'm generally just trying to help people avoid pitfalls that I fell into myself and hopefully guide them to find their own way out of these "lessons." Today I want to discuss one of the most fundamental things I had to learn and hopefully it will help someone else either avoid this lesson or see it for what it is and grow out of it. Our circumstances don't make us feel a certain way, we have to be mindful of our own thoughts and behaviors and then they create the circumstances that match our own state of being.
For the majority of my life, I blamed everything around me or happening to me for making me the way I was and nothing changed. I was very bitter about that and it turns out that I was actually just being self destructive. It's very easy to justify self destruction when blaming everything and everyone else for making me a victim. Abusive parents, shitty jobs, depression, and telling myself what a horrible person I was every day and I still couldn't figure out why nothing would ever change. Looking back on it now I can see that I was actually creating a lot of these circumstances through my own negative thought patterns and behaviors.
The truth that I found is that we have to learn to respect and appreciate ourselves before we can ever find any semblance of peace. I could list out all of the ways my life would be different if I hadn't been self destructive for all of those years, but what's the point really? I could have not gambled away thousands of Bitcoins, I could have gotten sober earlier, and I could have done a lot of things different honestly, but in the end I got where I wanted to be and it turns out that now when good things happen to me I don't feel the need to sabotage them. The biggest problem I've found is that most of us are aware that we are being self destructive on some level, but we don't really care enough to actually change or we just make up excuses and blame others for the way we are, so we get stuck in those patterns.
I feel that seeking ideal circumstances to justify changing or working to better ourselves is kind of comical in its' own way. That's kind of like asking the universe to do all of the work and then give us the reward. It just doesn't work like that, because even if it did, we would just sabotage it through our own destructive behaviors. The only person that can grant us peace and serenity is our self. Once we make peace with things we cannot change and let go of the things that are weighing us down despite all of the silly reasons we convince ourselves of as to why we can't let them go, we can then appreciate what we do have and the opportunities that we are given. We change ourselves and then naturally we are drawn into alignment with the reality that matches our own frequency of existence. We are all responsible for ourselves. Namaste.