Radical Self-Responsibility

a nuanced take

Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash

When you are burdened with unprocessed energies, life can’t flow through you. You create the same patterns, again and again, in an attempt to transform those energies.

If you were to reflect on the challenges that repeatedly come up in your life from this perspective, you would be able to see your role in creating those challenges. You wouldn’t feel like a victim or blame other people or outer circumstances anymore.

This is what we call radical self-responsibility in RBM.

Although always a work in progress, one of my biggest commitments is to being open and curious, and making room for nuances.

This makes me question things when they are associated with being radical.

I can see there might be a time and place for being radical. Still, I find it extreme and feel like it leaves little room for nuance.

I find truth in the idea that our incomplete experiences and limiting beliefs create our reality until we begin to complete and rewire them. I am all for exploring how I might have contributed to the unfolding of the events in my life.

But does being radical about it mean that I am the creator of every unfortunate, unpleasant, difficult, devastating, and life-shattering experience in my life?

There are some life-altering experiences that can happen in a person’s life that, in my honest opinion, could never be explained by only that person’s unconscious patterns.

We live in a reality that is much more complex than we can fathom, even if we use all our faculties at hand. Wouldn’t it be so simple to think that I, as a human being living in an utterly complex web of consciousness that is creating itself through every being, am the one who creates all the good and bad things that happen to me?

I am all for taking self-responsibility. But I feel like leaning on it radically misses out on the big mystery and the role God plays in it all.

Can I be open to the possibility that there is a higher intelligence creating the exact circumstances for me to experience what I need to experience, even though it doesn’t make any sense in the moment, or maybe, at all?

Can I make room for not knowing, bow in front of the big mystery, and enjoy the dance between creating my life and being guided by the Divine?

I won’t pretend to have answers. But I find so much value in sitting with these questions.