I really believe that if we want to have an inclusive heart to our world,
we have to be able to notice where we've turned on ourselves and deepen our commitment
to loving ourselves into healing; deepen our commitment
to embracing the parts of ourselves we don't like. If we can't do that, we're not
going to be able to open our hearts to the world, we're not going to be part of
the healing of hatred; and it's not easy because we have a lifetime of
stories that keep cycling through our mind about what's wrong
and feelings that then solidify our self-judgments, so we have to learn to work with that.
So when Arthur Brooks talks about a culture of contempt
- he says we're addicted to a culture of contempt - we're also addicted to a culture
of turning against ourselves, inner contempt. It's an addiction to not like ourselves.
But I want to pause here in what I'm sharing, because I'll often describe the power
of getting that it's not my fault and some people wonder: 'Well wait a minute
doesn't that make me, that I'm not going to be accountable
or I won't be responsible, I mean if I tell myself it's not my fault?'
I remember one man who hated himself for his anger
because he lashed out at people, and he was hurtful; he hurt his wife,
he hurt his teenage daughter, he was hurtful. And he said: 'How can I forgive myself,
I'm hurting people I love?' And so I said: 'Well is your blame, is your self-hatred and blame
helping you to behave better?' He could get the logic of that,
but he said: 'But for me to tell myself it's not my fault when I'm causing -' you know...
I mean, I'm sorry; he said: 'But for me to forgive myself'
and I looked at him and I said:
- and I actually had my hand on his shoulder, I said: 'Your anger is not your fault.
It really isn't your fault.' And something cracked, and he began sobbing. And
I'll never forget how, when he really could let it be true that it wasn't his fault, he saw
as he was meditating, had memories of his father and how his father
he could remember a time when he was a young boy watching his father throw dishes
you know, in anger at his mother - not, he didn't just throw the dish at his mother,
but breaking dishes in the kitchen and afterwards the remorse, and he remembers
thinking: 'Oh, he couldn't help it either' - this is the father he had hated for four decades...
the message of 'it's not your fault' to him what happened was it broke him open to a
level of self-compassion, that he started being able to work with the roots of his anger
his real feelings of powerlessness and fear. And he told me a year later that his wife
said to him: 'For the first time in our marriage, I actually feel safe with you.'
Getting that it's not our fault, that there's millions of years of conditioning
that we can't control the limbic brain, that we can't control
the trauma that's come in our lives; it's as one writer put it,
the title of his book is: It Didn't Start with You.
But he talks about past generational trauma
everything that shapes our psyche; it's not our fault. It doesn't mean we're not responsible;
what actually happens is, if we stop blaming ourselves, we become
able to respond to the wound, we become responsible.
It's the pathway to responsibility, to let go of that contempt and self-hate.
[bells]