Who is to Blame for Our Suffering?

Recently, I shared a photo on Facebook with a quote from Osho:

“If you suffer it is because of you, if you feel blissful it is because of you. Nobody else is responsible—only you and you alone. You are your hell and your heaven too.”

I realize that Osho has a stern expression in the photo and his words seem to lack compassion, but it also gives us opportunity to see the role we play in our own suffering.

The response I got to my Facebook post was eye-opening. Some did not agree with Osho’s words and felt personally attacked by the thought that suffering was a choice we make. Two of the respondents had been physically beaten as children and are still in emotionally damaging situations as an adult. It is certainly not my intent to judge anyone for any reason. I was abused by a babysitter when I was very young. It traumatized me so much that I could not even talk about it until I was nearly 40 years old.

We all come from dysfunctional families because that’s the dynamic of Earth life, and that is the very thing we lightworkers are here to change. That process begins with helping our inner child feel safe, and by recognizing that the choices we make and the things we believe about ourselves (consciously and subconsciously) are the factors that rule our lives.

Outer and Inner Suffering

There are two types of suffering that I want to address in this article: outer (circumstances) and inner (mental/emotional turmoil). There is an old saying that life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we react to it. We are not held responsible for what others do to us (outer). We are responsible for how we respond to it (inner).

As children we were helpless to do anything about the cause of our suffering and we did not have anyone to help us process our feelings about what was happening to us. As adults we continue to make choices to stay in our suffering. We stay in our inner suffering because we do not know how to help ourselves get free. We stay in an abusive outer situation where we do not feel loved because we fear leaving the familiar and facing the unknown—being alone, not having support, no way to make a living, etc. I know what that’s like. I was homeless for two weeks when I left my first marriage, but I had to leave to save myself from further emotional despair, much of which I was creating for myself because I was still fighting the demons of my childhood and the dis-empowering doctrine of an oppressive religion.

Some things that happen to us are beyond our control, and although we can choose different ways of handling it, to some extent past events will continue to affect us again and again—especially when we encounter something that reminds us of a former event that left us wounded.

We all suffer inside from time to time no matter how much of a front we put up for others. We are doing our best to heal our psyche/inner child.

One Facebook respondent said, “I have a lot of build up inside of me. Didn’t know how to release things growing up. Family and relatives would rip up another one. When I tried to do the same I got hell for it. So I continued to suppress everything.”

Tools to Transmute Suffering 

Many do not have the tools to work with their emotions and mental anguish. The book, Radical Acceptance, by Tara Brach is a great tool for working through your inner suffering. I know you will find it worthwhile to work through the techniques outlined in the book. It is making a big difference in the level of peace I enjoy inwardly

Psychological damage occurs when something happens that should not (abuse), or something that should happen does not (neglect, lack of nurturing). The answer is to love the parts of ourselves that are crying out for help; to release the tightness in the cells of our body where the trauma is being stored; and to help release the mental/emotional “freeze frame” that caused our brain to get stuck on a loop at the point of trauma. I have found EMDR helpful for that.

Our past does continue to affect us. I have worked through layers and layers of internal pain and continue to face mental and emotional demons. If we are to stop propagating more internal suffering we must change the way we deal with our internal dialog and emotions. The replays of battles that come around again and again are part of life and it helps to “friend” our inner adversaries rather than battle or ignore them.

One way I do that is with the breath and chakra smile, which is a technique I taught in a class about harmonizing the heart and the head. Learn to create a blissful feeling in your body and emotions and calm mental turbulence using the simple exercise outlined in the audio.

One person in our conversation wisely said, “You also can’t always force what goes on inside to align with what you ‘know’ you ‘should’ do.”

That is true. The harsh thoughts and painful emotions still rise and fall, and trying to force them not to occur is like trying to change the ocean’s tide. Healing is about accepting what is and allowing the unpleasant things that go on inside to move on through without get stuck in the loop. It’s about having compassion for ourselves.

Compassion does not mean feeling sorry for ourselves. It requires taking responsibility for where we are right now—the good and the bad—and accepting the accompanying feelings. Then moving through them without re-telling our story to ourselves again and again. Blaming others and replaying the events of the past does not help us heal—it only locks us further in the cycle of inner and outer suffering. Whatever we focus on intensifies.

My goal is to dis-“cover” and awaken my authentic soul essence, my “Buddha” that sits with Mara under the Bodhi tree and allows sorrow and suffering to be part of life flowing through. I desire to be the one that does not participate in harming self or others.

Veronica O’Grady and I co-hosted Empowering Hour with Empaths for about a year. You can listen to the replays of those calls on my website. Veronica replied to the Facebook post with some great insight I would like to share with you here.

“I just read this morning that the Creator is in all of us, and making our selves happy automatically makes the Creator energy lighter…more whole. To me, the energies of our past and those of our ancestors and even the lands we’ve walked and live upon affect us vibrationally, which lead to feelings that then lead to emotions. There is no fault, blame, or anything, even when we’ve been directly attacked on numerous levels by others.

“The idea is to vibrationally recalibrate the frequencies of the ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ that we carry so that we can eventually balance those frequencies into wholeness. Once those frequencies are balanced/healed, the emotional Velcro releases on its own (quantum collapse) and the feeling associated with them as well as the memories of their impacts upon our lives become neutralized. After that there is a sense of being free from all that once was.

“We are entering a new/ancient way of healing our inner psyche, our lives and the history, not only of our lives but of all that have gone before us as we become more aware of the inner terrain, its mapping and how to truly navigate this terrain effectively. Pain and suffering show us what still has to heal and actually gives us direction on where to bring our focus to ‘harmonize’ our energies. Can you imagine if we taught this kind of stuff in schools and to all of our young?

“There are inner maps to this terrain and ways to unwind and neutralize the energies in a purely vibrational way. From there, again, the emotions, vibrations discords/scars/woundings do eventually balance. It is a journey and if it took a lifetime, it would be well worth it on a soul level. This is the work we carry through our soul histories. This type of healing affects us and our children from here forward. I’m working on new ways to truly address this and tools that we can all use to facilitate this kind of work for upcoming workshops. Journeys and techniques that unlock the ‘ick’/imbalances and help us open to the deeper peace that Yvonne M. Perry mentioned…that deeper Buddha experience of being the neutral observer of one’s heavens and hells is such a powerful goal.

“If we notice every time we remember, think of, or react from the place of our fears and woundings and do our best each time we notice this, to just go to one vibration higher—like one note up on the musical scale, doing what we can to feel our body as vibrationally one note higher or softer or more open, we can begin to short-circuit the old vibrational patterns. It’s huge and maybe even awkward at first. I’ve found that it is not a quick fix by any means but an everyday process that does eventually bring an experience of lessening the impact of past traumas and eventually begins to stop that inner pattern from even happening.

“It’s definitely a ‘walk through’ kind of thing. Part of our own self-mastery. And with all the arenas of life that we engage in, we each have areas where we’ve healed and others we’re still working on. It’s a big pile of mush sometimes but good to be here—even when it’s hard and we can’t see the next step in front of us.

“Breath is everything. From a teacher long ago I read in a book: ‘I breathe in. I breathe out. This I know.’ Doing that alone for 10 seconds and repeat 10 times, or until you feel the frequency/energy/heaviness lighten or soften up a bit, can be just enough to break the pattern and make a new focus. Think of something that feels good and makes you happy or feels softer in your mind and body. That can quickly shift the frequency up in vibration.”

So, who is to blame for our suffering? No one. It is part of life on Earth. It has to do with free will. It is what it is.

Beloved ones, we are the light. No one can take away our joy unless we give them the power to do so. We each get to decide how we want to deal with the mental anguish inside and our outer life that may contain abusive relationships. How we treat ourselves in these situations creates our experience of heaven or hell on Earth.

Everything that keeps our light from shining is being dismantled. The dark forces we battle inside are just showing us what has been. We do not have to engage in that old war. This is a new day, a new dimension, a new revelation allowing us to walk into a better way of being and living and relating.

Try to relax into the flow of life—even allowing the painful things to be felt—and let go of the tension it creates in your body every time it comes up. Focus on being kind to your inner child and on loving yourself more than you ever have.

With this in mind, I am sending love to all who suffer, within and without.