How can we be allies for one another in this world if each of us isn’t doing the practice and the ‘work’?

How can we expect others to shift if we aren’t committed to loving ourselves and taking responsibility for our thoughts and actions?

The task of taking responsibility of our thoughts alone is a critical job and one that seems to quite often fall by the wayside or get confused. Or perhaps we neglect to realize the importance of it in everyday life.  There are also times we can become a bit inflated and think that we have done our work and the issues at hand are due to others not being ‘self aware’.  Self awareness is an ongoing process and not one that reaches an end point.  It is a day to day activity and will evolve throughout our lives.  No one is exempt from this human obligation.

From the moment we emerge from the womb we are taking in and taking on.  We are absorbing and shaping.  So much necessary for motor skills and function.  And also so many layers of conditioning that don’t necessarily serve us in being connected to self, others and the world.

How are we teaching our children (and ourselves) to think for themselves?  It seems we subscribe to and fuel a system that wants to give us so much information pre packaged.  It then puts us on a fast track into adulthood where we don’t have time or energy to question or even have curiosity about most of it.

How can this work?

At 3 yrs old you often hear children ask ‘but why?’ continuously……and then it fades away over time and growing up.  I still ask ‘but why?’ of myself every day for so many things.  It is a simple question and doesn’t involve deep pondering for most things.  It becomes a practice so that I begin to see when I am on auto-pilot.  Asking the questions for even basic things helps strengthen my ability to notice where it might serve to question more fundamental things.

More often than not, it seems like it is the exception for someone to actually step outside the ‘norm’, outside of this societal system, and ask ‘who am I’, ‘what do I like’, ‘how do I think or feel’?  Why wouldn’t we do this for ourselves?  I imagine it would happen quite naturally if we hadn’t been conditioned out of it.   (It’s like a muscle that you don’t use that goes weak……still there but not functioning)  Why not ask the questions and arrive at your own ‘answers’?  Perhaps they will be the same ‘answers’ you have found before…. perhaps not.

It is each of our personal responsibilities to truly know ourselves.  No one else can do it.