Someone to Blame

Recently I was at a marketing seminar in which the
presenter said that the worst thing you can do is
assume people want to take responsibility for their own
problems. “People need an enemy,” he said. “They need
someone or something to blame.”

Then, he advised, “you swoop in to the rescue with your
magic solution that will take care of that evil.”

You might be thinking that you’re not like that. Maybe
not. Or maybe, sometime in the recent past, you’ve
found yourself making a comment or thinking…

It’s the government.
It’s those big multinational corporations.
It’s big pharma.
It’s your genes.
It’s pesticides.
It’s human nature.
It’s some hidden ingredient in your food.
It’s greed.
It’s Mercury gone retrograde.
It’s your parents and the way they raised you.
It’s your annoying neighbor.
It’s racism or sexism or homophobia or classism.
It’s that person who betrayed you or hurt you or stole
from you or raped you or gossiped about you.
It’s a conspiracy keeping vital information from you
It’s your body betraying you.
It’s your own mind that’s to blame.

Have you thought any of these, or similar things?

Even more than this…

Have you interpreted the idea that you create
your own reality as meaning that you’re to
blame for your problems? That it’s your own
fault it you’re in the fix you’re in?

If you’ve thought this way, you’re certainly not alone!

But what if you were to stand back and consider the
possibility that those “problems” that seem to have
captured your attention, that you’ve been working hard
to solve, that you are determined to overcome…

… What if they aren’t problems at all?

What???

If you were to take the charge off of your “problems”
by giving them no more attention than any particular
breath you take today, by not pointing them out,
labeling them, talking about them, but just allowed the
circumstances of your life to just be what’s happening
in the present moment, what do you think would happen?

I’m not suggesting that you ignore what’s going on in
your life, or divert yourself from taking action. I am
suggesting that you stop labeling what’s going on as
problems.

What if your job in life were not to solve problems?

What if those things you previously thought of as
problems just blended in with all the things that are
easy in your life and require no particular attention?

Here’s the thing. When you really believe you create
your own reality, there’s never anything to get upset
about. That’s because you can create something new any
time you choose.

There’s no point regretting the past or worrying about
the future when you believe you have the power, right
now, to create anything you want—-and you believe
everyone else also has that power.

How freeing!

Try this. When you catch yourself fretting over
something, ask yourself: Am I thinking this is a
problem?

What if I just think “this is what is right now.”
Then, what if I just ask myself, what do I want?

It’s a funny thing. As soon as I define something as a
problem, my mind automatically seems to kick into
problem-mode. That means, all my attention goes to the
problem.

That’s how I was trained: What we do with problems is
worry about them, think about them, wonder what we’re
going to do about them, talk about them with our
friends, get more people to put attention on them, find
someone or something to blame.

When we think we have a solution, our own minds and
everyone else involved seem to jump into gear tearing
apart the ideas for the solution, worrying that the
person we’re thinking of hiring to fix it will do it
wrong, arguing about how the solution will never work,
worrying about how much it will cost and how long it
will take, and most importantly, trying to be right.

Of course, all this serves to make “the problem” much
bigger.

But, if from the start you decide “this is what is
right now,” all that drama never builds. There are no
victims, no perpetrators, no need for rescuers. At any
point in a “problem” process, you can make this
decision, and watch the drama evaporate.

“This is what is right now” becomes a starting point
from which you can make a step in the direction of what
you want.

At the most basic level, it becomes a LOT easier to
consciously apply the Law of Attraction. If I don’t
like “what is,” then what should I do? Put more
attention on it, or put my attention on what I want
instead?

It also becomes a lot easier to apply EFT/Tapping. If I
don’t like “what is,” and I can’t seem to switch my
attention off of it, then I can use Tapping to help
myself make the shift.

What happens to the question of blame when you stop
thinking of things as problems?