Taking responsibility...
“Taking responsibility for oneself is by definition an act of kindness.” – Sharon Salzberg
Self responsibility is the ability to take ownership of one’s actions, decisions, and consequences. It is a fundamental aspect of personal development and growth.
Whether you like it or not, we are responsible for ourselves and self responsibility is essential to mental health, creating connected and healthy lives and relationships.
Becoming more responsible for ourselves leads to deeper self awareness and greater freedom. The freedom comes from a decluttering of the mind creating peace and a sense of empowerment.
My journey to better physical health came this way. At one point, I was a slave to the system. I longed for the answers from the Drs and Consultants to fix me, to show me the way.
The trouble is they have some answers but not everybody's. They can help and it's good to get the support but it isn't the whole story.
Good health, specifically mental health is not wired into us at birth, its something we have to learn and to manage. Some of us have been brought up in environments that weren't that healthy or with parents who had poor coping skills too and this can make it difficult.
But taking responsibility for yourself, your emotions, responses, creating good boundaries and healthy tools to cope in a stressed out world is crucial to living a happier life.
The help from the mainstream healthcare system is based on a disease model. It sees everything as something that needs treated rather than understood and builds these expectations that "they" hold all the answers. I see it leaking out into the Wholistic Wellness world too and it's not good.
We are all different and have experienced different things. The lens in which we experience life is based on that and so are our minds and body’s.
This disease model trains us to see happiness and good health as an entitlement too. Even if you have taken no steps to good physical and mental health then you are still entitled to a cure.
When I first arrived at the hospital at 17 with Uveitis, I was stressed out, having little to no sleep. My diet was takeaways, alcohol, coffee and cigarettes! The health system got me out of crisis but the rest was up to me.
Once I knew and had awareness of how much damage I was doing to my body, I changed my lifestyle. Over the years I took several steps towards better health and they all made a huge difference to how I experienced life.
In the last few years, extra layers of that have been peeled back further enabling me to get into remission, but also to understand my habits and patterns, to stay heathier and happier for longer. But also to live a more fulfilling and connected life.
Our view of the world and our emotions can be counter-productive. We chase happiness like a drug. I often ask my clients how they would really like to feel, when they say happy I ask "and what does happy feel like to you?"
Our happy brain chemicals, like dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, endorphins evolved to do specific jobs, not to be there all the time for no reason. They’re designed to reward survival behaviour. They are there so we always have to do more to get more. In nature, continual action was necessary for survival, and happy chemicals rewarded that action.
This entitlement allows us to see the healthcare system as a route to our answers and when we don't get the right ones we blame them . We tend see society as the problem but who makes up that society?
When we externalise our focus it weakens us and stops us looking internally for the answers which builds strength and empowers our sense of self.
Taking responsibility helps us by making us accountable for our own behaviour and to handle change and challenges with ease.
Self responsibility begins with knowing what we want and creating a plan to get there and from our own desire.
By taking responsibility we:
Live more meaningful and purposeful lives
Experience personal inner power and authority
Create individuation
Embody our truth
Feel empowered and capable and able to take on the challenges of life
“You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.” – Jim Rohn