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  # When practicing unconditional acceptance, start with yourself. 

I found that I didn't really want to pay attention to this one... wanted to skip to the next and write pages about that, but not see this one. Finally, noticed and asked myself why.

Maybe it comes with the territory of taking personal responsibility, but it is hard to accept oneself, especially when you see all the ways you might have handled things in life differently, or people you have injured/are injuring. When you see mistakes you've made, it is easy to be discouraged... "All that work and that's what I came up with/that is how I handled that?" etc.

To share something a bit personal, this week I found myself wrestling ever so slightly, with my relationship with my mother... feeling judgementalism and a sense of loss, when I had the thought "What if she was a friend telling me a similar 'story', or my sister?" I realized that if she were just someone not 'she in relation to me', I would listen more easily and possibly have much greater/softer understanding. That brought in a lot of space.

It isn't that the thought is entirely 'new', and it seems some things we revisit, but what was new perhaps is that looking at this aphorism, I then did the same thing for myself. I didn't base compassion on how circumstances conspired or some sense of weakness, but looked at myself as just someone, and being just someone it was easy to have an expanded scope of all of us as someones from whom compassion and acceptance should/could not be withheld.    

  # When everything goes wrong, treat disaster as a way to wake up. 

  # Take all the blame yourself.

To me this is about personal responsibility, and living in a way that, although acknowledging and working with/through what ever circumstances arise, doesn't deflect and project away but sees things just as they are, where they/we are. If there is 'blame' in play, as there was in my personal example above actually, then finding something or someone 'other' to carry it, only lengthens the time we will be preoccupied and hindered by it.

When I think about my children in school with their peers, I understand very well how terrible it can be to be misunderstood or outcasted in some way. The strong tendency is that if you can pass the hot potato on to someone else... find someone even easier to focus on, then there is relief.

Actually, when you pass it on, it keeps going and going. It takes a generous ability to see beyond the setting of that one game and those people, for a child (or anyone) to let 'blame' (sometimes gossip which was brought up last week) settle and stop spinning.  

If you take the blame, you get to step out more quickly. When others see you take the blame and step out, sometimes it changes the way the game is viewed/played, too. :)

The metaphor is admittedly imperfect. :)