“All blame is a waste of time. No matter how much fault you find with another, and regardless of how much you blame him, it will not change you. The only thing blame does is to keep the focus off you when you are looking for external reasons to explain your unhappiness or frustration. You may succeed in making another feel guilty about something by blaming him, but you won’t succeed in changing whatever it is about you that is making you unhappy.” -Wayne Dyer
I came across this quote today and it spoke volumes to me. I truly believe that we all need to take responsibility for our own happiness in our lives. No one else can make you unhappy unless you let them.
When we blame others essentially all we are doing is trying to distract ourselves from our own truths and we are placing the blame of our own suffering onto someone else. We can blame others for the misfortunes in our lives but it will never resolve a situation. When life brings you something that you do not like it is much easier to point the finger at someone else so that your own misery is no longer your fault. True strength of character lies in the understanding that assigning blame is unproductive, it will not allow you to move forward and it will not release us from the pain. I think that it is important to live in the present moment as that is all we really have anyway. When we choose to live in the past we are not growing. We will not accomplish anything positive by reliving a negative experience over and over…
I think that a common human reaction is to blame the person who hurt our feelings or who is causing problems in our life. Perhaps we are right to some extent, we all have difficult people in our lives that will challenge our own good and a natural reaction is to say that it is the other persons fault that we feel the way that we do.
When we take control and responsibility for our own life we will begin to experience joy and happiness. Lately I have been working hard on not blaming other people for stealing my joy, I have written about this before and I believe that it is a skill that is never fully mastered and that it why I always come back to it. When difficult people are in our lives it is not as easy as it sounds to redirect our thoughts away from them and back to our own happiness. So how do you do it? It starts within yourself. We can choose to give someone else the control of our emotions and happiness or we can choose not to. Taking ownership of our own thoughts and feelings can allow us the freedom to also let go of them.
Do you ever let what other people think or feel about you still your joy? I know that I tend to struggle with this at times. What has helped me greatly is knowing that people are allowed to feel however they want to feel but just because they feel a certain way about you or a situation does not make it true, it is merely just their opinion of things and not a fact. Another person’s feelings cannot define who we are and it is our choice on how we respond. My best response is to give it over to God. I find my joy in the Lord. I pray that each day I will be able to give my worries over to him and to take responsibility for my own happiness.
Happiness is contagious, give it away to others everyday!
by Aimee Pool
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