Using Adversity	Pema Chodron
Drive All Blames Into One

 

When we look at the world in this way we see that it all comes down to the fact that no one is ever encouraged to feel the underlying anxiety, the underlying edginess, the underlying soft spot, and therefore we think that blaming others is the only way. Reading just one newspaper, we can see that blaming others doesn't work.

We have to look at our own lives as well. How are we doing with our Juan and Juanitas? Often they're just the people with whom we have the most intimate relationships. They really get to us because we can't just shake them off by moving across town or changing seats on the bus, or whatever we have the luxury of doing with mere acquaintances, whom we also loathe.

It doesn't mean, instead of blaming other people, blame yourself. It means to touch in with what blame feels like altogether. Instead of guarding yourself, instead of pushing things away, begin to get in touch with the fact that there's a very soft spot under all that armor, and blame is probably one of the most-perfected armors that we have. You can take this slogan beyond what we think of as 'blame' and practice applying it simply to the general sense that something is wrong. When you feel that something is wrong, let the story line go and touch in to what's underneath.

Strangely enough, we blame others and put so much energy into the object of anger or whatever it is because we're afraid that this anger or sorrow or loneliness is going to last forever...'Drive all blames into one' is saying, instead of always blaming the other, OWN the feeling of blame, OWN the anger, OWN the loneliness and make friends with it. Use the tonglen practice to see how you can place the anger or the fear or the loneliness in a cradle of loving-kindness; use tonglen to learn how to be gentle to all that stuff. In order to be gentle and create an atmosphere of compassion for yourself, it's necessary to stop talking to yourself about how wrong everything is - or how right everything is, for that matter.