The Grudge - Day 105

"...my responsibility in how all of this played out, and especially in how I chose to respond / react, how I chose to make myself a victim, how I chose to cut myself off from my friends, how I chose to not understand them in the fact that they missed hanging out with my ex, how I chose to create sides, how I chose to try to get others to take sides, how I chose to not understand my friends in terms of their experience with me in my depression, how I chose to put myself as my self interest first, how I chose not to look at myself but only to look at what others were doing wrong, and how I continue with all of these patterns today." - Betrayal - Day 104

I have to decide: is it more important for me to hold a grudge, or do what is best for all? Is it more important for me to hold a grudge, or forgive myself and forgive another? Is it more important for me to hold a grudge, or align myself within the principle of equality and oneness? Is it more important for me to hold a grudge, or take absolute unconditional responsibility for myself in brutal self honesty? 

It is not magic. 

A grudge will not just disappear. No one else will make it go away. No one else put it here. 

I have to do the work of releasing and rejecting it, just as I did the work of creating it. 

Really, whatever excuses or justifications or reasons I think I have for maintaining a grudge -- they're meaningless. They fit only into the context of competition, inferiority & superiority. They are my ego, and so to allow the grudge is to allow my ego. To allow the grudge is to hinder myself. To allow the grudge is to poison myself. 

I have a handful of grudges, some more prominent than others. So this will be a work of my entire self, and of these individual relationships. I have cut so many out of my life when it got too hard to continue to see myself in their reflection. So this will be a work of seeing myself resolutely. A work thus of seeing myself now, here, in every moment, and of reflecting too on my past and my memories and all that I have carried with me from grudges I have been suffocating under for months or years. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that something like a "grudge" will just dissipate or get better or somehow resolved over time. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that any amount of sympathy or understanding from another person will help to resolve the "grudge." 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am not the creator of my grudges, that whomever I am holding the grudge against is the person who brought these intense emotions and judgments upon me. 

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see how a grudge is created within my mind and how it manifests throughout my entire self, and how a grudge directs my living, thinking, and moving. 

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see myself when and as I am creating a grudge so that I can stop myself in that moment and reverse the process. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that grudges simply happen, they just are, and I have to maneuver myself throughout my life and the world between all these walls of grudges. Can't go that way -- there's a grudge over there!

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blockade myself within my mind and even my physical existence through the construction of grudges, where I wish to avoid certain people or places because I have attached such intense emotional reactions to those people or places. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe and live by the thought that it is okay to simply not see or speak to certain people ever again, to simply shut certain beings or places out of "my world," to manufacture a reality for myself that is exclusive of those against whom I hold a grudge, to thus divide up existence as I see fit for my own self interest. 

Ignorance is not bliss. This is undoubtedly one of my many sources for my creation of my continual experience of depression. To not face. To ignore. To pretend in resistance. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to blockade the flow of relating to other people because I have created so many judgments and expectations within my mind where as far as I'm concerned, other people are not really allowed to be themselves, they have to match up with the image of them I have created. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to black list and red x people who do not live and express according to how I have wanted or expected or imagined them to live and express. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to think and believe one thing, one positive direction, about a person, only to then reverse to the polar opposite of complete negativity about that person when/if something happens that I was not expecting or I do not like. 

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to see myself as the subject of "I did not expect that" or "I do not like that," where here obviously I am the mover in this sentence, I am the one who was not expecting something, I am the one who did not like something, NOT the other person -- thus I am the one who is creating the "problem" through my reaction. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to feel intimidated by this process of dismantling grudges and walls. I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to want to run away and not deal with it, to retreat back into the belief that the passage of time heals all wounds, to basically ignore my responsibility here as my own creator, and to want to just say/pretend that "next time" will be different, without having to deal with / face this time or all those times past. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to give myself the space of believing that "this will be a long process" where within this thought I see that I am giving myself room to dilly dally and not really try because it's going to take so long, it's going to be so hard, so it's okay if it takes me a really long time.

I forgive myself for not accepting or allowing myself to embrace my own power as the creator of myself and as my own self directive principle, the only person who can remove these grudges which I put there in the first place. 

I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to believe that I am more important, as my ego, than the work that must be done here, and I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to bastardize my self importance by not realizing that what is important for me is important for all, within the principle of equality and oneness as what is best for all. So I forgive myself for accepting and allowing myself to hold on to this idea that I am important, what I want is important, what I think is important, what I feel / emote is important, not realizing that yes, "I" am important AS LIFE, as one with and equal to all life, but not these other things -- these other things are not me. 

So now I commit myself to watching and seeing myself as I move, to catch myself when and as I am developing a grudge.

I commit myself to watching and seeing myself as I think, to catch myself when and as I am participating in the sustenance or maintenance or growth of a grudge. 

I commit myself to actually writing out my grudges, to investigating where they are from, to releasing them, to SEEING them without judgment so as to really see myself in them, who am I here? What am I hiding from myself within these grudges? What do I not want to see, by not seeing this other person? Do I really think I am protecting myself within a grudge? What am I really protecting? 

I commit myself to the realization that the walls I see which I believe are containing me and blocking me in are me, they are my own creation, they are made of the same stuff as I am made of, and so I can move them, I can smash them down, and I can create within myself one nothingness which can exist in equality and oneness with all life. 

I commit myself to increasing my understanding of the difference between who I am, and who I am as my mind. I commit myself to breathing and being here with myself in my body. 

Most of all, most practically of all, I commit myself to actually writing it out, not to ignoring it. This is one of those commitments I have to push myself to follow through on. 

When and as I see myself resisting the work that is to be done on myself as my grudges, I stop and I breathe. I realize that this resistance is what will keep me in the grudge. I realize that any excuses or justifications I manage to rationalize this resistance are lies I am telling myself so as to avoid the work of seeing myself, which is also the function of the grudge. I realize I cannot change myself if I cannot see myself. I realize I am the only person who can do this work. So I commit myself to writing it out, little by little or a lot at a time, and I commit myself to doing it until it is done, no matter how long it takes. I am already in this process, and I cannot continue if I do not face this.