GUILT AND RESONSIBILITY

The other day, a friend was talking about telling someone else that she was sorry for something she'd said - making amends. As we talked, I began thinking about humility and the willingness to take responsibility, at how necessary both are to getting free. We live in a culture in which many people are defensive and blame everyone else. Sometimes, I can see them stewing, rehashing all the reasons they are right.. It seems impossible for them admit any wrong-doing and I think this comes out of insecurity. The more threatened the ego, the more it wants to protect itself.
     I think of the many times I've said or done something I shouldn't have, gotten angry, tried to get my own back. Something eventually shifted, though, and I began to realize that it doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong; what I actually want is to let go of the residue of bad feeling I can so easily drag around with me. I've learned to feel in my body what anger, resentment, the need to prove I'm superior feel like. A motor revs up inside me and takes over, makes me go over and over again whatever the incident or argument was, becomes an obsessive reliving of all the bad feelings I walked away with.
     I no longer want those feelings in my body so I've had to cultivate the kind of humility that helps me recognize when I've been wrong or done wrong. It keeps me from leading with ego and from the need to prove anything. It's what make amends possible.
     But there's another ingredient in the willingness to make amends. Someone once said that the only way out of guilt is to take responsibility. Guilt imprisons and paralyzes me. Taking responsibility puts me on a new footing; it's as if I've been in a dark cave, endlessly blaming myself, giving myself all the bad feeling that keeps me from change. But I can find the way out, the way past the prison of guilt and that means taking responsibility. Not only for things I've said and done but also for the voices inside that tell me lies of negativity. I want that pathway, the freedom it promises. If it requires owning up to the truth or making amends or surrendering the need to clutch bad feeling to me, I'm more than willing to do it. I just don't want to live in guilt and carry bad feeling forward.