I Will Play This Game No More
Victim, perpetrator.
Victim, perpetrator.
I will play this game no more.
Blame, fault-finding, finger-pointing, and hate,
“You did this TO me.”
And I hate you for it.
I punish you, not realizing that when I punish you,
I create more pain for myself and
I create more pain for you.
I create more pain in the world.
How can I not?
There is no separation between us.
Pain Plus Pain Equals More Pain.
Hate Plus Hate Equals More Hate.
And on and on it goes.
There is no end.
Instead of feeling my pain that results from your acts of unconsciousness or misunderstanding,
Instead of opening my heart to you in open-hearted communication in an effort to understand,
I blame, I fight, I rail against you, causing more pain.
Unprocessed pain gets passed from one person to the next.
The cycle never ends.
There is only one way out of the cycle of pain.
What if I stop, what if I look inward at what provokes my feelings and actions towards you?
What if I decide to accept responsibility for what is truly mine?
When I look inward, what do I see?
When I look inward I see Pain.
I see that I carry massive amounts of unresolved pain:
anger, sadness, and grief.
There are so many ways that I twist and turn away from the pain within my being.
All of the lies, all of the denial, all of the deflection,
and all of the blame.
Anything to avoid taking responsibility for what is mine, for my own pain.
There is a pathway out...one pathway.
The pathway out is in fully feeling my pain, opening to it, processing it, accepting responsibility for it,
Allowing my pain to transform me,
Allowing it to open my heart.
This is the only answer,
and this is the path of salvation for us all.
Love and compassion
and feeling their opposites when they come,
Welcoming them fully, seeing them as the gift that they truly are.
Allowing them to open our hearts fully to life AS IT IS.
Allowing them to open our hearts to each other AS WE ARE.
Allowing our pain to open our hearts to all that life has to offer:
All of the beauty, the love, the pain, and the strife.
ALL OF IT.
We cannot have beauty without pain.
Victim, perpetrator.
Victim, perpetrator.
I will play this game no more.
