By Cesca Anderson

Who do you hold accountable in your life? Who is responsible for your wellbeing? Who is responsible for the way you look? A dietician? Fitness instructor? Beautician? Who is responsible for your happiness? A spouse? A lover? Your children? Some good friends? And what about your health? A doctor? Your yoga instructor?

Do they fulfil their roles and responsibilities adequately? Are you beautiful thanks to them? Are you happy? Are you healthy? How is all that working for you? Why do we give so much of ourselves over to others? Why do we think it’s perfectly natural to hold others accountable for our wellbeing? Who are you responsible for? Do you think it is fair to be held accountable for another’s health, happiness or general wellbeing? Do you feel that you’re up to being responsible for another’s happiness? And if not, then why do you hold someone else accountable for yours?

There is no one that can make us beautiful on the outside if we feel ugly inside, and there is no one that can make us truly happy by their actions if we are not happy by ourselves on the inside, and as for our health, why must our doctors be held accountable when our body’s show our dis-ease?

All of these shirked responsibilities keep us from going within and finding the Being that is truly there… It is easier to have a hair cut and tell ourselves we feel better for a while, or blame a moody spouse when we don’t feel good, or mask our dis-ease with a magic pill after a trip to the doctor, but what if we stopped to take a closer look, what if what we found wasn’t what we expected? And what are we so afraid of anyway? What if we held ourselves accountable? What is we worked with ourselves instead of hiding behind the excuses of other’s failed responsibility toward us?

We are so much more than the sum of our visible parts, and yet, we seem to have forgotten that. We go through lives mechanically, wondering what to wear, what to eat, what to watch, what to talk to this one and that one about.

But what about the rest of us, the parts we don’t see, and the parts we don’t acknowledge. What about our thoughts, what about our feelings, our instincts, our consciousness, what about our spirit? How much time in a day do we take to really acknowledge those parts of ourselves? When we suffer illness we always say, “It’s a bug doing the rounds” or “Everybody’s getting it this year”, or “The chair I sit on just destroys my back” But what if there was more to it than that, what if every illness was a warning signal for something deeper? And what if we learned to listen to our bodies and start understanding our minds, instead of living like mechanical animals going from one fix to the next? What if we took responsibility for ourselves entirely, instead of handing it over to the next person? Who is better qualified to understand you than you?

If every situation we go through in our lives can be traced back somewhere along the line to a choice we have made, why are we not choosing to make informed decisions? Is it really easier to be a victim of circumstance? Is it really easier to believe that we are beyond having control of our lives and destiny? Are we really happier believing these things? Or do some of us just think it’s easier while the rest don’t realise there is an alternative?

Humanity has always been afraid of what it doesn’t understand, and yet, we take so little time to understand ourselves, maybe that is why we live in so much fear. Gaining an understanding of our energetic make up is the first step to understanding who we are and why we experience the world in the way that we do.

Opening our eyes to the parts of ourselves that we can’t see, taking cognisance of our thoughts and feelings, realising that so many of our automatic responses and so many of our ailments tie directly in to the way we think and feel about ourselves and the world we live in; is beginning to take responsibility for ourselves.

Have you ever quieted your mind in still meditation and listened to your body speak to you? Have you ever taken note of the energy that courses through your body in unseen veins? Have you ever stopped to consider and understand why you feel the way you do about one thing or another? And have you ever stopped everything you were doing to watch a beautiful sunset and appreciated the emotion it stirs within you?

Take the responsibility for yourself and you will be pleasantly surprised, your climb to self knowledge and understanding may not be without trials but the view from the top will take your breath away and make you wonder why you didn’t climb sooner.

Words thousands of years ago inscribed at the Oracle of Delphi ring true today, as then, and in the times to come “Know Thyself”.