ear Cali Chica:

I thought about ideas after posting to you yesterday, on my walk. I have ideas and thoughts:

1. The issue of Responsibility: You have responsibility for your patients because you chose to become a medical doctor and you choose to work as such every day that you do. You have responsibility for your husband because you chose to marry him, and you continue to choose to be his wife every day that you do.  You have responsibility for your future children because you will be choosing, if you will, to bring them into this world.

You are not responsible for the people you did not choose to have in your life, such as your parents.

2. Do not accommodate anyone’s dysfunction- that is not helping another, that is … perpetuating dysfunction, helping the dysfunction to continue and spread to more and more people.

Think of making the world a better place, see the bigger picture. Your value should be not in providing temporary relief to people who promote and spread suffering. When you do that, you give them the relief they need to keep promoting and spreading suffering.

Turn away from the tradition of abuse, turn toward well-being.

3. Everyone suffers. Your mother’s suffering in the past, whenever she may suffer, is not different from anyone else’s suffering. It is her responsibility, always has been, to not pass on her suffering to others.

She is not responsible that way. Don’t contribute to her irresponsibility.

It is possible to not inflict one’s suffering on another. There are people who practice this.

4. A law of physics: for every action there is am equal and opposite reaction. Every time you choose to avail yourself to being hurt by another, to be used and misused, you are also choosing to hurt yet another person, to use and abuse another.

When hurt we naturally feel angry and that anger brings about that “equal and opposite reaction”, that is the abuse of another.

When you do not avail yourself to being abused, you also prevent abusing another. And so, back to responsibility, you are responsible to not avail yourself to abuse, not only for your own sake, but for the well being of others.

anita