Blaming - Moving Away From Yourself
Outer chaos, inner calmness, and healing
Master Glenn Tobey
Addressing your emotional response to the pandemic.
April 12, 2020
I truly love Spring Forest Qigong and the dynamics it teaches me about life and about living in a different way of calmness. The theme I have been working on is “outer chaos, inner calmness, and healing”. The topic for today is blaming. Blaming is a way of moving away from yourself and focusing on someone else as the cause of your discomfort and pain. Blaming is a form of anger. The purpose of anger is to produce distance from another, and to create a sense of survival. So, this practice of blaming and distancing is really an important thing to take a look at.
Long, long time ago, I read a book whose author was Loren Eiseley. The name of the book is “The immense journey.” Inside the book, there’s a little story right at the beginning. An ecologist moving down into the earth, sled onto the ground. There're layers of limestones. In his ecological mind, he saw thousands of thousands of years, million years just a blimp in time. He came across this skeleton, this creature long, long time ago, like fifteen of sediment thousands of thousands of years. He pondered. He said, “I wonder what this creature thought? What’s the cause or what is going on when he never realizes all the other things in life?” Immense journey of life. He was not totally responsible; the creature was not totally responsible for everything.
The idea was. What part of life do I not understand as I look around the way I behave and the way I react? I wonder sometimes whom I am talking to in this audience. You are a scientist. You are an artist. You are a politician. Or you are a public health. The reason I ask is that in certain ways everyone listens to things in their own way.
If I ask you, “How many colors are there in a rainbow?” Perhaps a scientific mind may say, “Seven.” Here is red. Here is yellow. Here is orange. Here are lines. An artist might say a thousand of colors. Who's right? If I am blaming someone else for the lack of dollars so to speak, what’s going on, I am really weakening myself. And not appreciating. I see a rainbow has a thousand colors. No, I see the rainbow has seven colors. Beautiful. We all can understand. We all have a view of life that’s incredibly important.
I sometimes joke. What I want is, I am an old white guy who speaks English. I want everybody in the world to be old white guys and only speak English. What part of it I don’t understand? I love who I am. And be connected to every possible point of view so that I can understand more of life rather blaming everybody else in the world who do not believe what I say, what I do, and what I want. So, blaming is actually about controlling and fear. How do I stay inside and coming back to my heart, and take responsible to what I see and what I feel?
Trauma is an experience where it is so big that it has less quality to it. Usually for me from the work I have done with people who have different kinds of trauma was a sense by the end, “When will it happen again?” It is not so much of the incident when the things are going on, but the sense of people for many things, “When will this happen again?” People live in that fear. “Oh, when will this happen again?”
What the virus is producing our globe is a tremendous sense. When will this happen again? As countries are working towards reestablish this or that, they are also wrestling with the possibility, “When will this happen again?” People are also looking for who they are going to blame. Who can we blame for the cause of this? Who can we blame? Who can we blame? The dynamic of blaming moves everyone away from their own strength rather than saying, “What part of life am I responsible for? And what part of life I don’t understand?” How come this didn’t happen? But not going, you are causing this. Coming back to yourself.
This might be an extreme example. If I put down my foot in the kitchen walking by, and my wife stepped on my foot. I can say, “Ouch, you are the cause of my pain.” Well, partly true. She stepped on my foot. My responsibility. What was my foot doing there? A lot of times the relationship takes two. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? How come? No, everyone has a role to play. Everyone has a part. I put my foot in the kitchen, and she stepped on it. It takes two. How do I take the responsibility for the part I play? The trauma is about not blaming others, not moving away my inner strength, but always coming back to myself. What part do I play? What part do I play? What part I play is that creature buried by 15 feet of history in the immense journey we are living. I can always come back to my inner strength. That's about calmness. That's about having the inner strength and inner calmness, the ability when something happens, I am not freaking out. I am not reacting out there. But most of all, finding a way starting from here. Then try to make sense as I move it out. I hope you can continue with the focus of developing your own calmness, your own self-confidence. Checking out when you have that sense of blaming. This is really about moving away from your inner strength.
Qigong Master Glenn Tobey
Master Glenn Tobey
Master Glenn Tobey, M. Div., M. A. in Management, is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in private practice in Duluth, Minnesota.
He has almost forty years of experience in the Human Service field and has worked in both urban and rural settings, and values the collaborative community-based model.
He has also taught at the college level, and conducted numerous SFQ workshops and trainings in various community settings. Glenn continues to teach and to share his knowledge and wisdom of Spring Forest Qigong which is at the center of both his professional focus and his personal passion.
Glenn is a member of the SFQ teaching team. He teaches Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Instructor Certification, and other workshops.
Teaching in Master Chunyi Lin's Tradition
My life mission is to create "A Healer in Every Home and a World without Pain and Suffering." I am very grateful for Master Glenn Tobey for sharing Spring Forest Qigong in his community and helping achieve this vision.
-Chunyi Lin, Qigong Grandmaster, The Founder and Creator of Spring Forest Qigong
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