Don't Accept Anything Less Than the Best You Can Be

Learn never to blame another for the pain you feel, nor to complain about anything that life brings to your door; but this doesn't mean to be accepting of those who would see you ache, nor should you be apathetic in the face of anything that challenges your hopes and aspirations.
Sir Guy Finley

Plant the Seeds of a New Self

Trying to resolve the pain within us by holding others accountable for it is like looking out at a field we have planted on our own property and wishing, every day, something other than what grows there would take hold and flower. If we wish to have true harmonious relationships with others, then it is we who must change. We must assume responsibility for what our relationships reveal to us about us, and then do the interior work it takes to plant the seeds of a new Self.
Everywhere we look, people are concerned with essentially one thing: getting what they want, when they want it, and as fast as possible. The fires that fuel their appetite for this envisioned success create so much smoke that they lose sight of the fact that all they reap for their insistent sowing are the cold ashes of regret raked out of broken relationships.
If we are ever to realize the integrity and consistent kindness of our True Self, if we long to know something of heaven while we live on earth, then we must sow the seeds that bring that higher life into fruition. One cannot expect to reap what one does not sow; and merely hoping for a higher life is not sowing true spiritual seeds, any more than climbing an imagined mountain is the same as reaching its top.
To sow spiritual seeds means that we do spiritual work. Spiritual work is always interior work first, even if, as a matter of course, this work becomes manifest through exterior action. What is this interior work by which we sow the seeds of the celestial within us?
One way to sow the seeds of a higher relationship with life is to not burden others or ourselves with past regrets, disappointments, or fearful future visions, even as we learn to ask truth for more insight into those unseen aspects of our present nature that are reaping their regrets even as they sow more of the same dark seeds.
It is not our duty to suffer over what will be or won't be -- to live with painful regret or guilt over what was or wasn't. Our soul task is to be responsible for what is -- and to allow this relationship with life to produce what it will. There may or may not be suffering in this order of responsibility but, if there is, it will be transformational as opposed to self-tormenting --which is the negative effect of every act born of assuming some false responsibility.
It is not enough to just sow seeds in this physical life, i.e., to struggle for or make millions, invent the greatest gizmo ever, or become the "who's who" of some social registry; for regardless of how sublime these intentions first seem, and even if their seeds should grow and flourish, they can only grow into forms that pass and fall in time. If our wish is for a life that is whole and loving, one that is filled with new light, then we must sow the eternal seeds of a higher life within ourselves; that is our work.
Set your self to the task of being an inwardly awake person and watch how you begin to reap the awareness that makes all things possible.