Let’s face it. The word frustration is just another word for anger. Frustration seems to be caused by something from outside you. This or that frustrates you. By little turns and twists within your mind, you convince yourself quite easily that frustration assaults you.

Anger is a little less slippery. You really do have to face your participation in anger. Whatever causes your anger, you have to admit you are angry. You hold the anger. You hold responsibility for it.

Frustration seems less serious to you, and somehow, you feel absolved of responsibility for it. You are innocent, as a matter of fact. Your computer has gone berserk with spam. Of course, you are frustrated. And so and so on.

I urge you to take responsibility for all upset you experience. You don’t have to have it. You do have to take responsibility.

We come back again to your feeling at odds with the world. This is a very basic level we come down to. You don’t like to think that you are at odds with the world. You haven’t realized that you felt the world was out to get you. You may have even given lip service to the idea of a benevolent world, even as you wrangle with it.

“Here goes the world again,” you seem to vent. “See how it misuses me. How can I not be frustrated? This happened and that happened, and they happened to me. I couldn’t solve a math problem. My shoe lace broke. I got tired. No wonder I’m tired. Look at what happened to me today.”

Beloveds, not for all the gold on Earth, do you want to see yourself as an innocent victim. A victim is also a perpetrator. You have performed a magic trick on yourself. It looks as though frustration has been foisted on you, yet that is really sleight of hand. The rabbit hasn’t come out of a hat. You are the one who planted the rabbit there.

Or, perhaps, you like to think you have been hornswoggled, once again, an innocent victim. Nope, My dear ones, you are the offender who puts the responsibility somewhere else.

No one denies that your car broke down or any one of the occurrences that contributed to your frustration, yet, come now, look yourself straight in the eye and admit your own culpability.

You may also say you are an innocent victim of measles or a mosquito bite or an upset stomach. Be that as it may, you are responsible now. You are responsible for how you react. In fact, beloveds, forswear reacting. Act instead, and act with good feeling.

There is no hiding, beloveds. Your thoughts cast their net. Bread upon the waters and all that.

If you drop the pot of soup, you dropped it. You didn’t mean to, yet no one else dropped it but you. And it’s you who has to clean up the mess on the floor.

Even when your fingernail breaks, it is your fingernail that is broken. You can blame your broken fingernail on anything you like, yet, here you are. It is your broken fingernail. You may say that you don’t get enough calcium, yet I say to you: “Who is it who doesn’t get enough calcium?”

It’s not in your best interest, or anyone’s best interest for you to get mired in innocence. Let’s say you are perfectly innocent by anyone’s standards, yet, I repeat, even when you are innocent, who has to run the race now?

If you are drowning, and you don’t choose to drown, what are you going to do? Are you just going to say: “I didn’t ask to drown.” Or are you going to swim and save yourself from drowning?

When someone gives you advice you don’t want to hear, you may mutter: “Whose life is this anyway?”

And this is what I am saying to you. “Whose life is this anyway?”