Responsibility and Karma

In her book Good Karma, Tibetan nun Thubten Chodron talks about the idea that karma is not "a ticket to punishment. Rather, it meant I could no longer blame my misery on others." (p.2). Thubten Chodron had an experience back in 1976 when she contracted Hepatitis A after eating vegetables that had not been fully cleaned by the kitchen staff. Feeling very weak and angry, she was given a book called The Wheel of Sharp Weapons, where she achieved the insight that her illness is the result of causes and conditions she created in prior lifetimes. Rather than blaming people around her for her illness, she learned to take a kind of total responsibility for everything that has happened to her up to this point in time.
  How is it possible to develop the capacity to take total responsibility for one's current state of body and mind? What is the starting point for this kind of practice? I am reflecting that even the notion of "self" responsibility might be a bit misleading, since even the self is conditioned by all sorts of things, and it is not a permanent state of being. I think self-responsibility needs to begin with a clear awareness that suffering is coming from the mind. It is not something I attribute to something outside of me, but it's related to where I am at right now in terms of my motivations and attitudes. If I am not checking and aware of these motivations and attitudes, then I am unable to really appreciate the mind sufficiently to take responsibility.
  Quite simply, unless one is aware that they are not identified with this body, they will not feel the gravity or the depth of the responsibility that Thubten Chodron talks about. If I am only thinking for this body and taking care of the appetites, I might have a sense of responsibility for the beings who provide for me and take care of this body, but beyond that, what can responsibility include? If I don't have the basic insight that the mind is not limited to this body (and even goes beyond all bodies) then my responsibility will be defined by this narrow sense of identity: my clothes, my job, my food, my preferences, and so on.
   I think that the most important thing is to see that one is not one's body: to see that even this body is a kind of dream, and that the mind is never limited to this body in this life. It would be a pity if one's life were only focused on making this body feel relaxed and comfortable, when in fact the body is impermanent and is subject to all sorts of discomforts. What is it that is witnessing all that discomfort? Is that witness subject to discomfort? This is a kind of practice that goes beyond even the notion of responsibility.

Chodron, Thubten, (2016). Good Karma: How to Create the Causes of Happiness and Avoid the Causes of Suffering.