It may be time for a change

I've been at this self-improvement plan for a year and to be honest, I don't feel all that much more optimistic. At least not in the long-term, change-your-life feel-good-movie-of-the-year way that I was hoping for.
The most hopeful signs for me, so far, have been occasional bursts of good moods, wedged between long spells of ennui (see last week's posts).
Clearly, it's time to step up my game. It's time for something of a world-outlook overhaul.
As luck (or maybe something more?) would have it, PBS came to the rescue last week with a special on Buddhism, which I taped.
Much of it was a history of the life of Buddhism's founder, Siddhartha Guatama. But the brief rundown of Buddhism's tenets struck me as appealing. (Watch the special here, if you're curious.)
Mainly, I like the idea that this is a religion (philosophy?) that doesn't dwell on blaming yourself for every bad thing that ever happens. In the religions I'm most familiar with, there's a constant drumbeat of blame. Why aren't we living in happy harmony with each other and with nature? Because we're bad, bad, bad. Women especially.
I don't know about you, but most women I know don't need anyone teaching them how to blame themselves. It's something we do very nicely all on our own. If you take it too far--as I've sometimes done--it makes your life unbearable. In fact, blaming myself for every misfortune that's befallen us is one of the top things that occasionally makes me miserable.
The usual Christian way of dealing with this is to pray more and think more about Jesus dying for us and about a rewards in heaven. I've gone along with this most of my life.
It isn't doing much for me now, though. When I look at what's been happening in Christianity (religion as power in The Family; the scandal in the Roman Catholic church) the religion of my youth seems more like a weapon to control people with. As a way of dealing with life's hardships...not so much.
So here's Buddhism, and after looking at an overview of it's central ideas, I think right away this is going to be something that might help me. I'm not so sure I can go along with rebirth or vegetarianism--even Buddhists disagree on that, apparently--but as a philosophy, it bears investigation.
And so I shall.