Usually when people talk about forgiveness it’s about forgiving someone else. Forgiving yourself is just as important if not more so. You cannot walk around with a negative perception of yourself and expect to be happy.
Forgiveness is not agreeing with something that happened, it’s simply letting go of the judgement and the bad feelings attached to the event. So if you forgive yourself, you can still learn from the incident intellectually and understand that you should not and will not do it again. That’s important, that’s learning from your past. If you learn from the past and forgive yourself by letting go of the judgement, there’s great benefits in that. If you hang onto the judgement and negative energy from a past event, it can do nothing to benefit you and in fact will be detrimental to your life in just about every way.
All of your interactions with life are birthed from your perspectives…your perspective is your reality. So if your core, foundational perspective is based in self-deprecation and unworthiness, that will affect everything you interact with. It will affect your relationships with yourself, others, work, play, etc. This is why self-forgiveness is so important.
There is simply no benefit to hanging onto shame or self-judgement. The illusion is that it’s a deterrent for future negative behavior, but it’s not. Learning from your past is a deterrent for future negative behavior. Shame and self-judgement only makes you feel bad about yourself and makes you feel less capable of doing good things in life. It literally prevents you from moving forward in positive directions, it doesn’t help in any way.
So if there is no benefit to hanging onto negativity and tremendous benefit to letting go of it…I say, let go of it. Forgive yourself for not feeling good enough or loving enough. It’s okay, you’re a work in progress, you’re learning, you’re doing better, you are loved as you are for simply who you are.
We simply do better when we know better. So get still, bring up the event that needs forgiving…even if it’s simply “not thinking you’re good enough”, allow yourself to understand that you DO know better now so you WILL do better and you always have been good enough. It’s okay. Allow yourself to feel the original sadness that was stuffed down and then let it be replaced by self-love and self-acceptance. Sit with this, let it resonate within you, feel the love, let it become your new perspective on who and what you are.
Forgive yourself, embrace the Truth of who and what you are…a Divine Spiritual Being in the midst of having a human experience. And I’ll let you in on a little secret of life…in the end…you win! So don’t put so much pressure on yourself!