Do You Need to Forgive Yourself?

Do You Need to Forgive Yourself?

By John Holland

In Soul Inspirations, I wrote about how to forgive others, so it seemed appropriate to dedicate this article to the process of how to forgive yourself. Ask yourself this BIG question: “Do you find it easier to forgive others more than to forgive yourself?”

There may be times when you did something you’re not proud about. Yes, we all do it from time to time, and yes … some of us more often than others! The feelings of shame and guilt that are associated can easily complicate your life, causing stress and emotional discord. It weighs heavy on your soul.

Societal conditioning encourages us to forgive everyone else for our actions, but if you don’t forgive yourself, you’ll end up holding the key to your own emotional captivity. This may sound overly dramatic, but I’ve seen far too many people who come for a reading, who have layers upon layers built up, and it’s only when you peel away those layers, can the healing process begin. So this article is about how to forgive yourself, before you even create the very first layer!

Many of us agonize over our past mistakes, living them over and over again in our minds, like a video caught in a perpetual replay loop. It depletes your energy and prevents you from forgiving yourself. When you feel guilty, you attract punishment into your life, and in situations that are more serious, you even manifest it for yourself.

It’s easy to reconcile the feelings, by saying: “I deserve this.”

In a newsletter that I wrote some time ago, I reviewed the Serenity Prayer. There are sentences in it, which I want to repeat here, as they seem so pertinent:

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can,”

and

“Your past mistake may not be fixable but you can acknowledge, accept, take responsibility for them and begin the healing process on yourself.”