“Living in the experience of freedom involves self-forgiveness.”  ~ Bev Pugh

What is the worst thing you have ever done? We all harbour our secrets, our moments of feeling ‘bad’ when we did something we think we shouldn’t have, or didn’t do something we think we should have. Self-forgiveness is one of the biggest aspects of our self-growth and personal expansion. We can lock ourselves away for a long time in very non-forgiving place. But this has the effect of depleting our energy, and taking a toll on our mood. It also limits our creativity.

This is my take on self-forgiveness.

Guilt, shame and remorse are very dense places to live. They lower our vibrancy in every way – health, personal power, relationships, creativity, joy – to name a few!

When you think of the worst thing you ever did, take a moment to explore the thoughts and beliefs that were behind it in that moment. Whether or not you believe them now, you believed them at that time. In that moment, that was who you were.

We have all been there. It is part of the human experience. I know I have certainly been there. There are many reasons why in that moment, we thought the way we did. It’s important to understand that you were in an honest place with yourself – albeit, a misdirected one. Now you are in a place where you can challenge those old thoughts and beliefs. You are in a different moment.

Challenging our thoughts and beliefs when we are living in a way we don’t like is crucial to our growth. And challenging without judgment is even more crucial.

To spend our valuable energy thinking about a past through our distorted thoughts and judgments doesn’t make sense. It is imagined, not real. We begin to see it how it ‘should have been’ and then that becomes real in our minds. It’s not. The only thing that was real was that we meant well. All of us mean well. If we screw up it isn’t because we didn’t mean well, we were in an honest place with ourselves, but as I said earlier… misdirected.

If you hurt someone, then make amends to them and yourself from your heart. You now have more clarity about how you don’t want to live. How valuable is that?

Once we have challenged a situation and our beliefs in a moment, those teaching moments bring us clarity. Unfortunately, many of us get trapped in judgment and miss the incredible power in all these beautiful teaching moments.

How else do we move forward?

We are all of equal value. We are all of equal wisdom. We just need to allow for more breadth of awareness, and that comes not from judgment, but from forgiveness.