Forgiveness … giving up all hope for a better past

Set yourself free

We could call this the self-love blog.

Forgiveness is a powerful tool to restore your ability to love yourself.

But let’s start with those people in our lives that we haven’t forgiven. Perhaps there are several. Are there people in your past that you feel may have taken malice out on you? Perhaps it was your parents? Or perhaps you are very angry toward someone who has unexpectedly left you? Ether personally, or perhaps they passed away without saying goodbye? Perhaps they left you holding the bag? Or perhaps your lover cheated on you? Or you cheated on your spouse? Or … or … or …

For myself, I have had to forgive several people in my life. Well, I didn’t have to forgive them. But in truth, it would just be a matter of time before I got around to forgiving them. One was a very dear friend. A brother, really. Well, not from the same mother. Not that kind of brother. We met relatively early in our lives. We first met working together at a television station. Over the decades we worked side-by-side. He was, perhaps, the person who could understand me the best. I didn’t have to edit my thoughts. I could just dump them out, and he always knew exactly what I meant. Nobody else has quite gotten there with me since.

But he died. He just left. I was so mad at him. It devastated me. He left and I couldn’t say goodbye. I couldn’t look him in the eye, and know it would be the last time I would ever see him again. I never got that chance. He had gone all the way through cancer, and came out on the other side. The doctors had given him a cancer-free status. He had made it. We were in the clear for many more years together as friends. But it wasn’t to be so. Without me knowing, he went into the hospital for a seemingly trivial ailment, and he died.

I forgive him. It is not like he had chosen to abandon me. He did not choose to blindside me with his loss. But I forgive him now.

This, perhaps, is the more common idea of forgiveness. Sure, it can be about someone who has “wronged” us in some way. And on this planet, that in and of itself can be some horrible circumstances. We were wronged. Perhaps we were broadsided. You do not have to wait for the other to make things “right.” Sometimes they have no regret. Or perhaps they don’t think they have done anything wrong.  Whatever the circumstances, we are free to forgive them, and ourselves, now and in any other moment.

But let’s go back to that self-love thingy.

Love, and more specifically self-love, is perhaps the most difficult thing for many of us to give ourselves. We are not willing to forgive ourselves. We hold ourselves in silent judgment. Often the judgment is silent because we really can’t remember what is was. We can’t remember the times that we held ourselves in judgment from our past. Many of us have this general mindset that says we are not (really) loveable. A silent mindset that says we don’t really deserve that wonderful Love. We are guilty, in some way, from our past. And we go through our life without a deep loving relationship.

Part of the forgiveness process is to feel all of the feelings behind our past. To feel the betrayal, or the deceit, or whatever it was. To feel how we felt when it happened. Often it is a theme that has been carried out in our past lives. If you incarnated into some tough conditions, you led your life paths up to this life. If there are core karmic challenges in your family of origin, your soul chose those tough conditions to give you a chance to go through those circumstances. Go through the feelings. The actions and the struggle of it all.

Life lessons are that way. You graduate by facing them. By processing all of the feelings behind them. To relearn the feelings, and to swap out the posturing with the feeling to the transcendence of those feelings, by mastering how we act when we are in the feelings.

When we go to improve our self-love, we can think of how much we love ourselves right now. And then, perhaps, imagine a (metaphorical) big brother or sister that loves us very dearly. What would they have for us? Often when we imagine a big brother or big sister, with unconditional love for us, we can more easily see ways we could heal our relationship with love. AS we spend time learning about our ability, or inability to love ourselves, we are actually on a path that will shift our future out of the struggles of our past. Often we will find ourselves in less than ideal relationships with others, and thus with ourselves, because we have not mastered the art of loving ourselves.

Once we have truly learned how to love ourselves unconditionally, we will no longer choose those situations and circumstances that had led us to those struggles in the first place. Self-love is the doorway to Heaven on Earth … for you. When you can embody unconditional love, then that is what the universe will reflect back to you. And you cannot exhaust love. You might think of it as a never-ending love affair with yourself. A Love you most certainly deserve.

Love You (repeat)

Les