Lets talk about forgiveness...

Like everyone and their mother, at some point within our ~healing journey~, we all turn to self-help books for guidance, right? Or at least I’m sure that many of us have at least googled and read an article or two.

It’s nice hearing other people's perspective and as much as you should trust your gut and intuition, when the only voice you’re listening to is the one inside your own head, things can get a little bit one-sided.

If we decide to only listen to our own perspectives and opinions, we eliminate the ability to see the situation in a different light.

One of the self-help books I’ve been routinely picking up and putting down this year said something that I’ve heard many times before but for some reason when I was reading it this time, it clicked.

The author said, “Forgiveness is about you deserving peace, not necessarily about others deserving your forgiveness. …. the only person being punished by your resentment is you.”

the preview of this post would look boring without a picture so here's one of my favorite shots from Kauaʻi

This struck a nerve with me. For so long, and in so many situations, I have held onto grudges and buried myself beneath my own negative emotions. I use to literally brag about it and say that I could hold onto a grudge for so long that when I thought about the person, I didn’t even remember what they had done that had made me so mad, but I knew that I still held anger for them in my heart.

The theme of this year for me has been letting go- letting go of limiting beliefs and mindsets, letting go of talking negatively about myself and others, and finally- something that I just realized a few days ago, letting go of the people I have let drag my mindset down for so long.

I was spending so much time just steaming inside my own head, spending my showers replaying past arguments and coming up with newer, better, more life-shattering comebacks I wish I would’ve said in the moment. Holding onto anger, holding on to the past, and- I wouldn’t have admitted this previously but- holding on to past versions of people I no longer knew.

If I could grow and change and become a better, more patient, more loving person, who’s to say that these people hadn’t taken the same, or similar actions, within their own lives?

Now, I feel like I need to preface this by saying that I don’t need to find out if that’s the case- these people are just that- pieces of my past, memories- be it good or bad. By forgiving their past actions, I am in no way inviting them back into my life. While I want them to succeed, I don’t have any desire to be part of that success, now or in the future. Because in forgiving them, I have also forgiven myself. And part of forgiving myself means realizing that reconnecting with people who have hurt me would be doing a disservice to myself.

So how do you release that? It starts with reprogramming your mind and the way that you think. It starts with stopping negative thoughts as soon as they make their way into your brain.

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For so many years, I made self-deprecating jokes ~my thing~, as if making fun of myself would, in some way, make it harder for others to hurt me in that same way. Like saying it first would be beating them to the punch. A “haha gotcha!” moment where I could revel in the fact that these things couldn’t be used against me because I made a joke about it first.

pshh that’s old material, yesterday’s news, you can’t get me there.

I had a bad habit of beating myself up when I did something wrong- without even a second to pause and think about how that stream of negative thoughts would continue to affect me throughout the day.

The thoughts that you chose to think about, fixate, and focus on are the ones that start to hold more weight within your mind. They become the things your mind centers in on more than anything else. Think about it: when you’re already upset or already beating yourself up about the way you acted or re-acted in a situation, isn’t it that much easier to come up with newer, more creative ways to express your self-loathing?

“I can’t believe I forgot about that appointment” quickly turns into “I can’t do anything right and I’m not someone that people can rely on. I’m so distracted and disorganized, why can’t I just get it together for once?!”

If you’re giving time, energy and thought to something, you’re going to attract more of it into your life. Because- get this- even if you beat yourself up about your mistakes and fixate on the past, it doesn’t change what’s already happened. Nothing can change that. But we can change our future by focusing on the past- we can derail the good that’s coming into our lives by focusing on punishing ourselves for things that have already happened and by worrying about worse case scenario future situations that haven’t happened and get this… don’t even exist.

I knew before I went on this trip that it would help me in more ways than one- because I set conscious intentions for myself before I went. I told myself that this trip would help me start to break down those walls that I’ve held up for so long- that through the quick-thinking, problem-solving moves I was going to have to make by myself with no help, some being split-second decisions, I could learn myself and love myself on a deeper level.

So how did I do it?

It started with changing the way that I reacted to situations, in my actions, but most importantly, in my mind. In the past, especially when I was by myself, I was perpetuating a dangerous pattern. I would do something that I deemed as not "good enough”; I would make a mistake, or do something that I considered to be clumsy, and immediately say, out loud, “Wow that was such a fucking stupid move, I can’t believe I did that” and just continue to knock myself down after what was already done. Punish myself for something minuscule in the scheme of things, and for what?

I was angry with myself, angry with the world. I felt like I was deserving of good things and then I would turn around and tell myself how unworthy I really thought I was behind closed doors. I was unknowingly blocking the energy that I so desperately craved in my life.

Just like the saying, “people change when they’re ready to, not when you want them to”, the same is true within your own life. Things don’t just magically change without you shifting your mindset and changing your life and your actions to reflect what you desire. It takes conscious action and thought and most importantly, patience, to change these things within yourself.

You can’t decide to give up when it gets hard or if you feel like the change isn’t taking place “fast enough”. By placing limits on your healing, you’re unknowingly adding even more time and stress to your journey. You can’t put a timestamp, or a countdown or a timer on unlearning these behaviors. If you realize that you're living in the future instead of the present, give yourself grace and understanding- don’t beat yourself up about not getting it right in the first, second, or 22nd go, and again, try to actively shift your awareness, be present in your actions, and live in the now.

Creating the shift in my life

For me, creating this shift started with giving myself grace when I make mistakes. I’ll be honest, this reprogramming didn’t immediately come to me. It wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight. But we’re talking about unlearning limiting beliefs you’ve had about yourself for years, maybe even decades. This shit takes time.

I still catch myself letting the words fly out of my mouth before it feels like the neurons have even had enough time to fire and create the thoughts themselves, much less speak them aloud.

Something I have gotten good at over the course of the past month or so is stopping the negative self talk before it snowballs into something much bigger than it needs to be.

Now, with practice, I find myself stopping those sentences halfway through and instead saying something positive about myself- something that actively disproves what I chose to critique about myself, and saying it out loud too. While I work on eliminating the criticism, I want to give the praise just as much weight, attention, and meaning- if not more.

When me dropping things while rushing out of my house to make it to something on time leads to an “I need to get my shit together” exclamation, I’ve started to combat it with a “My shit is very much together in the scheme of things. I take conscious action each day to set myself up for success and I continue to give myself love by maintaining these routines. I put time and effort into myself and into keeping my house clean, my body active and my mind healthy. Every day I do these actions, show up for myself, and show myself love in these ways, the more I’ll be able to add to it tomorrow.”

I’ve genuinely seen this shift my mindset, and faster than I thought possible. When you decide to stop taking yourself so seriously and start to instead laugh at the tiny “mistakes” you used to ruin your days over, you begin to realize that you have so much more time to do what you actually want to do. Because whether we realize it or not, thinking takes up a lot of our time. And, in the scheme of things, the loop of thoughts that are running on a track inside of our heads are only affecting us until we say them aloud.

So where do we go from here?

I’m not going to sit here and give you a spiel about how you can’t love anyone else if you don’t love yourself. Because in my opinion, I believe that to be wildly untrue. I think some of the most hyper-critical people love the hardest because they realize how hard it is to be trapped inside of their own head and wouldn’t wish the things that they thought about themselves onto anyone else. But, this in turn can lead to isolation. It can lead to closing your heart off to people, experiences, places and things because you don’t feel worthy of receiving them. If you feel unworthy of receiving love, you won’t be able to receive it and reciprocate it in a healthy way.

All this to say that, in my opinion, forgiving others starts with forgiveness of yourself. And loving yourself starts with forgiving yourself. (See? It’s all connected)

If you can learn to forgive yourself for the past mistakes you’ve made- forgive the way a less evolved version of you reacted to situations, the way a less evolved version of you treated other people- forgive the mistakes and stop daydreaming about the “what ifs” that could have existed if you had handled those situations differently- by actively doing better and by being present instead of letting yourself live in the past, you can forgive yourself.

To summarize...

We won’t always be the hero in other peoples stories. Whether we’d like to believe it or not, we’re probably the antagonist in someone’s story. Because, whether warranted or unwarranted, not everyone will like you. Not everyone will think that your passions- the things that you believe in and speak about with conviction, are as important as you know them to be. Not everyone will hold those beliefs with the value and meaning that you do. Does that mean that you should let the opinions of others dictate what lights your soul on fire? Spoiler alert: absolutelyfuckingnot

You can choose to hyper-focus on the opinions of others or you can find validation within yourself. Which, I know, is much easier said than done in the age of the internet. Seeking validation from outside sources becomes like a drug, a fleeting feeling, you don’t know where you’ll find your next hit but you crave it so badly you seek it out anywhere- and especially if you aren’t receiving it first from yourself. We become hooked on it and we lose touch with ourselves as we stop trusting our own intuition.

When we seek out constant advice and praise and pats on the back from people to tell us that we’re doing things in the “right way”, we forfeit our inner knowing, our gut, our intuition- the part of ourselves that already knows whether or not we’re making the right choices.

If you only believe in yourself up until the point where you don’t receive the reaction from others that you had daydreamed about in your head, you do not fully believe in yourself. I know, hard pill to swallow- but once you understand it, you can begin to unlearn

Unlearning this looks different for everyone and I can't give one-size-fits-all advice here because we'd run into a brandy melville situation, if you know you know. One thing I can suggest though is to put the opinion that you have of yourself above anyone else's opinion of you. We all have things to work on, but we'll never make progress if we continue to hate ourselves for what we can't undo.

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Suggestions for success

1. Start each morning by saying/writing/thinking about at least 10 things that you're grateful for. It can be as simple as the peanut butter you put on your english muffin each day or the smell of the perfume you wear.

2. Spend time with yourself and learn to enjoy your own company. After all, the person we spend the most time with during our entire lives will be ourselves, might as well spend that time with someone who isn't constantly insulting you.

3. Meditate. I know, it's hard. I'm the person that's been to thousands of yoga classes and is still thinking about my grocery list while other yogis are deep in their Savasana. But, with breath work and meditation, the only way to improve is to practice. Even spending 5 minutes a day deep breathing with your eyes closed can help calm your nervous system. Thoughts will come. You can chose to either keep a journal next to you and jot these down (if they're negative release them, if they're positive, use them to create intentions for future you) or you can return to your breath, and use each exhale as a symbolic release of these thoughts.

4. Make a list of an area of your life you want to begin healing or an area where you want to grow. This could be something as simple as having more patience with others when you're driving on your daily commute or something as big as trying to repair your relationship with yourself- all that matters is that you put active thought and intention behind this growth. In doing this, remember that healing is not linear and that making mistakes is an inevitable part of life. We cannot change the past, nor should we seek to try to- but we can continue to get back up and try again after we fall.

5. Decide to forgive. Actively decide this. This doesn't mean that you need to revisit past situations or reach out to people you have no business starting a conversation with. It means releasing yourself from the way these grudges and anger make your heart feel like it's weighed down. It means letting go of this hurt, honoring the way these situations allowed you to grow or see things differently or even change the way you live your life, and realizing that that growth took place because of your actions alone and wasn't dependent on other people's mistakes. No one except you is the catalyst for your growth. The unfair way you were treated might have spurred this desire to change within yourself, but it's important to realize that it would have happened in some way, with or without them. Do not give other people's mistakes any more power in your life than they should have and then release yourself from the hurt those situations have caused you.

And finally

6. Do your best every day, even though your best might look different day to day. Do not criticize yourself about how your productivity and energy change and fluctuate each day. Have kindness for yourself in all moments, not just when you think you deserve it (that includes what you say to yourself in the confines of your own mind). And if you fuck up? Apologize and make conscious choices that will allow you to not make those same mistakes again.