Self-Love and Forgiveness

One insight that I have gained from doing my own shadow work and then releasing negativity, is that replacing the negativity with love for self and others makes true compassion and forgiveness possible. Let me explain . . .

First, the idea of self-love is different than ego. The Guides have shown me that we are divine expressions of *God/Source, on the soul level. So having love for ourselves is really like having love for that part of us that is an expression of God/Source. The problem is that we sometimes let our beautiful souls get cluttered with a lot of negative emotions and memories.

Forgiving Others: To go one step further, if we can truly love ourselves as expressions of the divine, as beautiful and indestructible expressions of love, then we will be able to truly love others and show compassion for them, even for those who may wish to hurt us, which is a challenge. Turning the other cheek or offering forgiveness toward people who harm us (or wish to) doesn’t mean allowing or condoning the harmful behavior—if we love ourselves first, we should remove ourselves from harmful situations—but it does mean trying to lean into understanding and forgiveness. Understanding in this case would be understanding that the person who does mean or hurtful things is carrying around an inner hurt that we can’t see. People who are happy and emotionally well don’t go around doing mean and hurtful things. They just don’t. So the people that hurt others are often doing so unintentionally or they are misdirecting their own anger and pain by targeting others and trying to release it that way, in the often unconscious hope of removing that pain from themselves. If nothing is done to interrupt this cycle, we just perpetually feed and hold that negativity. That's my belief anyway. Practicing understanding, compassion, and forgiveness is a way to stop this cycle of perpetual negative influence. Instead of anger and hatred, we can create love for ourselves and understanding for others. The forgiveness is really more beneficial for the person who is doing the forgiving than for the recipient, because carrying around that grudge or that wound will only create an internal space for negativity. That’s how I understand this emotional cycle.

Forgiving Ourselves: To practice this level of forgiveness toward myself (at least sometimes—I’m still working on it), what I had to do was to think of my eternal soul as a child who had made mistakes and to understand that those mistakes or bad behaviors (anything that caused guilt, shame, and so on) were really the result of challenges and difficulties in life that had inflicted pain on me. So it wasn’t that I was a bad person, it was that I was a good person who sometimes did bad things (much as we are taught to parent a child—by distinguishing between the child and the behavior as distinct elements). Once I was able to grasp that concept and to acknowledge that I regretted that behavior, I was able to forgive myself and to make the effort to not act that way when challenged or hurt in the future. This is really the same way I would try to teach a child, so in a way, I was parenting my inner child (I know this is a lot of touchy-feely speak, but this is the best way I can explain it). The most important thing is that, once I felt better about myself through forgiveness and releasing the negative energy, I was able to do the same for others who had hurt me. It doesn’t mean that what they did was okay but it does mean that I can honestly remove myself from the situation and wish them well, because if they can find a happier path, they will become a positive influence in the world. I basically understand the need to release that pressure—if someone is mean to you, your instinct (ego) is to be mean back to protect yourself . . . but it’s really more effective to practice self-love through understanding what's at the root of others' behavior and to prevent that negativity from finding a home within you. Does that make sense?

In my own case, I used EFT Tapping, meditation, visual imagery, and acupuncture to delve into my ‘inner child’ and to release the negativity there. That negativity is what I call Soul Coal because, if we allow it to rest inside of us, it can weigh us down and prevent us from reaching a higher level of happiness. It basically covers up our Soul Sparkle, our inner diamond. And nothing should obscure our beautiful light, especially if we can chip away at the soul coal ourselves.

*I use the term "God/Source" but you should use any term you are comfortable with for a supreme source of love in the universe.

Thanks for reading!