Forgiveness is not always an easy thing to offer, and to forgive yourself can be one of the hardest areas. More often than not we seek forgiveness from others, or we offer it to others, and the importance of forgiving ourselves can be overlooked.
To forgive is to let go. To release all you have attached to a situation, person or thing that has caused you pain, struggle, hurt, grief, sadness, trauma and other heavy emotions. Heavy emotions are a dense energy within your human body. They require releasing so they don’t remain stuck in your body and become a foundation you build on or a place you express from. When you cleanse the dense energy by allowing the energy of love to be showered onto that which you are forgiving, you release your attachment to it. It loses its control over you.
Cleansing dense energies is commonly known as ‘shadow work’, the areas of personal growth focused on to create healing. It is a multi-faceted process of recognising, acknowledging, understanding and releasing the dense energy. If we operate from our shadows we perpetuate the cycle and cause harm to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual wellbeing. We allow our Human Operating System and all its labels, stories, masks, projections and judgements to rule our behavioural responses and internal dialogue. It is destructive and damaging, causing our soul harm. Forgiveness is a key component of shadow work.
It is not always possible to forgive another for their actions and the impact they’ve had on you. Genuine forgiveness can take a long time to be felt enough to offer. Sometimes forgiveness cannot be offered, and that is okay. Forcing forgiveness is unproductive and will be unsuccessful. Forgiveness needs to be felt within the physical body and genuine in its intention. It doesn’t require acceptance by another or for it to be received by anyone. It relates directly to your self and what your soul needs in order to break the hold dense energy can have on your well-being. It is about you more than it is about another. Forgiving another may be unachievable, but forgiving yourself is not. It is necessary.
We are conditioned to believe that focusing on our self is selfish, but knowing our self is knowing our soul. When we know our soul we know pure love. Our soul exists alongside our human, housed within the human physical body. When we are connected to our soul we can navigate our human life and all its experiences with greater clarity and more easily from a place of love. To focus on our self isn’t selfish, it is fishing for self. To forgive ourself is to love ourself. If we don’t love ourself it is impossible to love others fully, with vulnerability and sincerity.
Our human experiences can challenge us at great depths. It is easy to project blame onto others for how we feel based on our life experiences. Blaming someone else voids our personal responsibility to understand what is stirring within us. It stops us from looking at the underlying cause creating misalignment within our soul. But, what we ignore or resist will only deepen and fester within us until we do. Understanding what is sitting within us, the dense energies that cause dis-ease, dis-comfort and dis-ability, allows us to release the energy and alter our human perspective on the issue. An important part of releasing is to take the time to honour your self for the wisdom the experience has given you and to make a commitment to your self to show up a different way. However another important part is forgiveness of self.
In clearing the dense energy within you it is important to offer your self forgiveness for the situation that impacted you. We often don’t choose to be involved in difficult life experiences, they occur unconsciously and from the actions of others. Energetically we CAN attract more of the same experiences if we fail to clear the dense energies, but largely our experiences occur without our conscious awareness. We often don’t start the situation, but we do have full control on ending it and that is where self-forgiveness is critical.
Self-forgiveness is a key component of self-love. Love is a powerful pure energy that cleanses dense energy from your body and replaces it with its light energy. When we love ourself we approach the world from our Soul Operating System, not our Human Operating System. We experience more joy, ease and grace. We know ourself at a deeper level of conscious awareness and have greater equilibrium in all situations. Loving self radiates the energy of love outwardly to every situation, person and thing we interact with.
A powerful moment in my healing came when I forgave my ex-husband for the destruction, chaos and hurt he inflicted on our children and I because of the Domestic Violence. It took me seven years before I was in place to be able to forgive him. Many friends could not understand how I was able to offer my forgiveness to him, and told me it was undeserved. But it wasn’t about him and I didn’t offer it to him directly. I offered it into the ethers, with deep sincerity and it created a massive energetic shift within me that enabled me to look at the experience through a different lens. It didn’t remove the pain instantly, but it numbed it enough for me to look at it with greater clarity. I deserved to not live with the dense energies impacting me, and that made it important I forgave him. For me, not him.
What I failed to also do was offer myself forgiveness. I didn’t even consider I had anything to forgive myself for. I didn’t start the violence, in fact I walked on egg shells daily to avoid triggering him into violence and aggression. I didn’t do anything worthy of the abuse. I knew him well and understood his family history, so I had a level of compassion for his inner torture and turmoil. I initially conformed to his control to keep the peace. There were many things I did to prevent him reacting, but he still continued it for many years, worsening after I left our marriage. Whatever did I have to forgive myself for?
Self-abandonment. Guilt. Shame. Humiliation. Lack of personal integrity. Failure to set healthy boundaries.Dishonouring my worth. Many different aspects of myself that I either didn’t value or adopted as my false truth. All of which created a distorted sense of my self-identity and added dense energy to the trauma energy he had impregnated within me from his actions. Not recognising the need and importance of self-forgiveness meant these dense energies perpetuated inside my physical body. Not only did they cause physical dis-ease, dis-comfort and dis-ability but they controlled my behavioural responses to people, situations and things. My sense of safety and security was destroyed. My inability to trust, not only people but situations, caused me to withdraw. My self-esteem and self-worth was almost nil, causing me to be suicidal on a number of occasions. There were many side-affects from my inability to recognise the importance of self-forgiveness.
We don’t need to cause the trauma or difficult life experiences to take responsibility for our wellbeing. Self-forgiveness is a key component of healing and giving ourselves love. It is not about berating ourselves, criticising ourselves or talking negatively to ourselves. It is not the “should of”, “could of”, or “would of” conversations we have with self. It is about honouring and loving ourself enough to allow ourselves to see the personal growth from the situation and the opportunity to know our soul deeper, to heal the dense energies and change our life trajectory. It is about loving all of our self, not just the light energies which we naturally gravitate to because they’re easy and feel good.
Where in you life can you offer your SELF forgiveness?