It’s important to me that this blog has a major focus on self-love. That’s because I believe it to be a doorway to lasting happiness, spiritual and emotional freedom, and compassion for others.
But true self-love and self-acceptance are things that elude most of us.
My own path to self-love was littered with lessons and challenges that I had to learn and overcome to heal my emotional wounds and do away with my own limiting beliefs, which were the obstacles to my own liberation.
One of these lessons is the topic of this post today – forgiveness.
Pain, shame, and blame are, in my experience, largely prisons that we willingly stay in.
I’m not trying to say that bad things don’t happen to good people, because they do. Look all around you and you’ll see evidence of people hurting other people everywhere. What I’m talking about is the aftermath and how we tend to let events scar us and leave us hurting and fearful long after they’re over.
I used to carry a lot of anger for the people and situations that had hurt me in the past.
In fact, some of that anger and pain had been my companions for DECADES, but I still clung to them in spite, stuck in my own inability to move on.
Because of that, I was triggered into feeling those painful feelings over and over again whenever I saw or thought of that person or situation.
I was living the pain on loop.
This became clear to me after a year or two following my Dark Night of the Soul. At that time, I had made significant gains in rebuilding myself and my life, reprogramming my own mind to see things in a positive light instead of the negative one that used to darken my days. I developed an intolerance to feeling bad, especially when I learned that feeling good was a choice I could make at any time, at any given moment.
It was this understanding that led me to weed out those sources of pain and looped memories of hurt that seeped into my consciousness when least expected.
As I began to dig into my painful scars and past traumas, it became clear that I was holding on to old things that didn’t need to be in my life anymore. It began to seem really stupid to keep doing that, especially when I knew that: a) many of the people who had hurt me weren’t even aware of my hurt, and b) those that were, weren’t losing any sleep over it.
So, why was I still losing sleep?
I’ve mentioned in previous blogs that my early and transformative spiritual teachers, Michael B. Beckwith and Jeffrey Allen, were instrumental in giving me the tools to heal and transform myself. It was in their teachings that I realized how much power I was giving to the past when it could be used in the present and how much power I was giving to others that I could be using myself to shape my world into one of my own choosing.
Forgiveness, I learned, was about taking back my power. It was about giving not one bit more of my precious energy to the past.
It was about setting myself free.
“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
– Rumi
There was one particular person whom I blamed for a good many of my childhood traumas and so, as a first act to vanquish the pain I carried over that, I decided to write them a letter with the intention of burning it afterward.
I’d hoped that the exercise of giving words to my pain would help to release my stuck feelings. I started several letters to this person but didn’t get very far. You see, this person is someone I love and as I started to tell them of all the ways in which I felt hurt, my new-found outlook on life (to see abundance over lack, to see positive over negative) kicked in and I threw those letters in the trash.
What I did instead was write a letter of thank you. Instead of focusing on all the ways I felt let down, abandoned, neglected, and unheard, I wrote about the good things I remembered, and I thanked them for every single one of them.
In choosing to see the ways that this person had shown up for me, I realized how petty and insignificant the grudges I’d chosen to carry were. I realized with clearer eyes that this person had done the best job that they could, given the pain they were also experiencing.
And that was when I finally understood the adage that, consciously or unconsciously, hurt people hurt people.
Hurt people hurt people.
These thoughts gave space for others, like understanding and compassion. I began to breathe benefit of the doubt into my old hurt memories until it seemed to me that there was nothing to forgive in the first place.
This was solidified with another exercise I did for a writing workshop just this past year.
The directive was to write a short story that really pulled emotion from the reader with the use of narrative and literary devices. I decided to write an account of my childhood that had been particularly distressing, thinking that would make it easy for me to delve into the emotional.
That went fine but it was the following week’s assignment that was so powerful.
The next week’s assignment was to choose a person from the story I’d written the week before and to write the scene from their point of view.
And so, I wrote from this person’s point of view, this person I love. As this person I love, I wrote about the feelings of despair I was living with and about how I couldn’t understand how my life had come to what it had. I wrote about the isolation I felt and the regret I had over the missed opportunities I’d let slide by. I wrote about the struggle to hold it all together and how I knew I was letting everyone down.
Giving this much space to what another person might have been feeling when I myself saw a different version of events was so powerful to me that I cried for this person.
I cried for their sorrow and their mistakes, and I cried for the way I had unfairly held them up as the scapegoat for everything wrong in my life back then and how I had added to their burdens with the weight of my judgements.
There was nothing to forgive.
These exercises resulted in immense healing for me and a new way of looking at things.
And I hope it healed a bit of the pain in this person I love when I shared that thank you letter with them.
When no one else had thought to see the ways in which this person had given of themselves, I did…long after I should have. It was powerful medicine for both of us to pay homage to the things done right, to say thank you at last, and to forgive everything else.
It often happens, though, that the person we need to forgive the most is ourselves.
This was the case with me.
I had a long, long list of people I’d hurt thoughtlessly and a long, long list of perceived failures that made it hard for me to look in the mirror during my Dark Night. For me, forgiving others was easy in comparison.
We’re our own worst critics and we are rarely gentle with ourselves.
When I was younger, I’d torture myself with thoughts of everything I’d done wrong and things I’d said that were stupid, embarassing, or inadvertently offensive. I constantly relived events where I messed up—again, living my pain on loop.
All of this work started me thinking and, after learning more from my spiritual teachers, I realized there was a young girl inside of me still carrying the pain of perceived rejection and abandonment. A little girl who felt unloved, even by her own self.
And I realized that just wouldn’t do.
I undertook a series of exercises (yes, more exercises, LOL) after that that transformed me.
The first was imagining my current self sitting across from that little girl who had felt so unlovable. And just like I was talking to my own child, whom I adore without condition, I told my little self how much I loved her. I told her how brave she was even when I knew she was afraid. I told her she was beautiful and perfect just the way she was.
I told her how sorry I was that I’d let her down and hurt her in ways she didn’t deserve. And I held her and we cried together, letting our tears wash away all of the pain between us.
And then I did the same for the girl or woman I’d been during each of the times I felt I’d failed the most, making space to see that, in each instance, I had been doing the best I could with the knowledge I had and the wounds I carried. And I gave space for the times I consciously made bad decisions and recognized the places of pain those decisions had welled from.
With the same gentleness I’d show my own child, I forgave myself.
I forgave myself.
I treat myself with great gentleness these days. I’m not perfect and it’s not in my best interest to be perfect.
Exponential growth comes from pain; that’s the unfortunate way of things. And growth in this life is about learning lessons, deciding to do better with each mistake, and moving towards a better version of myself than I was yesterday.
So, when I make my mistakes now, I just tell myself, “I forgive you. Do better tomorrow. I love you.” And I don’t lose sleep over these things anymore.
Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself, Dear Ones. You don’t have to tell another soul that you’ve let forgiveness into your heart. If you want to keep it, that’s your secret. But give this gift to yourself. Let yourself out of your self-imposed prison and take back your power. This is a step, especially self-forgiveness, that is needed to attain self-love and the bliss that comes with that.
You can do it.
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I LOVE this song by Trevor Hall, with guest Luka Lesson, called Forgive. It’s on my Spotify playlist (The Sacred Years_2025) and it consistently brings tears to my eyes. Luka’s poem, which he recites within the song, is POWERFUL. I love it so much, it’s made me a huge fan of his poetry. And, of course, if you listen to my playlist, you’ll see how much I love Trevor Hall. Teachers and messengers come in many forms and I include these two artists amongst those who have aided me on my journey of transformation.
