LIVEANDFORGIVE.COM

Do you like or want to feel good about your life?

Do you have a hard time forgiving yourself?

Answering “yes” to both of these is a real tough spot to find yourself in. Like everyone else, you wish for a good life. But you also have some things you feel bad about having done in the past, and can’t see how there is any kind of forgiveness for that stuff.

Well, the good news today is that there is a way to get out of your jam, get yourself forgiven and get yourself a good life. Here’s how it works…

One thing we know from recovery groups and science is that a pretty reliable way to feel better when you’re down is to go and do something that helps someone else. It could be a small one-time thing that you just happen to do while you’re shopping or something like that. Or it could be a more planned thing with a bigger impact like working the food line at a homeless shelter, packing food for starving families in another country, or volunteering in a hospital or care center. They both work! We know this for real!

So, what we can do is use what we know to help our situation when we want a good life and feel like we’re unforgivable. In that situation, we can the helpful thing we’re going to do for someone is forgive them. We can do that in a real intentional face-to-face way or over the phone, or we can do it privately without the person being present or even knowing. Either way that person coms out of the deal forgiven by you. Present or not present, a person benefits from being forgiven because their world just got a little more forgiving for them. That is helpful by any definition.

The free downloadable REACH Forgiveness Workbook from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University will guide you through the steps of making a full and lasting forgiveness for an event in your life.

When you forgive someone and are aware that you are helping that person, you should experience the benefit of that to your own feelings or mood, and how you feel about your life. You just made your life “good” and by being a forgiving person (there’s never enough forgiving people). Being, or becoming, a forgiving person is a major lifetime achievement — so congratulations! Celebrate the day that you became a forgiving person (again)!

This next part is important. The more you forgive other people, the better at it you will become, and the better your life becomes. The day will come along when it’s time to look in the mirror (maybe not literally but you know what I mean) and take another run at forgiving yourself. By that day, you’ve become pretty good at forgiving other people, you have come to know yourself to be a forgiving person, and you feel that your life reflects that in its goodness. So…all your going to do is forgive another person…and that person is you.

With all of the understanding and empathy you have picked up forgiving other people, its time to just regard yourself as another person and turn that understanding and empathy on yourself. Understand yourself and where your head was at when you did the things you wish you wouldn’t ever have done. Empathize with yourself and understand that you are the same as other people and just did what was in your head at the time back in those situations. Focus on how you’ve been forgiving people since then and that made you change and become a new forgiving person. It’s time to really be that frgiving person fully, and that means forgiving yourself.

You can use a formal process of forgiving yourself and capturing your own forgiveness of yourself in writing or with some kind of memento — even a plain old rock from your driveway will work if you decide that the rock symbolizes your full and forever forgiveness of yourself. Everett Worthington has a six-step process and workbook thful.at you may find helpful. Restore also has a process and materials that are specifically geared toward spirituality as part of the process. Whichever process you use or decide you don’t need, it’s important to capture your forgiveness of yourself formally with writing or a memento — so don’t skip that part.

Why wait another day?

One thing that can help:

If you believe in God or a Higher Power or are at least open to the possibility that there is a God or Higher Power, your whole effort will benefit from often taking a minute often to say “God, I need your help to do this, please give me what I need to get it done,” or “God, I don’t know if you’re real, but if you are, I would be grateful to get your help.” Expect good results.