Merry Christmas and wishing you and your family the Happiest of Holidays!

In honor of this blessed season of celebration, today's topic is The Healing Power of Forgiveness...

There is no more effective way to heal your past and support your relationships to thrive than by forgiving.

It is critical that you begin this healing process by forgiving yourself. All human beings make mistakes and the tragedy is not in making the mistake but in not having learned from it. And it’s never too late to do so.

Part of the challenge is how most people relate to mistakes and problems. In our culture, we have determined that challenges of any nature are bad and that we shouldn’t make mistakes. With this limiting paradigm, we have very little room to risk, take chances and aggressively pursue our dreams and honor our values.

The concern of avoiding mistakes at all cost has us needlessly resign ourselves to a life that is less than ideal. If you can’t afford to make a mistake, you won’t have the freedom to grow, expand out of your comfort zone and achieve greatness. Consider adopting the perspective that everyone who lives makes mistakes and that the greatest mistake you can make is to have mistakes crush your spirit and steal your fervor for accessing the best that life has to offer. If you view mistakes as an essential component of your evolution, you will see that they actually support you to see things differently. As you continue to learn from your mistakes, your awareness will increase and you will be less likely to repeat these same mistakes.

Powerful people focus not on avoiding mistakes but on living their commitments instead. Embrace mistakes, learn from each one and look forward to the insights and gifts that are sure to come from experiencing future mistakes. By shifting your relationship to mistakes and overcoming your fear of making them, you can move on with your life in a powerful manner. You can expect to make more mistakes, encounter many more challenges and grow from each enriching experience. So, acknowledge yourself for having learned some extremely valuable lessons from your mistakes.

We all do the best we can to not only survive but to actually thrive as we go about our daily lives. We all instinctively seek pleasure and avoid pain. Based upon the limited perspective people have as imperfect creatures, we will err from time to time. So have compassion for your human weaknesses and adopt this same attitude toward others. Everything is important and nothing matters so much that you should choose the alternative to risking intelligently. Avoiding growth and risk would mean the death of your spirit and result in the resignation that comes with living in fear and playing not to lose instead of to win. Know that you are often your own harshest critic. When you judge yourself to be bad and unworthy of love and life’s greatest pleasures, you will manifest a negative, destructive energy that ensures this be so. Your self-esteem will suffer to the extent you maintain your right to punish yourself for past weaknesses and mistakes. You will tend to attract the negative energy you put out into the world. By failing to forgive yourself, you will block the loving energy that cleanses your soul and allows you to share your greatest gift with others, the gift of being the best you can be.

By stubbornly keeping your critical self-judgments and the self-anger that accompanies these in place, you will avoid responsibility for making your relationships stronger and your life work most advantageously. Doing so allows you to shirk liability for your communication. When you stay angry with yourself and keep active an unhealthy level of self-pity for your faults, this distracts you from getting on with your life and cleaning up your mess!

It’s a lot more difficult to forgive and give up being a victim. Forgiving enables you to proactively get about the business of making your life and relationships flourish rather than keep the downward spiral of self-incrimination and blaming others alive.

Making mistakes is part of the human condition. It has nothing to do with the worthiness of you as a person. It also has no bearing on the healthy unconditional self-acceptance essential to high self-esteem. Taking responsibility for your excellence means committing to no longer act in a manner consistent with your past mistakes, but to learn from them instead.

You’ll find that you hate those things about others that you hate most about yourself. Forgiving yourself is the first step in clearing the way to forgive others. By forgiving yourself, the toxic resentment that consumes your spirit and destroys self-esteem will give way to the self-love that precedes forgiving and loving others.

Waiting for others to initiate reconciliation will not support your relationships, health or self-image. Healing your troubled past will come from the empathy you get by putting yourself in the other person’s world and understanding why that person may have acted as he did.

By being the first to forgive others, you can pave a new road to a future based upon love rather than anger. Anger results from your interpretations about what was done, not the actions themselves. Forgiving will make you the champion and designer of your future self...in a way you can feel good about who you are. Likewise, there may be some people who you have wronged. See if there is anything you can do to make amends for hurting others with your past behavior. Clean up misspoken words and acknowledge mistakes. Acknowledge the casual promises that you blew off as being unimportant. Offer a sincere apology if you have erred and commit to make things right and repair the damaged relationship, if possible.

Your reparation should be appropriate for the damage you caused and directed at the person harmed. When you actively accept responsibility for your part in failed communication or a wounded relationship, you will act with the courage to make things right. This commitment blazes a trail to a new way of being. When you apologize for past mistakes and take appropriate action to clean up the mess created, you’ll take responsibility for your part by giving a 100 percent effort toward healing the relationship. No matter how the other person chooses to respond, take comfort in knowing that you have done whatever you could to repair the harm. It will support you to be committed to healing the relationship without an attachment to having the other person respond in kind. By showing a willingness to repair the situation to the best of your ability, you will have done your part to initiate a healing of the relationship. Keep the door open to communication, congratulate yourself for courageously taking action in the direction of completion and get on with your life. When you have done everything you can to right a past indiscretion, it will not support you to continue to berate yourself about what was done. We all make mistakes. All we can ask of ourselves is to continue to learn from our actions, commit to honoring others and take responsibility for being the person we declare ourselves to be.

Again, this does not excuse hurtful or wrongful action. It simply means acting from love upon realizing one has caused another pain or loss. With this foundation of love, you are now free to declare who you are to the world rather than have resentment dictate your reactions.

Your attachment to making yourself and others wrong will fade and a commitment to deliberately designing the person you have decided to be will be possible. Miracles will manifest and your self-image and personal power will soar.

Let’s now look at some exercises you can do to practice forgiveness...
 

1. List all the items for which you have not yet forgiven yourself and others.

For more wisdom to live your best life and/or to learn more about becoming a Certified Life Optimization Coach, go here now and save 97% (Holiday Special)!

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays,

Joe

Dr. Joe Rubino