How to be free of guilt

Guilt is very destructive. It reduces your self-respect and undermines your relationship with yourself. It makes you feel undeserving and shrinks your capacity to receive. It takes away your confidence and fuels the deeper core issues that destroy love and sabotage your life.

Being free of guilt is very important. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to do. It’s easy because guilt is never, never caused by what we did. Guilt is something that we add later with the benefit of hindsight. It is only when we see the consequences of our actions that we add guilt.

Select a guilt from your life. Then go back in time to the moment you did whatever you did. At that moment, didn’t you have a very particular state of mind and didn’t you see life in a very particular way?

Now notice what would have happened if you knew then what you know today. Wouldn’t you have acted in a very different way? Of course you would, but you didn’t now then what you know today. You only knew what you knew. Even if you knew that you shouldn’t do what you did, your knowledge wasn’t enough to change your actions, and you certainly didn’t know the consequences like you do now.

So here is the big question: are you willing to forgive yourself for not knowing and for not being wiser and more aware? You might as well. If you look, you were doing the very best you could with the very limited awareness and ability that you had at the time.

So forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for not being wiser and more aware. Forgive yourself for acting totally consistent with your limited ability and forgive yourself for any damage that may have been caused by your actions. Making mistakes is part of the human process. This is how we learn. Every time you make a mistake, you become wiser and more aware. So forgive yourself and allow yourself to be human.

It is possible to release all guilt in a moment. Sometimes it takes longer. Sometimes you need to release it over time by declaring, “I forgive myself. I did the best I could with my limited awareness.” Every time the guilt comes up, forgive yourself again. Eventually, the guilt will be gone forever.

If you have trouble releasing a guilt, you are probably dealing with the avoided hurt of feeling worthless, not good enough, failure, or some other core issue. If you have a guilt or something from your past that affects your life today, give me a call. We can make an appointment and I can walk you through the healing process.