DAY 1 I Forgive Myself

Today’s Forgiveness Practice is all about forgiving YOU. This is by far the most self-loving, self-honoring, self-affirming gift you can offer yourself. It is the logical place to start because self-forgiveness opens the heart and the mind to greater possibilities. In addition, not until you have forgiven yourself will you have the courage and compassion to forgive anyone else. You cannot unsee what you have seen. You cannot unhear what you have heard. What you can do, however, is stop wishing that what has happened had not happened. For this reason, I think of forgiveness as a “spiritual laxative”—it eliminates long-held mental and emotional toxins. Regardless of how bad, wrong, or unforgivable you or your behavior has been, you deserve to be and can be forgiven. No matter how hard, challenging, frightening, unjust, or difficult an experience may seem, self forgiveness is the path to recognizing that everything is just as it needs to be and was just as it needed to be in order for us to heal, grow, and learn. That’s just the way the universe works.