Lesson 1: Let’s admit it! Your negative self-issues block your ability to create your dreams
“Forgive Yourself and Start Fresh
by Mary Hayes Grieco
Lesson 1: Let’s admit it! Your negative self-issues block your ability to create your dreams
If you have negative self-issues – guilt, shame, resentment, a bad self-image, or unfinished painful stories – they are like a block in your spiritual system, and they prevent you from creating positive new things for yourself.
A number of self-issues combine and stagnate to form a block inside you; they plug up the “pipeline” between your soul and personality. You lose your sense of being in the flow, and you feel stuck. These old issues are burdens that weigh on your heart, and make you feel alone and separate from others, and from the Source of life itself.
How do you know that you are unhappy because of an issue that requires you to forgive yourself? There are certain obvious signs: continuous indulgence in a destructive addiction, depression, and thoughts and statements of self-loathing that you think or say.
It’s not hard to see in these cases that you are punishing yourself. The question is, why? It’s worth doing some inner investigation to discover what issue or issues in the back of the mind are driving this kind of self-torment. There are other obvious signs that you feel unworthy: like the habit of not allowing others to be generous to you, and avoiding caring relationships that would enhance your life.
Did you ever ask yourself why you deprive yourself of nice things? Just take a moment now to think of a few privileges and adventures that will be pleasurable, empowering, and just plain good for you. Is there any reason you don’t do those things, except for the reason that you are still running low on self-love?
Journal Reflections: (Printable worksheet from “Materials” tab)
I wish I would stop saying this to myself:
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I wish I felt deserving enough to let myself have or enjoy:
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In her book, Guilt is the Teacher, Love is the Lesson, Joan Borysenko gives us some more clues that indicate if you are unconsciously caught in guilt and shame:
I’m over committed.
I really know how to worry.
I’m a compulsive helper.
I’m always apologizing for myself.
I wake up anxious and I can be anxious for weeks.
I always blame myself.
I worry about what other people think of me.
I am not as good as people think I am.
I’m a perfectionist.
I hate to take any assistance or ask for any help.
I can’t say no.
If you are in the habit of one of these behaviors, you might be driven by a self-forgiveness issue.
How do you know you have some personal housecleaning to do?
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Take a moment to FEEL your blocked and stagnant energy; let it get bigger inside you, and let it reveal more of its effects on you:
Physically:
Emotionally:
Mentally:
Spiritually:
Your blocks, continued.
Do you feel like something broke something inside you, a while back?
That happens to all of us at some point – it’s the human situation. Fortunately, that brokenness is not permanent, and everything can heal, well enough for us to be useful and happy again. You are not uniquely ruined!
I hope you enjoy this great little piece by Anne Lamott, author of Plan B, Bird by Bird, and Help, Thanks, Wow!
“You will go through your life thinking there was a day in second grade that you must have missed, when the grown-ups came in and explained everything important to other kids.
They said, ‘Look, you’re human, you’re going to feel isolated and afraid a lot of the time, and have bad self-esteem, and feel uniquely ruined, but here is the magic phrase that will take this feeling away. It will be like a feather that will lift you out of that fear and self-consciousness every single time, all through your life.’
And then they told the children who were there that day the magic phrase that everyone else in the world knows about and uses when feeling blue, which only you don’t know, because you were home sick the day the grown-ups told the children the way the whole world works.
But there was not such a day in school. No one got the instructions. That is the secret of life. Everyone is flailing around, winging it most of the time, trying to find the way out, or through, or up, without a map.
This lack of instruction manual is how most people develop compassion, and how they figure out to show up, care, help and serve, as the only way of filling up and being free.
Otherwise you grow up to be someone who needs to dominate and shame others so no one will know that you weren’t there the day the instructions were passed out.”
AFFIRMATION:
Say this out loud:
“The blocks in my system are going to easily dissolve and leave me soon.”
VISUALIZE:
Visualize your soul like a serene sun shining over your head, about a foot above you.
In your mind, see a channel or a pipeline connecting you to your soul; it is partially occluded with dark old energy.
Imagine light from your soul seeping into the channel (like spiritual Drano!) loosening the blocked energy so it can begin to break up and flow freely in the coming 21 days.
Congratulate yourself on getting started.