How to Let Go of Guilt
The Buddha said:
whoever has done harmful actions
but later covers them up with good,
is like the moon which freed from the clouds,
lights up the world.
To begin with,
guilt is an emotion.
A momentary emotion.
It's the indicator that you have done something
which you do not want to repeat.
The emotion of guilt,
in the momentary sense,
is meant to tell you
that you do not wish to repeat something
and that something you did or said,
is out of line with your higher-self.
We call this indicator
of your internal knowing:
Conscience.
Conscience can bring your attention
to ways in which you are out of line with your integrity,
fighting against your higher self.
It can make you aware
that you are doing something that is hurtful to yourself or others
or something that is not honoring yourself
or the universe at large.
Conscience, which is a function of the higher self,
is absent of regret.
It sees every single thing which happens
as an integral part of expansion.
And yes,
even things like the holocaust.
Let's pretend you're in a building.
Guilt is like the tear gas
which has been released,
filling up the building.
Regret is how you know
that anger and self blame
has entered the building
and is preventing you from leaving
the building.
It's keeping you imprisoned
in that tear gas.
It's keeping you inside the suffering
of that original thing (the tear gas)
which was meant to make you go away in the opposite direction
of the tear gas.
Regret introduces guilt
for the things that have happened in the past.
Which you've already acknowledged
are not things that you want to repeat.
Which is the very purpose of conscience.
Once you have acknowledged this,
the emotion of guilt serves absolutely no purpose whatsoever.
Its only purpose is to help you
discern what you would prefer.
To discern that what you have done
is not in line with what you want to do.
Once that step occurs,
there is no value in it, universally, whatsoever.
It does not keep you moving in the direction of positive change,
it keeps you trapped in guilt.
We have an issue in the English language.
Quite often, we have a minimal amount of words
to convey what we're describing.
That's why when we usually use the word guilt,
we're not actually referring to the momentary emotion of guilt.
So when I am going to talk about guilt throughout this video,
I'm not referring to the momentary emotion
which is a function of conscience.
I'm not referring to guilt as it stands as:
This moment,
this emotion is indicating
that's something that I've done or said
is out of line with my higher self.
When I refer to guilt throughout this video,
I'm referring to the self regulation system
of blame and of self punishment
or self abuse,
that keeps you locked in this emotion
that we call guilt.
So it's the regulation of self blame and self punishment
that I'm going to be calling guilt throughout this video.
Step 1. to letting go of guilt, is realization.
Understand, what guilt is,
understand how it begins,
understand what it does.
You have to have the realization
that it is causing harm and not good,
before you are able to release guilt.
You have to realize
that guilt is not serving your highest good.
It is self abuse.
Realize that guilt and shame are negative emotions
that are fueled by negative thoughts
and they do not help you go in the direction of where you want to go.
Step 2.
Decide you are ready,
wanting and willing to let go of guilt.
As much as guilt may be the one shred of evidence
causing you to feel your own goodness,
you have to be willing to let go of it.
Because it's doing more harm than it is good.
I say this all the time,
but we have to be ready and willing to let go of something,
before we're actually going to let go of it.
So that decision is paramount to letting go of guilt.
Step 3. is:
Replace the belief that you deserve punishment,
and you deserve to suffer, and that you don't deserve happiness,
and you don't deserve love,
with the belief that you deserve
to be loved and to be happy.
To do this, you can look back at the video which I've made
about how to change a belief.
Start working on those beliefs.
The subject of deserving
is really a video in and of itself,
and so be on the lookout for that because I'm going to do
a video on deserving, in the future.
Step 4.
Take responsibility only for what is
your responsibility in a situation.
Taking responsibility is not shame.
It is understanding.
It is not owning up to the blame
for what happened,
it's owning up to the responsibility
to change in the future.
In other words,
it's owning up to the responsibility
of saying or doing or thinking
something differently in the future,
and thus changing future events.
5.
Take off the Rosy color sunglasses
when you are looking for ways that the past could have been different.
Guilt is fueled by looking back on a situation
and seeing options that either weren't there
or which we had no access to at the time.
It's easy to look back on a situation which occurred in the past,
with the benefit of our current knowledge.
I'm going to use an example
of someone who I've counseled in the past with guilt,
to demonstrate what I mean by:
"Using rosy colored glasses"
to look back at the past.
There is a woman I counseled whose husband was an alcoholic.
When she puts on her rosy colored retrospective glasses,
she thinks:
if only I'd gotten him to treatment,
the marriage could have been saved and everything would have been rosy.
So she comes to the conclusion
that she had obviously been too weak
or stupid to get her husband the treatment he needed,
and like a bad bad wife,
she is responsible for ending the marriage.
And of course, is responsible
for depriving her children of a father.
Here is what her rosy colored retrospective glasses
will not let her see:
1.
She didn't know that her husband was an alcoholic
until they'd been divorced for several years.
She just thought that he drank a lot.
2.
Even if she had known,
her husband would never have consented to treatment at that time.
In fact, his willingness to undergo rehab several years later,
was in no small part,
due to the fact that he had lost his entire family.
In other words, he had to go through this journey
on his own, in his own pace, in order to be ready to release
his own pain.
Her leaving might have actually saved his life.
Looking back, she sees the option of reconciliation
The fact that she had tried again and again
to make the marriage work, before finally,
and only after having exhausted every other option she could think of,
decided to leave,
that has gotten blocked out
by the rosy colored hindsight glasses.
But the truth is that the option of making it work
was no longer on the table
at the time of the she got divorced.
When she got her divorce,
the idea of therapy was not public,
it was something you did only if you were insane,
or at least completely unable to function in normal society.
It was not something which was considered normal for people to do.
So the idea of therapy,
hadn't even occurred to her at the time.
The truth is that the option of therapy,
as it stands today,
simply didn't exist back then.
She is feeling guilty for not choosing options
that weren't actually there at the time.
She is holding herself responsible
for knowing what she didn't know.
No one can win with those expectations.
The bar is literally unreachable.
This is the perfect breeding ground for guilt.
Look back at what you're using
your rosy colored sunglasses to see,
and start refuting the evidence you've come up with.
In other words,
look for ways to refute the "if onlys".
Apologize to anyone that you feel like you've hurt in the past.
Especially if this person is yourself.
If you offer sincere apology,
that can bring you a long way
towards releasing the resistance you have
towards your actions and words in the past.
It's really hard to let go of guilt,
when someone else is hurting.
So offer a sincere apology
where you make it understood,
what you would have done different,
had you known what you know now.
If the person or animal
or thing is not around to apologize to,
or if you simply don't feel like you're ready to address them,
then you can take a piece of paper out
and write down a letter to them,
expressing your apologies.
And then you can go outside somewhere, that's safe,
and you can burn this message.
And as you watch it burn, you can reaffirm to yourself:
"I am ready to let go of the self punishment and self blame
and move in the direction of something that's different."
And state what it is you're ready to move in the direction of.
state your new intention.
Now that I've lost track of the bullet points that we're on,
We're back to number 7.
So hopefully you can fill in the blanks as to what the previous steps were.
I'm sorry I didn't mention the numbers.
But step seven is:
make a new plan
for how you will do things in your life now,
and in the future.
If you don't have a new plan
for how you will behave differently the next time,
it's really hard to change your behavior.
You might keep making the same mistake over and over again.
This is making a subconscious process, conscious.
Guilt exists to tell you what you would prefer to do or say.
And so to make this conscious,
you want to really look for what it is
that the guilt is telling you that you should do or say.
The point of letting go of guilt is not to accumulate more guilt,
it's to allow yourself to start fresh,
with a new perspective.
8.
Recognize the value in mistakes.
Unless you knew what you don't want,
you would not know what you want.
Unless you knew what didn't work,
you would not know what does work.
And so, mistakes are incredibly valuable to this universe.
The universe would not have a world free of mistakes,
because mistakes are integral to the expansion,
not only of you, but of this universe.
When mistakes turn into suffering,
is when we make mistakes part of blame and self punishment.
We introduce shame and self punishment
into the equation of a mistake,
instead of understanding and taking it as a lesson.
9.
Discover all of the assumptions and judgments
that you're making based on the situation
which is causing you to feel guilt.
A lot of times our extreme negative emotion
has more to do with the judgments we make about ourselves
based on what we feel guilty for,
than it does the actual guilt.
What I mean is this:
You could be a person who has stolen something.
Now, stealing something,
you could feel that momentary pain emotion of guilt,
which is causing you to know that stealing things
is out of line with your higher self.
But what causes you to really suffer
as a result of that action,
is the fact that you're thinking a thought like this:
"People who steal things are bad people."
"I have stolen something, which means that I am bad."
So the belief that I am bad,
is really what's causing you that extreme negative emotion.
So try to figure out what assumptions
and what judgments you're making
based on the guilt which you are experiencing,
given what you have said or done.
And take time to shift those beliefs.
Those judgments and assumptions about yourself
really keep you completely prisoner
to the circumstance.
They don't allow you to change.
We may have done bad things,
we may regret them now, and we may vow never to repeat them.
But doing those bad things does not mean
that we inherently are bad.
A person's actions are different than who they really are.
10.
Guilt is the opposite of self-love.
So what should we do if we're trying to dissolve
the vibration of guilt?
Come up with ways to reinforce the vibration of self-love.
Guilt makes us a match to doing more things
and meeting more people who reinforce guilt with us.
So,
what do you do when this self abuse of ego
is running the show with guilt?
Show yourself love and care
and discover how to be your own friend.
Look inward and see that you are in need of loving kindness yourself.
Counter that self hate with self-love.
Whatever that might look like to you.
That might look like taking a bath,
writing affirmations,
doing some mirror work,
watching a movie that makes you feel good about yourself,
or doing a self-love visualization.
If we have problems showing our self love,
it's because we don't think we deserve it.
Humans have a problem,
thinking they deserve anything.
Because we've been taught that to deserve is to be entitled.
So it's understandable,
if you're trying to show yourself love,
and you have felt guilty for doing something,
that it sort of feels like
you're rewarding, instead of punishing the bad deed that you have done.
But this is not the way that the universe works vibrationally.
If you're able to work yourself into a vibration of self-love,
you can't do anything,
you can't even be inspired towards anything
that would cause you to feel guilt,
or cause you to cause harm on anybody else.
So getting yourself into the vibration of self-love is paramount,
in terms of not making any "mistakes"
that you might feel guilty for later.
Step 11.
Ironic number don't you think?
Step 11.
Which is the last step,
is to forgive yourself.
Understand that every person on this earth
always makes the best decision they can,
given the perspective,
information and knowledge that they have,
from where they are.
In other words,
everyone does what they think is right in the very moment.
Because of the way that we are societally told to punish ourselves,
we hold guilt
for choices we made,
given options that did not exist at the time.
You cannot judge your past self,
based on today's
expanded perspective.
You also can't love yourself and not forgive yourself at the same time.
You can't have a happy life
and not forgive yourself.
To expect to live a happy life,
while you're holding yourself a prisoner to guilt,
is the same as saying:
"No, it's possible to be happy
even though I'm beating myself up every day."
Forgiveness is the practice of making peace with where you are,
thereby releasing you from the bondage
which is keeping you from moving forward
and from happiness.
In true forgiveness the negative emotion no longer exists.
Forgiveness is letting go
of what is holding you back, once you are aware of it,
so you can turn in the direction of what you would prefer
as well as discontinue carrying the past into the present.
Every single piece of release and bliss
is found in the alteration of the point of view
you are holding about a subject.
I'm here to tell you today
that if you are able to alter your point of view,
that you are beating yourself up with,
there will no longer be something
which is beating you up.
When you're able to shift your perspective,
relative to what you're beating yourself up with,
there will not be the emotion of guilt present within your reality anymore.
So ultimately,
the moral of this story is,
to release and let go of guilt, you have to shift your perspective
relative to past events.
Have good week.
Subtitles by: Tanya Duarte www.tanyaduarte.com