We need to forgive ourselves and others for not being perfect.
Not forgiving is poison to our soul.
Forgiveness melts our heart and expands it. Holding a grudge just suffocates us with poison and contracts our heart. When our heart contracts everyone around is negatively affected. When we turn away from forgiveness we are looking for validation orrevenge and neither works. We become toxic, whether we see it or not. There’s no real justification for failing to forgive. It changes nothing. It can’t change whatever happened, whatever caused our hurt and pain. We try to attain perfection when really as humans there is no such thing.As a soul, we are already perfect; we are not broken. Our ego looks at our life’s experiences and believes that we’re broken and need to be fixed. Our ego blames others for the brokenness that it thinks it sees. With our ego in charge, we then try to fix others because we see them as the broken ones.
In truth, we are actually only seeing a reflection of ourselves. We don’t need to be fixed; we need to be healed from the belief that we are broken and flawed in the first place, or that others are broken. We must accept our feelings and be compassionate and loving towards them in order to heal them. Having feelings of hurt, sadness or anger does not mean we are broken. When we take responsibility to heal our feelings with love and compassion then we can release and let go of them. This is a difficult concept but I am going to try to explain it the best I can based on a thought that came to me recently during a meditation.
Because we have labeled traits, feelings, form and everything else as good or bad, negative or positive, pretty or ugly and so on we are assigning these labels to different parts of us whether it would be body image, thoughts, feelings or behaviors. Due to this labeling we are causing separation within us, such as: this part of me is good or this part is bad, this is acceptable and this is not.
Think of a prism and visualize that each facet is holding or reflecting a separate part of us we have deemed good or bad. We have tolerance for certain facets and not for others based upon what our ego tells us and what we have ‘learned’from our generational programming. Our job is to stop assigning labels to these facets and accept the prism as a whole. That whole piece of glass is perfect with everything in it, no matter what it is. All facets in the prism combine to make the whole, and this is the perfection.
For myself, my prism facets would include my soul, a sad part of me, a happy side, a vulnerable side, a fiery side, a responsible side, very focused, unfocused, irresponsible side, a funny side, a serious side, independent, dependent, my ego, etc.
Most of us are looking for perfection or only seeing ourselves worthy if the whole prism is reflecting only good or positive things, acceptable traits we learned from society. This will never happen because we are, of course, human. The point is that the prism is already perfect, even with the dichotomy of all the different facets of us. It gives us depth and makes us who we are.
The pressure and stress of creating and maintaining an illusion to hide what we deem as negative is killing us. You can see how this gets projected out into society when we are not tolerant of certain parts of us that do not fit into what we think of as mainstream society, what is acceptable…what we look like, what our job is, our age, disabilities, performance, abilities, etc. And then we throw in our ego with its faulty belief system and we are a mess inside. We are then creating this same mess on the outside. Seeing each of the many facets of our self as being separate and distinct, some of which are good and others bad, causes us to react internally/externally in anger, aggression, judgement, passivity, avoidance, control, self destruction, passive compliance or apathy. We are acting out of the intolerance we have for our own self. This is why there is so much hatred and anger in the world. Too many of us do not accept that we are perfect just the way we are, flaws and all. If we cannot accept ourselves how can we accept others or have tolerance for those that we see as being different from us? We are projecting our ego’s perception of our own ugliness out into the world.
