Healing Yourself with Forgiveness - 5 Tips You Need to Know
/To feel free of worry and upset you must learn how to offer yourself forgiveness. Learning forgiveness can feel confusing, even more so when you don’t feel able to let go. The power of forgiveness can be huge in releasing worries and help you to find inner calm. Live more in the moment with these 5 tips for forgiveness.
Forgiveness is an often overlooked tool for healing. When you normally think forgiveness you probably don’t think about offering it to yourself. Surprisingly enough you and the most important person in your own life and to spend time on your shortcomings would be a waste of your time. When you allow yourself to let go of your past mistakes, you can really start getting to a healthy place with yourself.
Forgiveness is the first step to growth, as you cannot expect to become a better person while still dwelling on your past. Learning to let go can help you get the most out of the relationship you have with yourself.
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1. Learn to forgive others
Sometimes it's hard to imagine being nice to ourselves when we feel unworthy of forgiveness. When we practice forgiving others it is kind of like training a muscle, and it can become easier to imagine a world where we don’t carry guilt.
Practicing forgiveness is something you can do in many ways. You can send a message, meet face to face, or even just in your own mind. Forgiveness can be as much about you as it is about others.
2. Focus on the small stuff
Instead of jumping to your worst memory or thought, try looking for a small mistake you may have made instead. It can be a lot easier to learn forgiveness when you aren’t trying to heal a major source of hurt. Pick something that you feel that you can easily separate from yourself and let it go.
Apologize to yourself for not washing the dishes or forgetting to pick up groceries. Starting with something small can help open the gate for deeper emotional healing.
3. Be aware
A major part in forgiving yourself is the awareness that you are feeling guilty or stuck in a negative thought loop. When you feel yourself getting sucked into a moment that is not the present one, take a second to reconnect by checking in with yourself. This could be done in a multitude of ways; body scan, focus on your breath, mindful meditation, etc.
By breaking the vortex that your negative thoughts can become you are breaking a pattern of thinking. Awareness is the first step to finding your source of hurt.
4. Let go
Once you are aware of what is causing you to hurt, it’s time to free yourself from it. Holding onto negative emotions will not help you get happy. Let yourself feel any emotions that come up but also be ready to let them go when they no longer serve you.
If just letting an emotion go seems difficult you can try this shower meditation. Using visualization you can learn to let your emotions wash away.
5. Be grateful
Sometimes even after letting go of a mistake, it can still seem to hang around. When you take a moment to reframe the memory you can change the feeling around it. Learn to look for the things you learned from the experience. Becoming grateful for what an experience has given you is the ultimate goal in learning to forgive yourself.
What do you need to do to get it right next time? What lesson has this experience taught you? How can you improve despite maybe screwing up?
Learn to stop feeling bad about your choices and instead start looking for the good.
When you break the cycle of anger and negativity towards yourself, you can really begin to start healing. Offering yourself forgiveness allows you to find peace with yourself and in that ultimately, happiness. The power of forgiveness allows you to live in the moment and can reframe negative experiences.
Free yourself from worries and stress by learning to forgive yourself.
