Hello to you. I hope this letter finds you on your own path of self alignment. I hope that your journey is humbling in the most healing ways. I know that the road is winding and bumpy and sometimes treacherous. The only way through, is through. Though we might get completely stuck and unstuck countless times.
I am writing to you from my living room, on the couch, posted up next to my 6 year old. She is home from school sick for the second day this week. Even after having a mental health family day on Monday, I kept her home again. Though we are not in traditional school right now we are learning deeply from our earth and family school. We are both sick with colds and giving ourselves the grace of a break, regardless of school attendance and outward studio productivity.
I have been learning through the roads and modes it is necessary to have grace for yourself. I forget this all too often, then I return and remember the grace and forgiveness I can give myself. It has been a hard lesson for me to learn, the one of compassion for yourself within the failings and the humanity of the process of living and being human. Without grace and compassion the road of living leads to a cliff you want to jump off of. Without forgiveness, there can be a whole lot of self bullying and shaming for the past mistakes and missteps. My path has looked like a grappling match with my own self and though I wish it was different, this is my journey to take and to learn from however hardheaded and bruised I am along the way.
Can we forgive ourselves?
We can forgive ourselves. Can’t we? Full on self forgiveness on a spiritual level, on a soul level, on an individual knowing plane?
I have been thinking a lot about what it means to have self forgiveness. What it means to forgive the worst parts of ourselves. Those ones we have worked so hard to hide and to fix and all the ways unconscious reaction and actions around it. Are we able to forgive them?
These ugly parts we do not wish to show others in fears of rejection and misunderstanding come from a deep place within us. An old story retelling of rejection, causing me to reject myself and take my own role in self abandonment? And the outcome of that self abandonment is closing off to authentic connection needed to thrive.
Ive written about embracing the mistakes but what about forgiving the mistakes?
Within each mistake we make is the effort to try something new. To try a new way of doing things. Inherently, mistakes are how we(how I) learn so to berate and bully ourselves for these mistakes does so much more harm to us than the good of accepting, learning and growing from these mistakes.
I believe self forgiving ourselves has to be a conscious practice for many. To recognize ourselves in our efforts to unfold and be whole and that the effort is something to be proud of even when it results in unsavory outcomes.
Sometimes our mistakes of seen in real time. With my art practice it is an instant noticing of a wobbly stroke or a wrong color choice. I can see it. But when mistakes have to do with our own lives and actions we take, it is hard to see ourselves clearly. We can become mired in stories and comparisons. A fog of unworthiness can set in so dense it creates fear. Our minds can either direct us into this muddled way of thinking or it can help to stop the forward trajectory into the abyss and instead create a unique vehicle to fly us overhead to see the bigger picture.
How do we find the pathways to build this flying machine of observation?
Unrelenting effort, yes. Presence, yet. Mindfullness and a slower pace, yes. Meditation and journaling. Etc etc. There are so many tools we have available to try out, to experiment with.
What works and what doesn’t is individual and can only be felt from within.
For me, I have tried an exhaustive list of modalities to rewire the paths that put me into the fog and keep me there. To this day, I still get a bit sticky but in a new trial, I have found greater access to what my brain intellectually knows and the relationship to how my body responds to certain situations.
I will say that this new trial, I believe, has only been as successful as it has been because of all the inner work I have already done through other modalities and the consistent effort to learn and understand myself on a soul level.
Micro Dosing psilocybin, for me, has been an effective way to break through the deepest veils of unconscious behaviors. For me, this earth medicine has disturbed the unconscious behaviors and patterns, loosened them just enough for me to see them clearly and to be able to make real time decisions to change the reaction/response.
I want to note that this might not be everyones answer but I will stand by the fact that the experience of micro dosing 4 days on and 3 days off for 6 weeks has been transformational in the way I see myself, my past behaviors and the way I can recognize a more healthy, grounded in self path forward.
Retroactive Forgiveness
Using this medicine however has also given way to the awareness of ALL OF THE WAYS I have created my own suffering throughout the course of my life. Past experiences and relationship issues have become clear and my part in creating that suffering brought to the open page.
This has been the most enlightening part of the experience. Being able to look at myself with a more rational critical eye. An honest perception in comparison to a biassed one. Biasses and perceptions of self that were once the way I saw things, now made to be utterly faulty but in that belief system, so many mistakes were made. Feeling were hurt and relationships ended. The way I perceived others and myself and the relationship between the two; I had created my own hell.
But here is where the beauty is. It is in the self forgiveness because I was doing the best I could in the ways I understood at the time. I could not have known better. I was trying to survive. To self protect. To find my truth and my place in this whole human experiment. I did the best I could and my subconscious took the wheel.
I have numbed and buffered myself, cutting my own self off from real connection. I have avoided connection and community for fear of rejection for my own humanity which I was the one rejecting. I became toxic to myself in my ways of “go it along” and pride in my own isolated independence. I have abandoned myself in hopes of making those connections and in turn shut down the parts of myself that would actually create authentic whole connection.
I see my errors. Can I forgive myself for those errors and move forward in this new awareness. Can I retroactively forgive myself for my past wholly and fully so that I can move forward and allow all my humanity to come to the forefront without feeling the needs to avoid, hide or reject myself?
Yes. And in that forgiveness is the biggest sigh of relief that can be nothing short of a god source within me. A freedom of self within the whole.
Who gives me the right to forgive myself?
I grew up in a religious household. One that held the Bible and the savior of Jesus as the source of God. The way to forgiveness was through prayer. Because, as I was told, we are all sinners and flawed. This is true, we are all flawed but does being “flawed” make us unworthy or just human? What I do not agree with is that we have to pray to someone or some thing else outside of us. Even through the channel of “accepting god into your heart” you are still separate from god.
I believe that “God” is source. Source is within each of us at the start but we have to remember. We have to remember we are innately connected and make that contact conscious to know it to be true. I left the church when I was 17 or so though I was never really in it totally. Never really grasping the concept of a god outside of me. It never made sense. I became atheist and then agnostic and then my world exploded. And then I found….her.
She is me and the inner voice that has kept me alive through the last three years. She is the intuition that guides me. She is the source. And She is God. She is simply my higher self and when I embody that knowing and spirit I am the most whole and honest version of myself.
Let me be clear. I, myself, am not god. But god or source is within me if I listen closely in the silence. If I listen to the stirrings of expansion and acceptance. If I listen to the dark and the light and the wisdom that both create.
If then, we believe that God is source and source is within each of us, we then, have the power to fully spiritually forgive ourselves. In connection through the body to a source greater than us.
What this has felt like to me is acceptance of my whole self. A subject I wrote about twice a year ago, Radical Acceptance. Which now seems quite uninformed of what it actually meant to accept myself.
It feels like I can breathe and see life more clearly. Because I have seen all my light and all my darkest parts and forgiven myself for ever pushing them away. It is counter to my old unconscious beliefs, that I now insist on holding myself up in my darkness and looking it square in the eye as a teacher instead of something to run away from.
It is in the forgiveness of self that we can forgive others. It is compassion, that only can be given out it that same compassion is given to oneself.
They say you can only love someone to the extent that you truly love yourself and I find that to be true. Because It I don’t love my failures as part of my human experience and see that they are not me but happening through me, then how can I love another knowing that who they are is not tied to their own failure and unawareness.
We are doing the best we can within our own point on the self awareness spiral.
So I will put it to you dear reader. Can you forgive yourself for being human? In the mistakes and missteps along the way of uncovering your truest selt? Can we see these moments as opportunities to see ourselves more clearly and know that we were always doing the best we could?
Can we forgive our self for the years we spent hiding and avoiding?
Can we forgive our self for the art we were too afraid to make?
For the poem we never wrote?
Can we forgive our self for all the times we created our own suffering?
Can we forgive our self for the friendships that ended? The misunderstandings that happened when we know we were the ones not giving what we so desperately were wanting to receive?
Can we forgive our self for our own fears?
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The last few weeks I have been having an internal reckoning. A reintroduction to my own personal authority and source in the most clarity then I have had in my whole life. Whether through time or by the planetary transits or through plant medicine, I am grateful.
Now comes the rest…the actual rest and rest of the journey in full responsibility. I know what I know and I cannot unknow it. I cannot go back and unsee all the ways I created my own hell and I sure as hell don’t want to go back there.
This is where we start to climb. Putting right effort in front of right effort in the direction of my own north star, guided by the cosmos within and without my physical body.
This where I can truly expand out because I know where we came from. I reckoned with my darkness and continue to see myself and the world more clearly. Though complicated as the matrix of our inner and outer world is. We move forward in forgiveness.
Because we are all doing the best we can.
In Reverence for the Journey,
Rae
Self bullying and shaming, ooooofff, I feel that viscerally in the body. And then the shame of feeling it kicks in too. And then it is up to me to bring us all back to unity, the mind, body and soul. But as you said, the knocks can be hard to take. The bruises often run deep. Breath has been the key of love, grace, forgiveness and compassion for me. Funny, the intellectual self-awareness modalities on their own could not get me here because of that disconnect of the body, mind and soul. And yet, it is a practice, a lifelong practice to keep returning to that inner presence that knows. ❤️❤️❤️