(kate jarman paintings in Rue)
Are you regretting something right now? Or have past regrets sort of seeped into your days and colored your perception of yourself?
Today, the de-cluttering Feng Shui is all about letting go of self-judgement that keeps those regrets very prominent in mind, weighing down the present and limiting the future.
We do things, we realize that later maybe they weren’t the optimal things, maybe not the best choices, and then…suddenly… there’s a regret. Or, five or ten years later there’s a regret.
I wish I didn’t…
If only I knew…
If I didn’t screw up…
I have stood idle for years in regret for things I did, waiting to be somehow cosmically absolved of my wrongs. It was as though: I couldn’t trust myself, I questioned my judgement to a point of demanding only right choices moving forward and, when you’re deadlocked in these expectations, it’s so hard to move ahead with anything.
After all, I realized if I did nothing I certainly couldn’t screw up anything, right?
I also got nothing done!
Regret and the shame I carried around privately did something interesting in my life: it kept the situations I wanted to avoid on a cycle of repeat.
Until I really could let this stuff go, I felt like I was destined to repeat the same patterns despite my best intentions.
Regret and all the shame were like a magnet, drawing to me everything I didn’t want.
Over and over again.
Have you been there?
I realized that at some point I’d have to let this go. After all, how much could I condemn myself for mistakes, judgement calls that weren’t the greatest… and how much could I let this become my future?
A few things I realized, and later saw in hundreds of clients lives in their own ways…
I often did the best I could at the level of understanding and awareness I had at the time. How could I penalize myself for not learning the lesson I could only really learn “after” screwing up?! Now I’m not quick to judge people for their mistakes. I used to be as hard on everyone else as I was on myself, and that caused it’s own problems.
Self-forgiveness is so important. I didn’t know how to forgive myself because it seemed to me that if I let myself “off the hook” for the things that I’d screwed up that I would probably repeat them again. Self-punishment wasn’t very effective a way to live. It made me feel smaller, more ashamed and very stuck in limited “safe” options for everything in the future. It made me feel super undeserving.
THIS powerful forgiveness technique has helped me so much, if you’re having trouble forgiving yourself it may be helpful to you, too.
Get a lesson. The lessons are the reason I fear much less now than ever before. It’s all either a lesson or a success, and nothing is failure. Sometimes it takes a while to learn the lesson.
Seven years ago I ignored my doctor’s & my own best judgement and made questionable decisions that led to two weeks in the hospital and a good 6 months recovering at home. I had a hard time forgiving myself. And I talked to my mom every day, like I never had before, for hours, for six months. It was truly unforgettable and so healing. And then, when I was well, weeks later, she suddenly died.
It took me months to realize that had I not been so sick, I would not have had those six months of hours and hours of all-day conversations. I wouldn’t have learned all that I did. And, I had to forgive myself for getting sick and allowing myself to fall so far physically, as it was an odd and enormous blessing in disguise.
Make up for things as much as you can. You might not be able to right every wrong perfectly. The vase may not be able to be glued together again. Someone may choose to not forgive you. But you can still try to make things karmically right. Extend yourself in any and every way possible to right things that went wrong. In AA and other 12 Step Programs it’s a period of making amends. It’s pretty powerful stuff. In my experience, it makes all of the above a whole lot easier.
Of course this isn’t the fullest picture. There are more circumstances, nuances and we all have our own karma… but it can be a jumping off point to start clearing that heavy weight of regret, freeing the future in expansive ways.
xoxo Dana
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