Are you hard on yourself?

Another article by Rick Hanson, this time about forgiving yourself. First Hanson tells us why we should forgive ourselves and then tells us how. An excerpt:

Everyone messes up. Me, you, the neighbors, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi, King David, the Buddha, everybody.

It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical.

Inside the mind are many sub-personalities. For example, one part of me might set the alarm clock for 6 am to get up and exercise . . . and then when it goes off, another part of me could grumble: “Who set the darn clock?” More broadly, there is a kind of inner critic and inner protector inside each of us. For most people, that inner critic is continually yammering away, looking for something, anything, to find fault with. It magnifies small failings into big ones, punishes you over and over for things long past, ignores the larger context, and doesn’t credit you for your efforts to make amends.

Therefore, you really need your inner protector to stick up for you: to put your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective, to highlight your many good qualities surrounding your lapses, to encourage you to keep getting back on the high road even if you’ve gone down the low one, and – frankly – to tell that inner critic to Shut Up.

With the support of your inner protector, you can see your faults clearly with fearing that will drag you into a pit of feeling awful, clean up whatever mess you’ve made as best you can, and move on. The only wholesome purpose of guilt, shame, or remorse is learning – not punishment! – so that you don’t mess up in that way again. Anything past the point of learning is just needless suffering. Plus excessive guilt, etc., actually gets in the way of you contributing to others and helping make this world a better place, by undermining your energy, mood, confidence, and sense of worth.

Seeing faults clearly, taking responsibility for them with remorse and making amends, and then coming to peace about them: this is what I mean by forgiving yourself. http://www.rickhanson.net/just-one-t...rgive-yourself

Negative chatter impedes growth. Forgiving yourself frees you to pursue your goals in life.

nope, live in the moment..only way to live

Amen to that, brother. Or sister. I'm not entirely sure...

what i liked about that article is the discussion of what i call "facets of self" ,, we all have them, i believe. it's important to allow oneself to be multi-faceted, and not suppressed, allowing things to arise and pass away naturally, rather than grabbing and clinging onto one's favorite, or least favorite, self. it was somewhat recently that i decided to put my self-critical and self-abusive facets in the background, and lighten up ... it has been wonderful, like pain pills,, such relief. i recommend it to everyone~
best wishes, Gus

"Negative chatter impedes growth. Forgiving yourself frees you to pursue your goals in life." quote from above

I have to remember this every day, lately there has been way to much negetive, I have to remember this lately I have been very provoked needlessly.

Open Eyes