forgiveness – A Dog and Her Girl

June 4, 2025

Try this: validate your shame.

You don’t need to agree with the voice to validate the emotion.

The “Emotions Wheel” has “ashamed” in the category of sadness. If I sit and feel into it, it’s fear, sadness, and anger combined. Then, there’s usually emotions under that, as the inner shamer is different from the part being shamed.

Honestly, the story you’re living in, the story that you’re broken or not enough, is really hard. And the shamer is just doing what it knows how to do.

We always do our best with the skills we have. If you dig into it just a bit, you’ll most likely realize that your inner shamer sounds a lot like one of your parents, enhanced by some other mean voices you’ve heard on TV.

The experiences and voices of others that gave birth to your inner shamer are most likely not from super memorable situations. It could be a small thing that felt really big and confusing in your little body.

For example, when I was a little kid and I said something “bad”, I would get my mouth washed out with soap. This might sound extreme now, or you might think, “why didn’t your parents just have your brush your teeth or use mouthwash?”, but this was fairly common in the 90s. Now, I was a really good little kid… and I was a kid. I can’t remember what I would have said, it just couldn’t have been that bad. But even if I said a swear word or was mean to one of my sisters, it’s because I didn’t have the skills to regulate my own emotions and the only thing I could to to release some of the anger or frustration or despair in my body was to let it out verbally. Again, I didn’t have any other tools, and this is probably what I saw others do. My parents too, were of course doing the best they could with the parenting and emotional skills they had. Unfortunately, that didn’t prevent my little mind from making up a story that when I mess up or have big emotions, that I’m bad*. Something is wrong with me. Which brings in a huge energy of fear, as I then question if I’m lovable. The story I further create is that I’m only lovable if I’m perfect. And in this fear, I strive to be perfect, but because I’m acting out of fear instead of love, I inevitably make “mistakes” (miss the mark) over and over again (and also, because I’m human). Because the only skill I learned was how to shame myself for making a mistake, I keep doing it over and over and over again. Until I learn about, and start practicing, self-compassion and Love, which my dog has been trying to teach me for over a decade.

*While I used a personal example, this is really how all our little brains work. This is called “egocentric”.

What we can start with is forgiveness. Forgive your shame for being so hard on you. It’s been doing the best it could with what it knows. Forgive yourself for anytime you missed the mark, because you were doing the best you could with the emotions and energy you had stuck inside of you. (We only do “bad” things if we feel bad inside.) And, half the time what you did was probably just fine, you put that “not good enough” story on top of it.

From there, you can practice self-compassion. Find compassion for the perfectionist, the achiever, and other critical parts of you that have been doing the best they could. Allow the inner child, the one that has been shamed, to feel all of his/her/their fear, confusion, frustration, and grief. (This will take time and most likely multiple therapy or journaling sessions.)

Then Love. This is less of a practice than going within and finding the Love within you that’s been buried. It might be breathing into your heart charge, or drawing on your dog’s beingness for inspiration. Ultimately, Love is your most natural state.

July 4, 2024July 4, 2024

Innocence: Lost Magic (Part 1)

What if innocence is the magic we all lost?

The belief that everything and everyone is good? That we are always loved and inherently enough?

That people act poorly not because they are bad but because they have forgotten love. That we act poorly because we have forgotten who we are. That we have been treated poorly not because of our own fault, but because others have forgotten too*.

Innocence, as @the.alchemist recently said, is different from naiveté. We don’t hang around people who are going to treat us poorly. But we do believe they are inherently good.

Innocence then is, in a sense, freedom. Forgiveness is embedded by innocence. We forgive others for acting out of fear (in particular, the fears of being unworthy, unlovable, and not enough) and forgive ourselves for the same. When not weighted down by fear or shame, we are given the ability to fly. Even in the physical limitation of gravity, our density is less because we let go of the heaviest of emotions, giving ourselves the ability to know that as we move through life, nothing is real besides Love itself.

It is out of innocence that we are born and back into innocence that we will die… (more in part 2).

*Young children often quickly forgive their parents for hurting them, be it emotionally or physically. While some may believe this is bad, it’s often what saves a child from further harm and allows them to move through difficult situations. The problem is that the mind creates a story on how the child must be bad to deserve such behavior and this belief can be carried on to adulthood if there is not quick intervention in childhood.

March 24, 2024

My Love, Why are you repenting?

My Love,

Why are you repenting for sins that you didn’t commit?

The only mistake you ever made was forgetting the truth of who you really are.

Remember.

***

Whether you believe Jesus came to earth to be our savior or you regard him as an important prophet, what I think we can agree on is that he only spread messages of love and offered compassion to all he met.

Yet somehow around Easter, we seem to totally forget this and instead focus on fear, death, darkness, how we are bad, and the sins that we committed.

Before I dive in, let me get one important piece straight. “Sin” simply means “to miss the mark”, or to act out of alignment with one’s true self.

And Jesus knew this. He knew we could only act “wrongly”, or out of fear, when we had forgotten who we truly are, extensions of Love (or, God). Therefore, when Jesus said “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” (Luke 23:34), he meant it. In fact, I believe he meant it so much so that he actually never even saw a need for forgiveness because how can we forgive what didn’t actually come from us, but rather there persona we developed through fear (this is an important idea from A Course in Miracles, a metaphysical text in which Jesus was supposedly channeled)?

Still, instead of focusing on the Resurrection, life, light, and the rise above the ego, fear, and forgetfulness, we’ve been instructed to focus on our unworthiness, which Catholic’s repenting for being unholy when in fact they have only forgotten their own sacredness. This belief of being separate from Love is one of the sly ways that fear comes to be the primary driver in our lives as we either strive to prove our worth or feel defeated and prove the belief of our unworthiness.

It’s so weird to me now, seeing myself as a kid being instructed by teachers, priests, and parents to “give something up” (albeit quite small, like a favorite snack) to help earn my right back into favor. Of course, my teen self secretly hated and loved the 40 days of lent, which was an excuse to feed my eating disorder and control it more. I didn’t know then that fear and control went hand in hand.

What I’m finding inspirational now, in my mid 30s, is that if Jesus and Mary Magdalene and so many other shamans, prophets, and mystics could rise above their egos (fear-based selves), the stories in their minds, judgement, and feelings of unworthiness, then maybe I can too. Maybe I can forgive the parts of me that made mistakes, the parts of me that prosecute me daily for the perceived mistakes, and quiet the nightmares that live in my head. Maybe I can believe in my inherent goodness and see the world through a lens of love. Maybe I can die and become reborn, to resurrect only the part of me that is Love.

And that is a cause for celebration. I just can’t do it by shaming myself to get there. We only move beyond fear by loving our way through the darkness and then discovering there was only Light.

***Another important point that is often only casually mentioned that it was Mary Magdalene who first saw the resurrected Jesus because she could best “perceive him”.