Thank you so much, Tara¡ I did this quick and simple exercise, and it was amazing because I immediately felt that my relationship softened, as if something in me opened up. Namaste.
I have been struggling with anger at myself for being lazy and not fulfilling my responsibilities. I imagine giving myself a pass on the anger, on the laziness, and on the unreliablity. A limiting belief is that my value is in what I do.
By allowing genuine forgiveness for self or others, releases negative energy which then gives room to see and hear others from a compassionate, loving freedom from preconceived judgement(s).
I also found this post very enlightening.. I have a stepdaughter who I think doesn’t really care about me.. and so I have pulled away from her. I feel very guilty about this..and it has been troubling me.. I see a little girl in me..feeling unloved and rejected and the way I respond is very child-like.. so to be able to forgive myself would be a great start.. for a better relationship.
I can be critical and hurtful towards my partner. It makes me wonder and worry if I truly love them because I have the capacity to be unkind to somebody who is everything to me. I recognise this stems from my relationships in childhood. By saying – ” It is not my fault” I allowed myself to accept and understand why I react this way habitually. I intend to practice saying this to myself when I am notice my thoughts and show myself self compassion. Thank you Tara x
This resonates with me deeply. Both my partner and I struggled with deep feelings of shame and inadequacy with regards to ourselves and what we brought into the relationship. It created such a negative feedback loop that broke a beautiful connection. Thanks for illuminating and articulating what so many of us experience.
It is so beautiful how a deep sense of liberation can occur once I forgive myself. It gives me an easier access to both giving and receiving from a free will! This I believe is the best ground for all relationships ❤️ Thank you Tara.
Thank you for sharing. judge inside of me is always inside of me and I have noticed – that he keeps me from lot of things more than someone outside of me.
It is like an echo. But – it becomes smaller when I feel my all feelings and accepting them. And accept all feelings of my Inner child. All shame, guilt, fear. And go through it. As loving parent. I love Tara’s voice and her teaching about radical acceptance.
With the earlier hand-over-heart kindness exercise, I praised my heart for being such a faithful friend, and such a steady and amazing worker. I suddenly recognized that the energy of love and acceptance coming from my heart could expand possibly endlessly and still not lose any of it’s amazing potency! I felt great gratitude, both giving and receiving!
Thank you for teaching this simple yet powerful gesture.
I understand self-acceptance and self forgiveness is important…what I’m concerned about is what if it leads to neglect and complacency in some people? Some people have a pattern of directing the blame to others and staying in a victim’s role. I also understand that it’s all about the higher intention that we all set for each action in our lives. Just sharing my thought here..
Would love to hear your thoughts and those of the participants.
My struggle with shame and self-judgment has impacted all my close relationships. Holding room for myself and allowing the feelings to move through me without my brain repeating the conditioned narratives which bring the contempt and shame seem at times so far from my reach. I still have a lot to work through.
The client i’ve seen have the most intransigent trouble with self-forgiveness had lost his wife of 50 years in a surgery that should have been routine, a wife he’d treasured but who he’d suspected for 20-some years of having once had an emotional if not physical affair that she’d insisted wasn’t true but his guilt that such an affair would have been because he’d been an inadequately ‘present’ husband, caught up in his job and both he and his wife raised with very puritan constraints around emotions and intimacy so as to have never found a ‘voice’ to talk out their truths – to get to any deep or shared revelation of their respective senses of unworthiness, left him bereft not only of his lifelong companion but of a suffering for a sense of a lost opportunity he’d never imagined being robbed of before he could find such a voice. Without the person still there that he desperately grieved he’d been an inadequate husband to and couldn’t share his deep regrets, his self-judgment had become a torture chamber by the time he came to see me 3 years after she had died.
There was anger, even rage albeit leashed, at the surgeons for this tragic too-early loss, but the real and insidious, sleep-robbing anger was at himself and it was cemented with guilt.
He had children and grandchildren whose love he treasured and nurtured but nothing could ease his sense of failure – at not having found therapy together while she was still alive, at not having found a way to know in his heart whether he’d been a failed husband – despite photos of her over the years that showed the glow in her eyes toward him. Those photos were our best resource for trying to help see his success as a husband mirrored back in her eyes, but that powerful judge inside kept coming back with a gavel pounding and claiming “insufficient evidence” to appease his mourning for the conversation that they’d never had.
I thought immediately of him as you posed the final exercise of imagining self-forgiveness and i will always see him in my mind’s eye as the person i’ve known and grown to feel his pain as closely as I think I could who i witnessed bearing an almost unimagineable burden of guilt for the ‘sin’ of living the life he’d been socialized to live and fully feeling its heavy price – the price of withholding emotions, fearing them, steering away from them and sabotaging intimacy in the process. If you have worked with such a client, Tara, with this kind of context for unsustainable self-forgiveness, i’d welcome your thoughts.
I see struggle with worthlessness and shame a lot in my work with clients, but also more recently with my own younger brother, which deeply impacted me and hurt me. The defensive and avoidant ways he relates to close ones in life indicated his inability to relate to self with vulnerability, genuineness, and authenticity. He cut people who love him out of his life for his own shame and self-loathing. I don’t think he is willing to acknowledge or even aware of the sources of his suffering. I wish I can one day engage him and support him through that journey if he can open up and more mindfully feel his feelings. Thank you for your way of illustrating this concept and the exercises.
Tamara Hudson, Marriage/Family Therapy, Chesapeake , VA, USAsays
In my practice I work with couples to recover from infidelity and trauma. One of the objectives I initially focus on during individual sessions with the unfaithful partner is the process of self-forgiveness and acceptance, which allows for this partner to begin their own healing and extend empathy and emotional support to the hurt partner more fully and earlier in the therapy process.
Self compassion helped me forgive not only the ones who hurt me but, most importantly, my self for hurting others.
Self forgiveness unlocks our enormous potential to heal our relationships with our families and friends.
Thank you Tara!
My daughter is an adult now and we have a very contentious relationship. I raised my multiracial child as a single mother in a white privileged world. I gave her everything but the one thing I could not, a feeling of truly belonging. I feel so much shame and guilt and your video helped me understand I need to start by forgiving myself.
Thank you Tara for a wonderful third video & sharing those powerful words “It’s not your fault” to assist genuine self-forgiveness & start the process of healing shame & guilt & build richer relationships. Thank you also for Mother Theresa’s beautiful quote: “Our suffering comes when we forget our belonging with one another”… ❤
I have watched these videos a couple of times and find they are so beneficial and support the strategies I provide freely to so many people. Additionally I have forwarded them to more than ten people who have benefited from watching them. What a blessing it is to provide such wonderful opportunities to many people.It will be extremely sad if they are no longer able to be accessed. A whopping big thank you to NICABM and especially to the wonderful Tara Brach for the opportunity to demonstrate her abilities, remedies and genuine kindness to the world. She is once again providing yet another lasting legacy.
Self forgiveness seems to free one to forgive others. Lack of forgiveness, holding a grudge against oneself seems to keep one in a kind of bondage that shows outwardly as keeping others in bondage, limiting the ability to form a relationship. Self protection may be the (no longer needed) cause of limitations to compassion,
Lamar Culpepper, Another Field, Statesville, NC, USAsays
As a restorative justice (RJ) practitioner with my Master of Science in restorative practices, I am impressed with how this exercise is so aligned with RJ practices for healing harm, especially after working through conflict or trauma between parties involved in even the most serious violations.
If I could forgive myself it might possibly
change my relationship with my siblings. It would be a miracle because I realize that the guilt has not changed anything at all.
Lisa Summers, Marriage/Family Therapy, San Carlos, CA, USAsays
It will allow them to pause and respond rather than react to their feelings. This is empowering. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and for including Mother Theresa’s quote. ?
I feel your pain as you describe the situation which helps me to feel the pain of my memory. Thank you for speaking from your heart & not just from your head.
I just loved this one as this has been such a theme with the couples I work with! This could really be a real change in the ways we forgive ourselves and how the relationship dynamics will ultimately be affected!
I don’t know. yet. but I would really like to find out. I have anger issues, and I take it out on my kids. I think I am a good mother, but I get hijacked and I get raged.
I had a friend for a long time that I worked with, and I got very angry and upset with her for introducing me and my disabled brother to a woman she knew. That woman ended up causing the two of us a lot of grief, including making accusations that took us to court and caused the judge to terminate the financial portion of my conservatorship of my brother. I felt embarrassed and angry.
I told my friend that I felt betrayed by her and ended our relationship, even though I learned later that the same woman eventually turned on my friend and ended THEIR relationship.
It has now been about ten years since we have spoken, both of us are retired now, I no longer participate in Facebook but my daughter follows her, and has said I should contact her again.
My brother died suddenly six years ago; he was unhappy with his life but feared death, and after the initial shock I actually I felt relief and happiness for him, he got away slick as a whistle!
Listening to your talks these past few days has given me hope that I can change my self-talk, my self-criticism – I have learned to erect a mental STOP sign, but the idea that I can CHANGE these ancient beliefs, do the work, practice, walk through the valley of my self-criticism and learn to care for and forgive myself, that is huge!
And I want to reach out to my old friend, apologize and re-connect, especially in these trying times. She was always kind and we are both in our mid-seventies now, I am definitely feeling my mortality and want to make some positive changes in my life, and this one feels right. better late than never!
Thank you so much, Tara¡ I did this quick and simple exercise, and it was amazing because I immediately felt that my relationship softened, as if something in me opened up. Namaste.
I have been struggling with anger at myself for being lazy and not fulfilling my responsibilities. I imagine giving myself a pass on the anger, on the laziness, and on the unreliablity. A limiting belief is that my value is in what I do.
Really interesting – love to know more
By allowing genuine forgiveness for self or others, releases negative energy which then gives room to see and hear others from a compassionate, loving freedom from preconceived judgement(s).
I also found this post very enlightening.. I have a stepdaughter who I think doesn’t really care about me.. and so I have pulled away from her. I feel very guilty about this..and it has been troubling me.. I see a little girl in me..feeling unloved and rejected and the way I respond is very child-like.. so to be able to forgive myself would be a great start.. for a better relationship.
I found it hard to get down to a layer of self-forgiveness.
I can be critical and hurtful towards my partner. It makes me wonder and worry if I truly love them because I have the capacity to be unkind to somebody who is everything to me. I recognise this stems from my relationships in childhood. By saying – ” It is not my fault” I allowed myself to accept and understand why I react this way habitually. I intend to practice saying this to myself when I am notice my thoughts and show myself self compassion. Thank you Tara x
This resonates with me deeply. Both my partner and I struggled with deep feelings of shame and inadequacy with regards to ourselves and what we brought into the relationship. It created such a negative feedback loop that broke a beautiful connection. Thanks for illuminating and articulating what so many of us experience.
Beautiful and helpful!
It is so beautiful how a deep sense of liberation can occur once I forgive myself. It gives me an easier access to both giving and receiving from a free will! This I believe is the best ground for all relationships ❤️ Thank you Tara.
Letting go of the past seems to be the way forward and changing how we behave around others. Being kind to the self as none of us are perfect.
Put this up on the wall to see everyday: “Self punishment plants the seeds for future acting out.” -Tara Brach
Thank you for sharing. judge inside of me is always inside of me and I have noticed – that he keeps me from lot of things more than someone outside of me.
It is like an echo. But – it becomes smaller when I feel my all feelings and accepting them. And accept all feelings of my Inner child. All shame, guilt, fear. And go through it. As loving parent. I love Tara’s voice and her teaching about radical acceptance.
I found the brief exercise very emotive and am interested once you are “held” in this way, where to next.
Your teachings are effective, simple, and lead to connect with your heart. Thank you so much Tara!! God bless you ??
This has been very helpful in understanding how to move to self-acceptance and appreciation of self and others.
Thank you Tara.
this has been a real eye opener as my unworthiness is reflected in dissociation. tks Tara
With the earlier hand-over-heart kindness exercise, I praised my heart for being such a faithful friend, and such a steady and amazing worker. I suddenly recognized that the energy of love and acceptance coming from my heart could expand possibly endlessly and still not lose any of it’s amazing potency! I felt great gratitude, both giving and receiving!
Thank you for teaching this simple yet powerful gesture.
I understand self-acceptance and self forgiveness is important…what I’m concerned about is what if it leads to neglect and complacency in some people? Some people have a pattern of directing the blame to others and staying in a victim’s role. I also understand that it’s all about the higher intention that we all set for each action in our lives. Just sharing my thought here..
Would love to hear your thoughts and those of the participants.
My struggle with shame and self-judgment has impacted all my close relationships. Holding room for myself and allowing the feelings to move through me without my brain repeating the conditioned narratives which bring the contempt and shame seem at times so far from my reach. I still have a lot to work through.
The client i’ve seen have the most intransigent trouble with self-forgiveness had lost his wife of 50 years in a surgery that should have been routine, a wife he’d treasured but who he’d suspected for 20-some years of having once had an emotional if not physical affair that she’d insisted wasn’t true but his guilt that such an affair would have been because he’d been an inadequately ‘present’ husband, caught up in his job and both he and his wife raised with very puritan constraints around emotions and intimacy so as to have never found a ‘voice’ to talk out their truths – to get to any deep or shared revelation of their respective senses of unworthiness, left him bereft not only of his lifelong companion but of a suffering for a sense of a lost opportunity he’d never imagined being robbed of before he could find such a voice. Without the person still there that he desperately grieved he’d been an inadequate husband to and couldn’t share his deep regrets, his self-judgment had become a torture chamber by the time he came to see me 3 years after she had died.
There was anger, even rage albeit leashed, at the surgeons for this tragic too-early loss, but the real and insidious, sleep-robbing anger was at himself and it was cemented with guilt.
He had children and grandchildren whose love he treasured and nurtured but nothing could ease his sense of failure – at not having found therapy together while she was still alive, at not having found a way to know in his heart whether he’d been a failed husband – despite photos of her over the years that showed the glow in her eyes toward him. Those photos were our best resource for trying to help see his success as a husband mirrored back in her eyes, but that powerful judge inside kept coming back with a gavel pounding and claiming “insufficient evidence” to appease his mourning for the conversation that they’d never had.
I thought immediately of him as you posed the final exercise of imagining self-forgiveness and i will always see him in my mind’s eye as the person i’ve known and grown to feel his pain as closely as I think I could who i witnessed bearing an almost unimagineable burden of guilt for the ‘sin’ of living the life he’d been socialized to live and fully feeling its heavy price – the price of withholding emotions, fearing them, steering away from them and sabotaging intimacy in the process. If you have worked with such a client, Tara, with this kind of context for unsustainable self-forgiveness, i’d welcome your thoughts.
Thank you Tara. Self compassion and self forgiveness is key to freedom and belongingness. Blessings.
Thank you so much for these ideas and tangible practices to support ourselves and work with clients.
Thank you for sharing your work, I will definitely use these tools with my clients
I see struggle with worthlessness and shame a lot in my work with clients, but also more recently with my own younger brother, which deeply impacted me and hurt me. The defensive and avoidant ways he relates to close ones in life indicated his inability to relate to self with vulnerability, genuineness, and authenticity. He cut people who love him out of his life for his own shame and self-loathing. I don’t think he is willing to acknowledge or even aware of the sources of his suffering. I wish I can one day engage him and support him through that journey if he can open up and more mindfully feel his feelings. Thank you for your way of illustrating this concept and the exercises.
Good to hear. I had a loving mother, so my criticism of myself is nicely modulated; healthy conscience.
By responding,not reacting
In my practice I work with couples to recover from infidelity and trauma. One of the objectives I initially focus on during individual sessions with the unfaithful partner is the process of self-forgiveness and acceptance, which allows for this partner to begin their own healing and extend empathy and emotional support to the hurt partner more fully and earlier in the therapy process.
this was lovely….
Thank you. This opens us (the therapist) and blesses us just as much as anyone we might strive to help. Then maybe striving becomes unnecessary.
Self compassion helped me forgive not only the ones who hurt me but, most importantly, my self for hurting others.
Self forgiveness unlocks our enormous potential to heal our relationships with our families and friends.
Thank you Tara!
My daughter is an adult now and we have a very contentious relationship. I raised my multiracial child as a single mother in a white privileged world. I gave her everything but the one thing I could not, a feeling of truly belonging. I feel so much shame and guilt and your video helped me understand I need to start by forgiving myself.
Thank you Tara for a wonderful third video & sharing those powerful words “It’s not your fault” to assist genuine self-forgiveness & start the process of healing shame & guilt & build richer relationships. Thank you also for Mother Theresa’s beautiful quote: “Our suffering comes when we forget our belonging with one another”… ❤
I have watched these videos a couple of times and find they are so beneficial and support the strategies I provide freely to so many people. Additionally I have forwarded them to more than ten people who have benefited from watching them. What a blessing it is to provide such wonderful opportunities to many people.It will be extremely sad if they are no longer able to be accessed. A whopping big thank you to NICABM and especially to the wonderful Tara Brach for the opportunity to demonstrate her abilities, remedies and genuine kindness to the world. She is once again providing yet another lasting legacy.
Thank you – this is a great explanation of the process of working through shame and moving toward self-forgiveness
I am wrestling with, how can I protect myself in relationships at the same time being open and compassionate. Thank you for your insights.
Self forgiveness seems to free one to forgive others. Lack of forgiveness, holding a grudge against oneself seems to keep one in a kind of bondage that shows outwardly as keeping others in bondage, limiting the ability to form a relationship. Self protection may be the (no longer needed) cause of limitations to compassion,
Genuinely forgiving myself, will help me relax and feel reconnected to others, more free to engage because I’ve acknowledged my vulnerability.
Maybe if I have more self compassion, I would have more compassion for others. And look deeper into and accept the “why”.
As a restorative justice (RJ) practitioner with my Master of Science in restorative practices, I am impressed with how this exercise is so aligned with RJ practices for healing harm, especially after working through conflict or trauma between parties involved in even the most serious violations.
recognize that others’ behavior may not be “their fault” either and allow an understanding and compassion for their apprarent shortcomings.
If I could forgive myself it might possibly
change my relationship with my siblings. It would be a miracle because I realize that the guilt has not changed anything at all.
It will allow them to pause and respond rather than react to their feelings. This is empowering. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and for including Mother Theresa’s quote. ?
Self compassion leads to deeper compassion with others.
They will be able to forgive others.
Wonderful. I want to take the course. I need it: I Do think “it” (my anger) is MY fault.. Thank you
I feel your pain as you describe the situation which helps me to feel the pain of my memory. Thank you for speaking from your heart & not just from your head.
I just loved this one as this has been such a theme with the couples I work with! This could really be a real change in the ways we forgive ourselves and how the relationship dynamics will ultimately be affected!
Valuable session.
I don’t know. yet. but I would really like to find out. I have anger issues, and I take it out on my kids. I think I am a good mother, but I get hijacked and I get raged.
I had a friend for a long time that I worked with, and I got very angry and upset with her for introducing me and my disabled brother to a woman she knew. That woman ended up causing the two of us a lot of grief, including making accusations that took us to court and caused the judge to terminate the financial portion of my conservatorship of my brother. I felt embarrassed and angry.
I told my friend that I felt betrayed by her and ended our relationship, even though I learned later that the same woman eventually turned on my friend and ended THEIR relationship.
It has now been about ten years since we have spoken, both of us are retired now, I no longer participate in Facebook but my daughter follows her, and has said I should contact her again.
My brother died suddenly six years ago; he was unhappy with his life but feared death, and after the initial shock I actually I felt relief and happiness for him, he got away slick as a whistle!
Listening to your talks these past few days has given me hope that I can change my self-talk, my self-criticism – I have learned to erect a mental STOP sign, but the idea that I can CHANGE these ancient beliefs, do the work, practice, walk through the valley of my self-criticism and learn to care for and forgive myself, that is huge!
And I want to reach out to my old friend, apologize and re-connect, especially in these trying times. She was always kind and we are both in our mid-seventies now, I am definitely feeling my mortality and want to make some positive changes in my life, and this one feels right. better late than never!