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How to Forgive Yourself
The last part of self-forgiveness is fostering positive emotions toward oneself. This is a tricky one. We can’t snap our fingers and feel good about ourselves. But consider this: after taking any necessary responsibility and offering repair, you’re allowed to feel good about your overall self…. Failure and positive self-regard are allowed to co-exist.
It’s important to point out that feeling better is not contingent upon a promise of personal improvement. Since all of us are hard on ourselves here, I repeat: we don’t have to promise ourselves, “I’ll do better next time to make up for it,” or “I’ll learn from this and come out of it better.” Self-forgiveness doesn’t need to be held in escrow, only to be earned by a more deserving version of you. You can simply forgive yourself now.
One way to feel better about yourself is to do the exact opposite of what shame tells you to do. Shame urges us to hide, to conceal, but that’s where it flourishes — in the dark. To make shame shrivel like a vampire in the daylight, do the opposite of concealment: share it with someone you trust.
Allowing failure and positive self-regard to co-exist.
Track Your Joy
Each day, track the two different forms of joy:
•Sharing your joy instead of your pain
•Sharing joyousness for the victories of others
Write down all the examples of each type of joy that you partake in. Also, remember to write down how your joy-sharing made you feel in the moment and afterward.
Optionally, you can take two small teacups and label them "Sharing My Joy" and "Joy for Others." Put a penny in each cup for every time that you did your practice. See how many pennies you can accumulate by the end of a week.
After you have had the opportunity to practice, ask yourself: How did sharing my joy with others make me feel? Did I feel elevated, happy, expansive, or giving? Did I smile, laugh, or give a hug? Did my joy enhance the closeness of my relationships?
Likewise, how did supporting the joy of others make you feel? There are always decisions made by parents, children, friends, or others that leave you scratching your head-or worse. Did you find it difficult to show joy when you didn't fully agree with another person's decision? How did you manage to overcome your internal judgments? You can always remind yourself of the times you did something that another person disapproved of. Maybe you learned a valuable lesson from your choice, or maybe you wish you had been more supportive of others. Either way, you are embarking on a new path to build relationships and love — and that makes the journey worthwhile.
Sharing your joy and rejoicing in the joys of others.
Sri Chinmoy, The Wisdom of Sri Chinmoy
Try to feel your oneness with everybody. When you do, immediately you will expand your consciousness. If someone does something well, immediately you have to feel that it is you who have done it. He should also do the same when you do something significant. Whenever any individual does something very well, others have to feel that it is their conscious inspiration and aspiration that have enabled that individual to achieve this success. If we always have an attitude of teamwork, then we will be able to conquer the ego.
Try to feel your oneness with everybody
Gunilla Norris, Inviting Silence
The experience of silence is now so rare
that we must cultivate it and treasure it.
This is especially true for shared silence.
To come together in silence
— even just a very few people —
creates a field of consciousness,
an awareness force.
This power helps us to see
our lives more truly.
Each of us can make a tremendous difference simply through our intent and constancy.
Shared silence must be cultivated
Tilden Edwards, Sabbath Time
There is a brokenness in creation that we all know. The wolf and the lamb do not yet lie down together. We swat the mosquito. We are wary of demons cut off from grace. And yet in a calm, trusting, sabbath mind, there is a sense of the promise that birthed Isaiah's pastoral prophecy of a peaceful creation. We accept the community that we can share now, and yearn for and somehow trust the promise of that full community of creation yet to come.
The promise of the full community of creation
Megan McKenna, Angels Unawares
What is a story? For the one who tells the tale, it is truth shared. For the one who hears it told, it is an invitation, a lure deep into universal experience. Once told, it echoes and is remembered a bit differently by all who listened. It is mercurial, liquid, fluid.
What is a story?
J. Ruth Gendler, Notes on the Need for Beauty
I have always been moved by a scene in the John Sayles movie The Brother from Another Planet in which the Brother removes his eye and hands it to the drug lord, who is comfortably distanced from the chaos of the street in his tall office building. The eyeball is filled with the scenes of pain that the interplanetary visitor has observed. In a science fiction movie it's possible to make the impulse to share one's vision explicit. It is a powerful, poetic, political rendering of the idea of giving someone your eyes.
The eyeball is filled with the scenes of pain
The Big Book of Less
For years, we've worked very hard, skipped vacations, and for a distraction, gone shopping to make sure we had the latest gadgets, CDs, DVDs, and books.
Now global wizards who keep track of such things are saying we should change course and not work so many hours. They think we would be less frazzled if we took more relaxing trips. And we ought to make shopping into a different experience, limiting accumulation and upgrading.
In this creatively designed full-color hardcover, Irene Smit and Astrid Van Der Hulst, creative directors of Flow magazine, enchant us with their ideas for adding more imagination and pleasure to our lives while adding less stuff. They give tips for organizing and decluttering and, most important, for figuring out what is really important to you. The pages invite you to make notes and lists; there are even built-in little journals.
Our favorite pages were the interludes inviting readers to savor little pleasures like holding hands, the silence after a snowfall, a day spent at the museum, or getting your desk organized. This is one of those books you can open at any place and discover more possibilities. What Smit and Van Der Hulst are really asking us to do is to reframe our perspective and see our daily life and surroundings in a new light.
Ways to add pleasure and play into our lives without adding more stuff.
Mouse and the Moon
In the middle of a field of grain lives a little Harvest Mouse. Lonely, he has come up with a nightly ritual of singing a lullaby to the moon. In exchange, the moon watches over him until he falls asleep. But one evening his faithful companion disappears and is nowhere to be seen.
The mouse is surprised to discover that other animals, including a duck, a squirrel, and a rabbit, are also missing the moon. They begin to blame each other but when they take refuge from a storm in a cave, they apologize to each other. When the moon reappears, they all realize that it is not their possession but something precious shared by all. And by disappearing, the moon has made it possible for the mouse to make new friends. A final lesson is that worry never gets one anywhere except in more trouble.
M. Christina Butler and illustrator Tina Macnaughton have collaborated on numerous previous volumes — all available from Good Books. Their mutual efforts have paid off well in this uplifting work.
An uplifting children's book about a little mouse who learns the value of sharing and the joys of making new friends.
Jump Time
"In Jump Time's developing hybrid world, capacities once nurtured in separate societies are available to the entire family of humankind. This is a stupendous happening, as important as the discovery of new continents during the time of the great sea journeys. For the first time in human history the genius of the human race is available for all to harvest. These rediscovered capacities may be evolutionary accelerators, now being gathered from many places, times, and cultures to awaken our species to who we are and what we yet may be and do. Often, however, it is not comfortable. We can for a time find ourselves strangers in a very strange land, wishing we could return to the comforts of a more insular and familiar worldview. Yet when we get beyond the shutterings of our local cultural trance, we gain the courage to nurture the emerging forms of the possible human and the possible society."
Jean Houston on the world's openness to capacities from all peoples.