Forgiveness

Hi everyone,
So how did it go this week in the "listening" department? Was there someone who needed you to turn on your listening skills? Did you?? This is one skill that I am convinced never gets perfected - by anybody. But hopefully, we can all work on it a bit and improve our communication a bunch!

This week's topic is forgiveness. I kept thinking all week it would be about patience, but I realized that the "patience" word kept coming up in relation to forgiving someone.

Forgiveness can make your life much more peaceful. Maybe it's forgiveness of parents whose guidance didn't really contribute to the "perfect childhood" for you (is there such a thing??). Maybe the forgiveness needs to be given to someone who has hurt you - even if they don't know you need to forgive them - and even if they don't know you have forgiven them!

Maybe your forgiveness needs to be given to a co-worker or a supervisor who just doesn't treat you very well. Or maybe it's a sibling - or a friend - or a casual acquaintance... get the picture? Forgiveness can involve anybody in your life - and they may not even know that they did anything that needs your forgiveness.

Now here's this week's question for pondering ~ Do you need to forgive yourself for anything? I think that's the reason this word came to mind for me. I kept thinking that I needed to be "patient" with myself, but what I really need is to forgive myself for a bad decision in my past that continues to bug me to pieces - it has the potential to steal my joy (remember that term??) when I get too focused on it. It's nothing huge, just one of those things where you can beat yourself up with the "if only" question. I have to consciously stop my mental meanderings and forgive myself whenever it pops up. When I do that, it all seems so silly to begin with, but you know how those minds of ours can work overtime!

For you, maybe it's not about a decision - maybe you have been the one to hurt someone else and now you really can't do anything about it - or can you? You can at least forgive yourself. We all make mistakes - and we all need forgiveness. Sometimes that forgiveness needs to come from someone who can be really tough on us - ourselves.

So...if something is bothering you about something you've done, said, should've done, should've said, or whatever....forgive yourself today....and tomorrow and the next day if necessary until you really believe you are forgiven!

Blessings,
Linda
www.LindasWorkshops.com