November 2, 2015
Self-Punishment
“Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.” Erma Bombeck put her finger on a major weight for a lot of us when she said those words.
That feeling of heaviness, the unwelcome rush of physical heat accompanying the realization that we did or didn’t do something. Then there’s the never-ending loop of “if only I hadn’t been so… (insert appropriate definitive here…thoughtless, indifferent, lazy, selfish…). Guilt self-talk keeps hammering at us until we’ve demeaned ourselves into a state of exhaustion, but only after the requisite levels of denial and grief.
How did we get here? How did we lose our way on this road of learning, growing, evolving? How did we forget forgiveness and compassion for ourselves as we navigate this gift called “life”? If we remember we learn more from our mistakes than from our triumphs, self-punishment can become a thing of the past.
Ram Dass said “Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation.” Allowing yourself a safe place to expand and realize and reach and stretch comes from understanding this Intention of your existence…evolution.
Human progress often involves what we see as mistakes; we can allow them to take us to depths of guilt or the heights of wisdom; we can break down or break through. The choice is ours, the work is ours, the Intention must be ours, because the evolution is ours.
