How To Forgive Yourself

Hi Everyone! On October 31st we had first snow in Chicago! I was very excited, because I love changes :-)

On Saturday I met up with my girlfriends, we had lunch, did some stuff for the wedding, that one of my friends will have on November 8th and went for dinner. It was so nice! I love my girls!

Few days ago I made a post on my Instagram page saying that I always forgive myself. And one of my subscribers asked, "I wonder how do you do this so easily?" And I thought that it was an awesome question and a great subject for my blog. Because I feel like I am an expert in forgiveness, ha-ha-ha.

Here is the link to the video for today's post: How To Forgive Yourself.

By nature I am very forgiving towards other people. I can get angry of course, but I cannot keep this anger for a long period of time. It's just not my thing. So I cannot really teach someone how to forgive other people, because it is not something that I do consciously. But I used to be very harsh on myself. When I discovered the idea of self-forgiveness, it improved my life dramatically. This was something that I had to learn and today I want to share what helped me. But first I want to point out that self-forgiveness doesn't mean denying your mistakes and saying "I haven't done anything wrong", when you did. Self-forgiveness means that you accept the situation, accept the fact that you messed up (not someone else), and are ready to work on yourself and make it better next time.

Here is the list of the things that helped me:

1. Desire to be happy. If you have a goal which depends on you only, you can always achieve it. When you are blaming yourself for your mistakes, you steal your own happiness from you. Life is not easy to begin with, and when we cannot forgive ourselves, we just make it harder. Try to have this "I want to be happy" goal and remind yourself about it when you get angry at yourself.

2. Mindfulness. If you want to stop blaming yourself, you need to notice the moment when you start doing that. If you practice mindfulness or meditation, it is much easier to stop negative and useless overthinking. One of the biggest problem in life is forgetfulness. We just forget what is good for us. And mindfulness is the best medicine against our forgetfulness. It brings us back to reality and helps to stay fresh and energized. When you look at situation with mindfulness, you understand that blaming yourself will not help and it is easier to forgive this way.

3. Practice. I can easily forgive myself, because I practiced this skill millions of times. The more you practice something, the better you become. Use all your mistakes as a learning opportunity!

4. Common Sense. Okay, let's just accept the fact that no one is perfect. If you think that you can be perfect and never make any mistakes - you have a lack of common sense, sorry! People do mess up, they do silly things. It is absolutely normal. Of course some things are more serious than others, but we all have different starting point, we have different genes, environment, culture, people we grew up with, difficulties we've been through. We all have some stuff that messes up our behavior one way or another. It doesn't mean that we don't have to learn from our mistakes, but when you do one, instead of blaming yourself, focus on the fact that it is normal life-learning process, which everyone is going through.

5. Self-Forgiveness is super healing. In my darkest moments when I was crying in my bed and thinking about the worst things in life, self-forgiveness helped me the most. I could feel how peace would arise, when I was telling myself, "I made a mistake, it's okay, no need to blame myself, I will try to do better next time, things happen. It was a great experience". It is harder to do if you don't love yourself. If you have difficulties with loving yourself, try for two weeks at least write kind and compassion letters to yourself, like you would write to your best friend. I also have video about self love on my channel and other videos that have some useful ideas. Anyway, the main point is that when you forgive yourself, you stop overthinking, and you reduce the pain, because our own thoughts create the biggest pain for us.

6. Trust. I believe that our mistakes just show us that we need to work more in some areas. And I trust life, I know that whatever I need to learn, life will teach me, it will give me the tools, it will send me right people, so I can become a better version of myself. When I know that I messed up, I remember that I will have another chance to pass the test. A lot of times when we make mistakes, we have a feeling that everything is over, that you made a horrible mistake and it will chase you for the rest of your life. But it's not true. Please remember about it. Everything comes and goes, nothing is permanent, one thing is replacing another. New life will grow. Whatever you have done wrong, will be corrected by life itself unless you try to force the process to go the way you want it to be. Don't resist life and it will help you to fix everything :-)

I think that trust is one of the biggest thing. Sometimes we just have to let it be and trust the process of life. Remember that this universe exists for billions of years and somehow it managed to fix all the mistakes that humans did. Life is very interesting, when you truly live it. And if you want to live your life, to stay in present moment, you need little by little learn how to forgive yourself and accept your mistakes. Otherwise you would just live in some imaginary world of your unsuccessful past and waste your energy on useless overthinking.

Please don't forget to practice self-forgiveness next time you make a mistake!

Be Strong And Love Yourself!

From Dasha With Love!

Love Wins!

PS: My Dear Readers, please ask me questions, send me your ideas, leave comments. I love to hear from you and I want my blog to be useful. The more you communicate, the better I can help!