Chapter 2 – The Happiness that Lies Ahead is in Your Hands and Heart

Telling you that the first person you need to forgive is yourself is easy for me to say, tougher for any of us to do. Remember, I wrote this book as a guide. I wrote it to give you a reason to want to have more peace in your life, to wake up and realize you can stop allowing a person or situation to rent space in your head. 

It is very difficult to make progress in your emotional life without forgiving yourself. It opens up the gate to the path of letting go and letting go will bring sunshine into life.

Let me share with you what happens when you forgive yourself.

First, you will feel tremendous relief. In fact, you will feel as if you have removed a heavy coat you were wearing. Guess what? You wore that coat. It’s heavy, it’s damp, it hasn’t kept you warm. It needs to go into the trash bin. 

When you forgive yourself, you automatically give yourself the gift of strength. You can’t see your strength when you are angry or hurt. When you forgive yourself you have opened your gift and it is like an explosion of birds, butterflies, sunshine, ladybugs and more flying up and away taking your anger with them and leaving you with the superpower of inner strength. Weak people cannot forgive – you can do this and emerge as an entirely new person.

What happens next is that even though you took the lid off of the gift you received and let everything fly out, stop to think about how this all showered you with excitement. This is that moment of pride we deserve. You will feel like shouting “I did it” to the world, and you did.Your heart will feel like it has taken wing too.  

We deserve to be happy and when we forgive ourselves we have a greater understanding of who we are and what we can do and be. When you opened that gift, you rose above everything and you let go. Who is in charge now?

Who among us can say they are perfect and that they have never made a mistake? The moment you forgive yourself, you will move forward with great anticipation of what lies ahead. 

You have freed yourself from having any regrets because now you know you cannot change what happened and you also know that you are not alone – we have all done things we need to forgive ourselves for doing.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• As written above, forgiving yourself is an act of strength, not weakness.
• You don’t have to make amends to yourself, you are learning not punishing.
• Forgiving yourself works well when/if someone else won’t forgive you.

You can always use positive affirmations to start the process. There is nothing wrong with talking to yourself and telling yourself how wonderful you truly are!

One more thing always seems to happen when you have forgiven yourself, you become more tolerant of others. There are many more blue skies ahead for you, I promise. You know what lies on the other side of the storm? A rainbow.