Here’s a wonderful quote about self-love and self-forgiveness from They Serve Bagels in Heaven:

“Self-love is acknowledging that we are all flawed and that committing mistakes at certain times in our lives is inevitable, yet with self-love we are able to forgive ourselves for those mistakes, learn from them, and choose to evolve with awareness from them.”

I have to admit that I’ve been struggling with this concept of late. I recently had a friendship with a person I thought I could trust. I’m not one to gossip, but when the gal I trusted started telling me that another gal we knew was talking smack about me to others, I chose to believe her  – which of course negatively impacted my relationship with the other gal.

So guess what happened.

I found out that my supposed friend who I trusted had been lying to me about the other gal. I was shocked, saddened and felt embarrassed. How could I not have intuited that I was being lied to and taken in?

It took time, but after a few weeks beating myself up with negative self-talk, I began to consciously give myself positive self-talk about being human, that it’s okay to make mistakes, and that no one is ever required to be “perfect.” I eventually switched from self-blaming: “How could you have been so gullible?” to self-love: “What lessons have you learned from this experience that will inform you in the future?”

It didn‘t take long for me to have an experience that would test whether or not I had learned the lesson of self-love and self-forgiveness. A few months later, I was feeling overwhelmed by my to-do list when a business dilemma hit my inbox. Instead of taking my time to evaluate the problem to find a solution, I took the expedient way out. That choice brought about a poor judgment call which could have created a disastrous problem for a colleague. When she got upset and called me out on it, in the moment I began to feel embarrassed and guilty …but when I almost immediately caught myself thinking the negative thoughts, I apologized to my colleague, reworked the situation and then lovingly patted myself on the back for apparently learning the lesson and actually being able to apply it to the new situation.

I am sure that I will be faced with challenges to the high spiritual concepts of self-forgiveness and self-love many more times in my life. I hope that my quickened conscious recovery times will enable me to reset myself to “lessons learned” with greater frequency!

We are each a work in progress! Loving ourselves as we do “our work” in this lifetime on our individual journeys is surely the “heavenly” way to go.

– Irene