Everyone falls and makes mistakes. It’s inevitable. But pain, whether it’s mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual, is just an indicator telling you that you have a lesson to learn. Lessons will keep coming until you learn them, so it’s much easier to practice forgiving yourself and getting excited about learning these lessons. I started realizing that I truly had to forgive myself for all the mistakes that I had made in order to accelerate and grow.
There have been numerous occasions in the past where I blamed other people for my failures or setbacks, not taking personal accountability for what I had attracted into my life. I noticed that holding on to that anger or resentment affects who I am, what I call my quantum energy, and this impairs my ability to pursue my potential.
A few years back, I had a neighbor who I’d bought a condo conversion from. The deal went sour, and we ended up blaming each other for that failure. We ended up in a lawsuit and he made up all these lies about me. I was so upset by the situation; it took me nine years to verbally forgive him. I actually had dreams about pulling out his fingernails and putting Tabasco on there, I couldn’t let it go. Although I had financially recovered, the pain and resentment were still there because I let it fester.
I knew that the only way I would be able to raise my energy and overall peace would be to forgive him. Not because he deserved forgiveness, but because I deserved it. I closed my eyes and I pictured the guy that I hated, and I started thinking about all the good things about him. I thought about how he was a really good dad and gave back to the community. Instead of looking at the negative, I found the light in him. Slowly but surely, this mindset strategy shifted my energy and dissipated the negative feelings. There was actually a feeling of tenseness, of anxiety, of hatred, of attack every time I thought of the guy, and it finally dissipated to the point where I went up to him at a tailgate and thanked him for what had happened. He was freaked out because he hadn’t processed the negative feelings for me. He flinched, and I just grabbed his hand and said, “I just need to thank you, because you helped me learn the greatest lesson of my life that has truly shifted my perspective, and I wanted to thank you.” And I walked away. It wasn’t that I was just thinking, saying, doing, believing that this gratitude was the right solution to this emotional problem, I actually felt grateful.