Sort what happened into three piles: moral faults, unskillfulness, and everything else.It is always the truth that sets us free. Notice any facts that are hard to face – like the look in a child’s eyes when you yelled at her – and be especially open to them they’re the ones that are keeping you stuck.If you yelled at a child, lied at work, partied too hard, let a friend down, cheated on a partner, or were secretly glad about someone’s downfall – whatever it was – acknowledge the facts: what happened, what was in your mind at the time, the relevant context and history, and the results for yourself and others.These are facts, not flattery, and you don’t need a halo to have good qualities like patience, determination, fairness, or kindness. You could ask the protector what it knows about you. Staying with feeling cared about, list some of your many good qualities.Open to the sense that aspects of this being, including the caring for you, have been taken into your own mind as parts of your inner protector. Start by getting in touch, as best you can, with the feeling of being cared about by some being: a friend or mate, spiritual being, pet, or person from your childhood.Then if you like, work up to more significant issues. I’ve spelled them out in detail since that’s often useful, but you could do the gist of these methods in a few minutes or less.
Start by picking something relatively small that you’re still being hard on yourself about, and then try one or more of the methods below. Seeing faults clearly, taking responsibility for them with remorse and making amends, and then coming to peace about them: this is what I mean by forgiving yourself.
#Just one thing plus#
Plus excessive guilt, etc., actually gets in the way of you contributing to others and helping make this world a better place, by undermining your energy, mood, confidence, and sense of worth. Anything past the point of learning is just needless suffering. The only wholesome purpose of guilt, shame, or remorse is learning – not punishment! – so that you don’t mess up in that way again. With the support of your inner protector, you can see your faults clearly without fearing they will drag you into a pit of feeling awful, clean up whatever mess you’ve made as best you can, and move on. Therefore, you really need your inner protector to stick up for you: to put your weaknesses and misdeeds in perspective, to highlight your many good qualities surrounding your lapses, to encourage you to keep getting back on the high road even if you’ve gone down the low one, and – frankly – to tell that inner critic to Shut Up.
It magnifies small failings into big ones, punishes you over and over for things long past, ignores the larger context, and doesn’t credit you for your efforts to make amends.
For most people, that inner critic is continually yammering away, looking for something, anything, to find fault with. and then when it goes off, another part of me could grumble: “Who set the darn clock?” More broadly, there is a kind of inner critic and inner protector inside each of us. For example, one part of me might set the alarm clock for 6 am to get up and exercise. Inside the mind are many sub-personalities. But most people keep beating themselves up way past the point of usefulness: they’re unfairly self-critical. It’s important to acknowledge mistakes, feel appropriate remorse, and learn from them so they don’t happen again. Me, you, the neighbors, Mother Teresa, Mahatma Ghandi, King David, the Buddha, everybody.
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