Have you ever wondered why some things are so much easier to see and do for others than to do and see for ourselves? Take forgiveness, for example. I’ve found that it often seems easier to forgive others than to forgive ourselves.
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Today on the Live. Love. Engage. Podcast:
- Learn how forgiveness relates to your emotional growth.
- Why we’re so hard on ourselves and how to practice self-acceptance.
- Understanding and respecting our humanity, along with our inherent spiritual nature.
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TRANSCRIPT
Gloria Grace Rand: Namaste and welcome to Live, Love, Engage. I am your host, Gloria Grace Rand. And today in today’s episode, I am going to be talking about forgiveness and self acceptance. And why both of these concept1s are important. Not only, not only important in a general sense, but important to you fulfilling your life’s purpose, for you to be able to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically, which is the reason for this whole show. So I thought I would, I would start off today doing is sharing with you, Daily Word. And I am recording this actually, this is actually July 7th, so today’s Daily Word was forgive and the affirmation was forgiveness sets me free. So I’m going to read to you a little bit of this first off and Oh, for those of you who aren’t familiar, the Daily Word is a magazine that is put out by Unity.
And I’ve been a subscriber for, Hmm, geez, probably almost two years, I think now. And they have really great messages every day. So let me share with you what it says today about this concept about forgiveness. It says, holding onto a hurt can intensify my pain and keep me stuck in unpleasant memories. Grudges, resentments, and negative emotions keep me tethered to the very experiences I wish to move beyond. When I don’t forgive, I can’t move forward, which stunts my spiritual and emotional growth. Deciding to pardon hurtful behavior heals me from within. If I struggle to offer heartfelt forgiveness, I can still pray for peace for myself and another. As I work toward being able to forgive, I know the unconditional love of God is for everyone.
This knowledge moves me into a new dimension of love and peace. I’m ready to begin again, to go forth renewed and filled with freedom and joy. Forgiveness has washed me clean. And then they always end the daily word with a reading. And this one is from, uh, from, from the New Testament, all from the Bible. But this one is from the New Testament from, uh, um, the gospel of Mark. It’s 11:25. Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone.
So I know that it’s, it’s important to forgive others. I mean, a lot of people will say that it’s important to forgive others and, and yes, it definitely is. And sometimes it’s a lot easier for us to forgive other people than it is to forgive ourselves. At least that’s my case. It’s been my case, but I know in talking with other people and talking with clients as well, some of my coaching clients said that is a recurring theme that comes up because we are often so much harder on ourselves than anyone else, you know, we can, we can let other people slide with stuff that we stew about.
So forgiveness starts with actually accepting ourselves. And that’s where that self acceptance comes back to. And it’s about accepting that we are human. We’re… now we’re spiritual beings, but we are, we have a human body and as such, we have free will and we are going to make mistakes. There’s there’s a great Billy Joel song that says I’m only human or, or no, you’re only human. You’re supposed to make mistakes. I know I’m not singing it well at all today. I forgot the tune. I was going through it. I’ve got it in my head, but, but that’s it, you are supposed to make mistakes because that’s how you learn, you, we have to learn from our mistakes. And I have been absolutely been guilty about this because, and I just had this awareness actually recently, because I realized where I’d been sort of going through a dilemma.
Because as I’ve been becoming more spiritually aware and more have grown closer to God and knowing that I am part of God, I was bumping up against a sort of conundrum because you… depending, I don’t know what your spiritual beliefs are. But generally you’ve probably heard more or may even believe yourself that God is all powerful, all knowing, God is perfect. Okay. So God is perfect. And then I believe that we were created in God’s image that we are children of God, which means we are part of God. So if God is perfect, but we make mistakes, then that means we’re not perfect. So that means we’re not God? See that’s that was my dilemma until I remembered.
And this, this was, this came to me while I was actually walking my dogs recently. Because it dawned on me. I had forgotten the part and that’s where my God source inner, uh, my higher self, spoke to me and said, remember, you are, yes, you are part of God. And you came to this planet to learn. You came here to learn and to grow and you were given free will to choose. And sometimes the choices we make in retrospect, and looking back, weren’t possibly the best choices for either ourselves or for someone else. It wasn’t in their best interest. It was at the time because obviously we would not have chosen to say something or to do something, if it didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do in that moment. And that’s where they say hindsight is 2020, you can always see, see clearly afterwards. And then that’s where we get into this beating ourselves up or we can, when we realized that, Oh shoot, I shouldn’t have said never. Oh shoot. I wish I hadn’t had done that. Hurt myself or it hurts somebody else. And that’s when we have the opportunity to say, okay, yeah, I screwed up.
What can I learn from this? How can I do things differently the next time? So that’s where you have to practice, not only forgiveness, but also self-acceptance and accept that. Yeah, you, you’re not perfect. Well, no, scratch that. Yes, you are perfect right now in this moment, you are perfect. And the things you do or say may not always be perfect because that’s the human part of you.
So our inner self, our spirit is perfect because we are part of God, but that human part of us, the human mind, the ego that sometimes trips us up. That’s where, that’s what trips us up because it’s always looking for, uh, either to keep you safe or just wants to, wants some sort of easy, quick gratification.
And it doesn’t always think things through long term and to see what are going to be the ramifications of a particular action you take, or a particular thing you say. So one of the things that I’ve started to do and I’m every morning I ask the Holy Spirit and God to say, I say, please give me, I intend today to think before I speak, to think, to stop and think, and choose what it is I want to do. What is it I want to say and give myself that opportunity to really get clear on is what I’m about to do or say really in the best interest of me and or the people I love, or, or that are in my circle that I want to interact with today.
And when I can do that, when I stop and pause and think, Hmm, then I can choose. And you know what, sometimes I’m still gonna make the wrong choice or what turned out to be possibly the wrong choice, because it had maybe unintended consequences. And it actually did hurt me or someone else, even though I didn’t think it would, but that’s the other thing is that we are always doing the best we can with the knowledge that we have up until this moment in time.
And sometimes it’s gonna work out and sometimes it’s not. But it doesn’t change who you are at the core, because I believe that you, we are all inherently good people because we are spiritual beings. We are of God by God, for God, living through God and that’s who we are. That’s who we will always be once this body ceases to exist. And our spirit is free. Our soul is free. We will still be that infinite, inherently good being, spiritual being. But right now, while we’re here, we have human frailties and we are going to inevitably make mistakes because we’re only human and that’s okay. So my advice today is for you to be okay with being okay.
Actually, I have a coach right now who was telling me that, and she’s very wise woman. So be okay with that. And if you are struggling with it, then I invite you to talk to someone about it. Um, seek out a coach, if you belong to a church, talk to someone at your church or you can contact me and I would be happy to help you out because it’s much easier for me to help other people than for me to help myself.
That’s why I go see a coach. That’s always the way it is, but I know that I have learned enough now that I’m sure I could help you. And if not, I will refer you to someone else. So if you would like to get in touch with me, you can go to engagewithgloria.com. That’s engagewithgloria.com and you can schedule an appointment to talk and it’s no obligation and we’ll just see, we’ll see if I can help you out. I would love to be able to do that. And I would also like to invite you to let me know if you have any suggestions for topics for our podcast, you can reach me on social media. I’m @GloriaGraceRand on Facebook, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, you can find me there or you can simply just go to my Gloriarand.com website.
And you can contact me through there as well. In fact, as soon as you get to a homepage, there’s a little, little window will pop up and where you can actually request just leave me a comment. All right. I think that’s going to do it for this edition of live love engage. So I thank you for watching on YouTube, for listening, and until next time as always, I encourage you to live fully, love deeply, and engage authentically.
