Welcome to the In The Rising Podcast. This is the platform from which I talk to you about living a life without the captivity of guilt and regret, so that you can use your self-worth to live an empowered, independent, and free life. Why? Because somewhere deep down, you know, there's a disconnect between the.

Where you are now in the you, you were created to be. My name is Bettina Brown. I'm your host, and I will begin by saying that I am not a licensed counselor, psychologist, psychiatrist, but I am a student of life and a healthcare professional who loves to research and have meaningful conversations and research into the depth of what makes us- us.

So, if this topic and similar topics are of interest, Go ahead and subscribe and leave a review. I absolutely appreciate that. And I receive email at Bettina in the rising.com, and I would love to get your feedback via email as well. So welcome to episode 10 where we talk about forgiving yourself. We're at the end of the mini-series.

What does self-love look like? And I'm gonna talk about the importance of forgiving yourself. For various things, for thought word deed. So something we often say to one another when we're in a bad time after a breakup, after making a poor financial decision, we may look at our friend or look at our family member and say, listen, you made a mistake.

You just have to forgive yourself and get over it. But what. If we on the other end just can't get over it and we can't just forgive ourselves, sometimes we feel guilty for something we participated in, and sometimes we feel guilty because we enabled a situation or we turned a blind eye, and in order to not feel that guilt, we can deny that we had anything to do with that event.

So being complete. Or change the subject frequently, not only in conversation, but changing the subject in our own minds and in our heart. And when we do this often enough, we kind of have this self-loathing and that can lead to self-mutilation. That's where cutting can come into. Or even self-neglect, where you've probably seen people who just have never taken a shower in the last three months or just don't cut their nails.

They don't brush their teeth, they just don't show any care for themselves. And depression, nightmares, insomnia, excessive use of drugs and alcohol are all kind of symptoms of this emotion. So, in my opening line, I say, I want you to live a life without the captivity of guilt., and is still how I believe.

But I do know that guilt can be an emotion that helps us initially figure out that something is out of place, that something is wrong. Guilt can help open our eyes to a situation and give us some clarity. Usually that clarity is from the other person's point of view. Did we hurt? I hurt your feelings. I felt guilty.

I wanted to apologize. picked up something wrong. I forgot to pay you back the $20. Something that could have hurt someone else. And that's a little bit more, I guess, more easy. That's appropriate English, a little easier to recognize, but what about forgiving yourself? Forgiving yourself for what you did or didn't do for yourself.

And when we have this guilt that stays and stays and stays, it goes on to something called shame. And shame absolutely does not have a place in our life, and it never serves a purpose that brings us to a higher level of consciousness or into a higher place in our relationships with others or in a relationship with ourselves.

So I love to research and I have. several books by Dr. David Hawkins, who has an MD and PhD. He is a psychiatrist, a physician, a researcher, really educated and cool guy. He has a good sense of humor when you watch him on YouTube And he founded the director, or no, he's the founding director of the Institute for Spiritual.

The founder of the Path of Devotional Non-Duality, that could be probably 20 episodes right there, what that is. But he's lectured in a lot of places. Westminster a, Abby Oxford, university of Michigan, university of Notre Dame. He's been in Argentina, Harvard, and he has also been an advisor to the Catholic and Protestant.

Pastors and priests, and he's even been a, an advisor to Buddhist monasteries. His entire view was from the spirit on, he did not look to any specific religion and because of his way of looking at things, he was even an advisor for foreign governments on international diplomacy. He's done a lot. He's really done a lot.

And in this research that he does, he discusses the ego, but not in the way that we typically talk. Like your ego is getting too big. He decides, and he describes that we all need an ego because that is what gives us survival. However, when it becomes the ruler of our body, it tends to lead us down some dark.

He goes on to compare like our levels of consciousness to a pyramid, and he uses this pyramid, which can be kind of similar to a food pyramid or a Maslow's pyramid of needs to, to put a concrete visual in our mind for an abstract. concept. And so he has all our different emotions, and at the top of this pyramid, he puts emotions such as enlightenment and peace, and he gives them a numerical value like 99 and a hundred.

So, this is the penthouse. This is the tip of our emotions. This is when we're feeling high. This is where we want to be. But at the bottom of this pyramid, he describes emotions that are not desired that we hope to not have. The very bottom is shame, and he gives this one, the number one out of a hundred and right above shame. At the bottom of this pyramid, he gives guilt the number.

So, in his book, he goes on to describe that shame is as close as we can get to death while still being alive, and that with this guilt and shame that we are so physically and emotionally down that our body shows this to the world. We hang our head. We don't really lift our eyes. We do that self-neglect.

And he also talks about how guilt is a learned behavior from society, parents, religion, and it goes hand in hand with feeling undeserved, unlovable, and worthless. And that's why long-term guilt is not beneficial because we don't want. Brene Brown is a sociologist and has written a lot of books about guilt and shame and vulnerability and how we can get to unlearn these learned behaviors Is on the top of her list and there's a lot of effort that has to be put.

Into getting out of that. But you can't deal with what you can't feel. You can't deal with what you won't feel and who wants to feel guilt and shame, but knowing that, feeling that and going through that can be painful. But do you want a short-term pain or a long-term pain? Cuz you're gonna have pain. But if you can go through that, then you can start to do something which.

Go on the path that leads to self-forgiveness. So, number one on that path to self-forgiveness is going through that guilt to give and make an apology to someone else and to apologize to yourself. Not with, I am sorry, because the body remembers like I am not, sorry, I'm not a sorry human being, but I feel.

So much sadness for what I said, for what I did, and we all, as citizens of this planet have the ability and capacity and probably have made a royal mess of, of something in life. But we owe ourselves that apology for being just as human as everyone else. Our actions do not mean that we are worth. But in giving this apology, we also have to know that we are worthy of accepting the apology for ourselves and accepting the grace to receive the apology from both other people and ourselves.

Number two, to be forgiving of yourself is to be patient. How many times have you accepted someone's apology? Genuinely, but you still felt hurt and resentful about it, like you just couldn't let it go. Like, I, I see that you were really, you know, not happy with your actions or what you did, but I am still hurt.

And so this can happen. When we give an apology to ourselves, it doesn't mean like, oh, I can't forgive myself. I'll never get it. But you can still feel. Emotions that are not coincided with forgiveness of what we, what we think forgiveness is, that it's just this poof that there are clouds in the sky and that everything's fine.

No, we are still human beings and we still have these emotions and still are processing and being patient and knowing that this is a process is so important. Is it It's, it's the journey, not the destination. And definitely when it comes to forgiving yourself, that is the case. And number three is change your story.

So, every time you think you, you recollect on the negative, your body hears it and it tries to latch onto that feeling. And as we talked about earlier in that pyramid, it doesn't take much to go from the penthouse to the basement, but it does take a lot of effort to go from the bottom up. So, changing your story can.

every time you think about, for example, my situation with student loan debt and debt in general, and being a physical therapist in today's society, we don't come out with just, you know, a couple thousand dollars. It, it's, it's a nice little home worth. Okay. And I felt a lot of guilt about. Having a credit card and buying a few other things because shouldn't I be using that money to pay down my debt?

Isn't that what everyone says, Dave Ramsey and everyone else, get out of your loans. Get out of your loans. But when you're looking at that, do you wanna live like a poor student for another 20 years or live halfway decent for 30? That's how long can take to pay these loans off. And just realizing that I have made mistakes.

and some of them had interest rates, those mistakes, but I learned something and that value of learning for myself and for other people that may listen to what I have to say, that's part of the human experience. I just have to forgive myself and sometimes I call it the, the mom fails when I say or do stuff.

That's not necessarily the best in my opinion. I have learned from my own son who's nine a lot about compassion and forgiveness because every day, and perhaps this is something through a child's eyes, where we as adults can learn the thing or two, that this forgiveness is like renewed every day. Every day.

It's, I'm so happy to see you, mama. Every day it's a new hug. Every day's a do-over. And I think from observing that I have now learned from a child, my own child, how to forgive myself because I have seen how someone else outside of me who has probably been hurt by me more than any other person, right? We hurt those closest to, you know, closest to us how he can extend.

And that's a huge lesson. And so if I can take that and learn that lesson now in my forties, what kind of lessons can we continue to learn throughout our entire life? So, I thank you for listening. Perhaps was was the first show that you listened to or if I'm blessed that you listen to several other episodes I ask.

If you found this topic or the topics just in general beneficial to you, have opened up your mind or perhaps introduced you to new ideas or new authors. And have boosted your day, would you forward a link to the show to those that you feel would benefit, but only if you found this helpful or interesting in any way, perhaps this will open the door for someone else in the future.

Again, I enjoy your feedback and I would love to connect with you on Instagram via email as well, and I'll see you next Tuesday. Let's keep building one another up.