When you free yourself of guilt, you live in peace within. You take on responsibility and stop sentencing (punishing) yourself internally with feelings of guilt. Taking on responsibility is constructive; it allows all your potential to remain awake and flow. You feel free and unburdened. When you get it wrong, you can find different methods to relieve yourself of the burden that it might imply. For example, being sorry for or feeling sad for something that you have done means that you are aware that you have acted against your own well-being or that of another. Realizing it is good; it is the base for any positive change. The important thing is not to sentence (punish) yourself. Learn the lesson. Say sorry, if it is the right thing. Put it right.
Remember that yesterday has already passed. The past cannot be changed. You can’t swallow the words that you said, since you already said them. You can’t repeat the scene from yesterday in a different way because it already happened and stayed recorded on the film of this world drama. Therefore, don’t repeat the words or the scene in your mind over and over again; doing that, you keep alive something that is dead, since yesterday already stayed behind. Learn from the error and commit yourself to you and to your life, promising to yourself that you will not fall over the same stone again. You will think about it before speaking or acting. If there are people or situations that lead you to fall over the same stone i.e. they lead you to make the same mistake, which was committed earlier, again, perhaps you will have to avoid them for a few days or a time, until you have strengthened yourself and have the inner security that they will not influence you. This is not running away; it is wise knowing your weaknesses and knowing that to get into similar situations with the same people is only to repeat the same errors and to worsen your well being and that of the other. Trust in yourself. You can overcome these mistakes and stop making them. It is a question of loving yourself and living. Out of love, you stop hurting yourself and hurting the other.
Crying over past mistakes, you don’t mend anything. Open yourself to forgiveness. Raise the level of your thoughts so that they don’t keep you in a state of sadness and loss of hope. Don’t allow your inner judge to sentence (punish) you each time that you act, since that way you won’t feel free. Your judge that you carry within makes your life bitter; however, it is you that gives this judge the capacity to exist. If the inner judge is in harmony with our conscience, it is good, because it wants to protect us. On creating guilt it warns us that we have broken a rule of our code of beliefs, values or behaviors. It alerts us to the fact that we are acting against something important of ourselves. At those moments it helps us to observe and question what is real, true, important and even sacred in our life and for us.
There is a difference between when we have established our own code of values or beliefs in life, and when we feel obliged (forced) to obey an imposed code of beliefs. It is important for us to accept on an inner level the code by which we think we should be guided and act. When we act out of obligation (compulsion), by following a code of beliefs or behaviors that we feel have been imposed but aren’t accepted as our own, we should ask ourselves why we act out of obligation (compulsion), basing ourselves on a code we have not accepted. Are we perhaps afraid that, if we don’t do it, we will feel guilty? When we violate the codes of belonging to a group, family, social class or community, generally we feel guilty. If this guilt leads us to question ourselves about what is right for our conscience, we progress in our personal growth and improve our clarity. It is necessary to respect ourselves, being clear about what the beliefs are on which we base our life, think, feel and evaluate. This will help us to avoid the gap between what we should and what we want to do. Until the should and the want are joined, we leave an open space for guilt.
When we act according to how we feel we should, we will feel guilt for not doing what we want. While we act according to what we want, we will feel guilt for not doing what we should. When guilt warns us that there is something to check and correct within us and we are willing to see it, have a dialogue with the self and clarify, we are on the right path. Sometimes guilt acts as an excuse for us to apologize without really taking on the responsibility for what happened; we pass on the responsibility to the established norms, norms that in this case we haven’t accepted as our own. In any case, the solution to guilt is to take on self-responsibility.
In Spiritual Service,
Brahma Kumaris