Learning How to Forgive Yourself 

I recently delivered a video presentation to senior executives in a Japanese publishing company I write for titled “The Zen Secret for Never Regretting Your Business and Financial Decisions.” In that presentation, I spoke about how to set goals and be intentional about achieving them, but without attaching yourself emotionally to the results.

Following the presentation, I got a note from one of the attendees, who wrote:

As I was interpreting you confidently with my tone of “as if I’m doing it myself already,” I noticed I’m so not doing it. Suffering from what turned out to be the opposite of what I wanted it to turn out has been really big and I tend to blame myself.

But like you slightly touched on, it shouldn’t have been all because of me. There could have been some other natural forces that I couldn’t control that led to the unwanted result. When I think this way, I feel a little easier. I’d better detach myself from the result, and have Plan B.

was happy that I had communicated the thrust of my idea, but I was concerned about the statement that “there could have been some other natural forces that I couldn’t control.”

I realized that there should have been a Part II to my presentation: Learning how to forgive yourself without denying or diminishing responsibility.

So, this is what I wrote back…

What I Should Have Added to My Talk

After reading your note, I have another idea for you to consider. It goes something like this: “The moment you forgive yourself, the universe forgives you, too.”

Maybe that is too abstract – one of those statements that, while true, is nevertheless impossible to understand unless you have done it yourself or at least seen it done by others.

Your note inspired me to try to do a better job of expressing what I mean by it, so let me try again…

We must take responsibility for our actions. Trying to avoid that responsibility by blaming other people or other things cannot ease the pain we feel for something we regret doing.

So that’s the first step.

The second and perhaps more difficult step is to forgive yourself. For most people brave enough to take step one, this is not easy. We’ve all been taught as children to feel shame and regret. For all sorts of things.

And there is nothing wrong with having those feelings. They are part of the larger recognition that we are all part of an interconnected universe, and that everything we do has some effect, large or small, on everything else. We all damage things. We all hurt and/or damage other beings. We do it purposefully through action or accidentally through inaction. Feeling regret and/or shame about it is a natural response.

But then we must move on.

And to move on, we must realize that the only way we can forgive ourselves is to give up the egoistic idea that we have control over everything we do – whether unconsciously, accidentally, or purposefully – and how it affects others.

We must be humble enough to accept our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. We must understand that, as imperfect beings with limited powers, we are no match for nature – that we should strive towards improving our awareness and behavior, but, at the same time, acknowledge that, however much progress we think we are making, we are, from the larger context of nature, bit-part actors in a very short scene of a very long play whose recurring principal themes are of tragedy and comedy with only a single thread that connects them. And that thread is irony, whose essential insight is, to paraphrase Newton, that each truth has an equal and opposite truth.

I’m writing this, as I sometimes do, as a hypocrite. I grew up secretly blaming myself for everything that wasn’t perfect in my life. I mentally tortured myself for every failure, every stumble, every disappointing outcome.

Looking back, I see that, at some egocentric level, I was seeing myself as a sort of heroic figure in a great struggle for human perfection. Not just for me, but for the rest of the world. Now I try to see myself more realistically, as a bit player in a cosmic comedy of never-ending moments of achievement and failure, love and loneliness, happiness and hurt.

But the failures and the loneliness and the hurt do not have to be constant and continuous. If we can see ourselves and our actions in the larger context, we can forgive ourselves – not to rationalize our mistakes or our limitations but to accept responsibility for the harm and damage we cause – and we can move ahead with humility and hope.

And if we can do that – if you can do that, even once in a while, you will notice that the world will be that much more ready to forgive you, too.