My Experience tells me guilt is a human invention mostly driven by religion. In my 12 years of Catholic education I was trained to be very proficient in feeling guilty. I was regularly given lists of things I should feel guilty about, things called sins. In the school I attended we had to go often to confession to tell about our sins so we could be forgiven. It seems this whole made up set of wrongs where created to make us feel guilty?
As a person able to think and reason about my own past and beyond the heavy conditioning of the mind, I have often wondered what is the purpose of such extensive training in guilt. How come we invented such ideas as sin, hell, damnation and guilt? I suspect it had to do with some plan to control the masses. Really if you think about it, if you want people to do what you want them to do, you must get them to feel no ok about themselves. Those that don’t feel accepting of who they are tend to not speak up, to note vote, to do what they are told to do, to act like sheeple.
Guilt in my work with myself and others seems to be a totally useless emotion and that we don’t really change because we feel guilty. In fact we change when we get clear our thinking or behavior isn’t working for us. Guilt only makes us feel bad about ourselves, which means we tend to contracted into old behavior rather than to expand into new behavior.
The opposite of guilt is feeling positive about ourselves, feeling self-love and self-acceptance. These qualities of positive self esteem are so needed in a world today run too often by people who seem to have no positive sense of self except related to how much power and control they have over others.
So what to do with the years of accumulate guilt? For some 35 years of more I have been working on purging myself of the negative beliefs and ideas dumped on me by some very unconscious people. Here are a few steps I have found very helpful:
1. Forgive, let go and move on – my Catholic education is the past I hold nothing negative about that anymore. Today I am fully free of whatever happened yesterday.
2. My heart is an infinitely wiser guide than my head in how to be in the world in a positive and purposeful way. I follow my heart not the conditioning of my mind.
3. Through being mindful and having impartiality, I can notice when old programming surfaces and can then intervene. In this moment I make sure my thinking is highest it can be in consciousness and compassion.
4. Today is rich in potential and I live it as fully as I can. No past beliefs or ideas can get in my way if I am completely present to the higher self/spirit in me. I am free to be.
Hope your weekend is full of sun, enjoyment, and the peace of mind that comes from saying goodby to guilt.