"I am haunted by having hurt someone. What is the best way to deal with it?"

Proluge: Can we really forgive ourselves? And who is doing the forgiveness? Our minds? Where does it come from? To whom will we report? The answer may surprise you because the human cannot effectively forgive the human. It's a dead-end road!

Photo by Felix Koutchinski on Unsplash

Hi,

Two years ago I met a very nice man whom I came to love. We dated several times, took a vacation together and shared very loving moments. At some point, I panicked and withdrew without explaining to him what was going on. I just left and never bothered to answer his calls or emails. He was deeply hurt, I could tell, and at first. he waited for me to come back. Later, as the months passed, he went on with his own life.

The problem is that for the past two years I have not been able to forgive myself for my nasty behavior. I still feel the pain and the hurt that I caused him and I don’t know how to make it up.

Thank you,

Thuni

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Thuni,

The way to forgive yourself is by acknowledging the human aspects of your whole essence. You see, the ideal image that we build in our heads compels us to always be positive – good children, good spouses, good students and good God-followers. We are urged, by that inner aspect, to be superhuman, falsely led to think that such a sublime personality is the only rightful mask that we should wear.

The truth is different. When the soul seeks to experience life on earth it wants to explore itself, all its aspects, the ugly and the beautiful aspects as well. The soul is thrilled by opportunities to experience love and despair alike or in general terms good and bad. In fact, life can be considered complete only when both sides of the duality are experienced, felt and grasped.

It seems that you gave yourself that opportunity. The way to release the pain is to remember that you chose it for reasons as he chose the experience for his own purposes. Remember that you were a wonderful and skillful creator to manifest such a wonderful relationship at all. Focus on that and forget about the ‘making it up’ issue. What is important is that you harness your creative skills to better your own life.

Another practical and very effective therapeutic measure that can be utilized should the circumstances allow (I stress that, do not force a communication!) is to communicate with the man (meet him, call him, email him – whatever suits you) and to directly and honestly confess your feelings and difficulty. Explicitly ask to be forgiven and use his forgiveness as approval for forgiving yourself. You will be surprised what massive amounts of energy will be released by that interchange. Such a measure is sometimes difficult to take because some ego blocks must be tackled before the personality is strong enough to admit to others its past erroneous behavior.

And again I stress that basically, from the soul level, nothing was wrong.

Now, and this will be a bit difficult for you to accept, but you, the human you, cannot forgive yourself. I know that you are told, repeatedly, to forgive yourself, but no matter how hard you try, no matter how many mantras and meditations you do, the hurt will remain. What to do then? Surrender the forgiveness to your soul (not god or any other angel/deity, your soul!) Tell yourself: "I receive the forgiveness from my soul level", breath it in, and then let it go with the knowing that you are forgiven!

Good luck!

Friends, my delegations to you will expire tomorrow. I hope you have enjoyed and benefitted from them. @alexaventuria, @leahlei, @milano1113, @yohan2on