How To Forgive Yourself For Something You Did In A Past Life
Time to let go of the shame.
Zotev Valery/Shutterstock Self-hatred.
I felt it for as long as I could remember but didn’t know why. I couldn’t look at myself in a mirror or spend money on myself.
Nothing I did was good enough and I didn’t feel that I was worth anything, in my own eyes. No one ever told me this, it just was.
Even when I was facing the loss of my eyesight from chemical fumes, in my desperate attempts of trying anything that might help, an angry voice came through from inside, "No, that’s it, it’s done!"
It wasn’t until many years later that I came to know the source of this self-hatred. It was feelings of guilt and shame and not being able to forgive myself.
Here’s the kicker: it wasn’t even from this lifetime.
I learned how to forgive myself for things I did in my past life.
Another time, another place, in South America, I don’t know how long ago. A plague was running rampant with swarms of people dying. I was a doctor and my best efforts were totally ineffective.
Not being able to do anything, I finally gave up and boarded myself in my home with my family. After the plague subsided, I came out and those who survived were angry.
I was blamed for everything. Their anger burned to the extent that one day when I was away from home they broke in and slaughtered my entire family. Their anger burned through lifetimes and I felt it on some level.
If they would have forgiven me, maybe I could have eventually forgiven myself. But, with these eyes continually on me, how could I?
One day, the answer came from a very unexpected place.
Now don’t take this wrong. I take full accountability for my actions and responsibility for their outcomes.
In past lives and this current one, I have hurt many people.
Whether the action was intentional or not — an accident that I directly caused or a happenstance I was involved in and ended up hurting others — I take full responsibility for my involvement.
"That doesn’t make sense!"
Is that what you’re thinking?
Imagine a 10-car accident on the highway and I’m in the middle of it somewhere. One car hit another, which hit mine. If my car was propelled into someone else’s car, t-boning them and killing the driver, was it my responsibility?
To explain this, let's take a quick dive into free choice and divine providence.
Free choice is that we get to choose and act out our lives. While divine providence is that God, the Source, the Universe — whomever! — is making the choices which we act out in our lives.
Polar opposites, right?
What if the clarity lies in which aspect of our lives we have free choice in and which we don't?
We’ve all been in some kind of situation. We need to catch a plane, a train, a show, or whatever. We’re being really good about it. Everything’s prepared and we're ready to go early. We leave the house with time to spare.
Then, it happens: an accident on the highway, a traffic jam, the car breaks down, there’s not a taxi to be found, the phone stops working, etc.
In the end, we miss our scheduled event. It’s obvious, that despite our best efforts, the outcomes of our decisions are not in our hands.
But, the decisions themselves, they’re totally in our hands.
What does this mean?
We can choose to be a kind person or stingy, helpful or self-absorbed, cruel or kind, giving or taking, responsible or careless, moral or degenerate, a hard worker or lazy, honest or deceitful, and the list goes on and on.
But, with all this, the outcomes of our actions are in the realm of divine providence.
How many times have you heard of a thief or thug going to shoot someone and the gun gets jammed?
Free choice: the thief decided to be really bad and kill someone.
Divine providence: the person he chose was not meant to die at that time. But he was meant to get a headache from a knock on the head in the scuffle that ensued.
We know this because that’s what happened.
And what if the thief pulled the trigger and killed the man? We know that the man was meant to die because this is what happened.
Now, I'm not saying that the thief is not responsible, just because it was the person’s time to die.
The thief is responsible, but for what? He’s responsible for making decisions that led him down the road to becoming such a person.
Since the thief brought himself to become such a person that he could take the life of another, and it was also the man’s time to die, divine providence brought the two together for this fateful meeting.
So now, going back to the story from my past life. The self-hatred and lack of self-forgiveness that ensued were very much a part of my life in this lifetime. Until one day, it all changed.
I was listening to a recorded class by Rabbi Shais Taub on free will and divine providence. Actually, I wasn’t just listening but stopping the recording and really thinking about the concepts.
All of a sudden, it hit like a bolt of lightning. All those deaths that occurred through the plague and killings were divine providence.
If they hadn’t died that way, it could have occurred through a tornado, mudslide, tsunami, or war.
But, I am responsible for making the choice of abnegating my responsibilities as a doctor and not staying by the side of my patients in their time of need.
What a relief! I could finally let go of the self-hatred and begin to learn to forgive myself.
What happened to all of the anger from the people in that past life? Eventually, I was able to assist them to come to a place where they could feel love and cross over into the light.
Malka Ahern is a Quantum Health and Healing practitioner. For more about her services, visit her website.