How To Heal Your Soul When You've Done Something You Regret
There are two ways to move forward. One will keep you stuck in pain, while the other will help you heal.
Zanuck | Canva We all know the feeling of regret. Like a pit in your stomach, it often feels like a combination of nausea and heartbreak. Regret is remorse for something you’ve said or done and the hurt you caused with an outcome you didn’t want or expect. It's a signal that you’ve stepped on your values.
Regret helps you know what is right and wrong for you, in alignment with your true self. Any regretful experience is a learning opportunity, just as the pain of touching a hot stove tells you to keep your hand away next time.
There’s a lesson here for you coming from your spirit. What matters to you now that you hadn’t acknowledged earlier or hadn’t learned?
There are two ways to move forward: in fear or in love. One way will keep you stuck in pain, while the other will help you heal.
A 3-step process to heal your soul when you've done something you regret
1. Discover the difference between your soul and spirit
Inside each of us is our “higher self,” “intuition,” or your ‘Inner Spirit of God”. The still, small inner voice of the Universal Creator helps you navigate any past mistake. Your inner Spirit is what you feel deeply in your heart is true for you, good for your well-being, and beautiful. When you act against this, you will naturally feel regret because, deep down, this part of you is love, and now you’ve done something that you recognize was not loving according to you.
Your soul is the eternal part of you growing with valuable experiences of truth, beauty, and goodness you’re collecting for your spiritual progress and is in the custody of your guardian angel. You might think of your soul like an “eternal trust” you are building where each deposit (valuable soul experience) keeps growing in value over time. Healing your soul requires you to let go of the fear of judgment, which can feel like a “need to control with condemnation” and will keep regret stuck in all kinds of pain.
2. Release self-judgment
The moment you hear yourself saying “you should’ve or could’ve” puts you into self-blame about the past that cannot be changed. There’s an acceptance or “peace with what is” that’s needed even though you don’t like what’s happened. The most powerful practice for acceptance is the Serenity Prayer.
"God grant me the serenity to accept that things I cannot change (the past)
The courage to change the things I can (taking responsibility)
And the wisdom to know the difference."
Saying these words in the morning with sincerity helps reconnect you to the truth of your Inner Spirit around whatever value you want to maintain that was stepped on. You may be thinking, but if I don’t keep reminding myself of what I did wrong and feel guilt and shame, you’re letting yourself off the hook. This is just your ego being self-destructive. Taking responsibility requires strength of character to admit and acknowledge your poor choices or errors so you can see and do something differently going forward.
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You are choosing to tap into your sense of integrity and stand up for a better version of who you want to become. When your ego is in fear, it needs to control the past and keep punishing you with blame and judgment that prevents your soul from growing by keeping you stuck.
The love of your Inner Spirit is understanding, patient, and kind and sees others, including ourselves, as “spiritually young” needing to learn soul lessons. Love helps acknowledge the mistake and take ownership. Genuine tears of sadness, frustration, or anger will naturally emerge when you allow your truth to lead you forward.
3. Forgive yourself to finalize the deal
Since we cannot change the past, forgiving ourselves means we’ve found a way to let go of wishing the past could be different. The willingness to stop making yourself wrong opens the space for forgiveness. Your Inner Spirit doesn’t judge you but offers compassion, mercy, empathy, and understanding.
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With any regret, it’s helpful to have a much bigger perspective of your life as being on a very long ascension journey that extends far beyond our short time here and is meant to be filled with ups and downs. We can only know what we know in a given moment when a poor choice was made, and later by acknowledging, “Yes — I blew it, and it’s OK,” means you are prepared not to repeat the same mistake next time.
If you make the same mistake, which happens, the lesson may take a few times to learn. Not all lessons are equal! If you repeatedly keep having the same regret, what you think you care about isn’t a value for you, and you may need to re-assess what does matter. Your power to choose love that forgives rather than fear that condemns in the face of regret is a gift you were given.
You co-create with your Inner Creator for your soul to heal from regret and be happy.
Carolyn Hidalgo is a soul executive coach specializing in helping individuals overcome life challenges by focusing on spiritual health.