It is amazing how fast January slips by. At such times, when our new year’s resolutions begin to fade and life seems busier and drearier than ever, what may be required is a little “self-forgiveness”: we had so many intentions and life keeps zipping along! Without that conscious self-forgiveness we may begin to avoid our creative work.
Along those lines, I wanted to share with you a lesson response on self-forgiveness from a participant in my creativity coaching training, as I think it is particularly lovely and eloquent. Lars (who resides in Norway) explained:
I need to forgive everything. I’m a thoughtful person, so I have a tendency to immerse myself into the density of facts about the world and my past and present life, bringing weight, inertia and opacity to my reality. All that heaviness makes it almost impossible to act and subsequently create.
It has dawned on me during this course that an all-encompassing forgiveness is the first step in a method to dissolve my heavy reality and open up for creativity. I must forgive everything, not only my failings and failures. I must forgive everything in the true meaning of remitting all debts between me and the world, so all my laboriously collected thoughts, experiences, sorrows, rules, habits, perceived limits, etc. are liberated to do what they want with themselves, each other and the world around them.
I understand this liberation as a form of generosity in my relationship with myself, giving me my reality back, but now subtracted of all that weight and with no strings attached. It’s not the lightness of frivolity I’m after (where everything counts and silliness counts double), but rather a lightness of thoughtfulness emerging from daily exercises in having a frisky, plastic, transparent perspective on the meanings in the world and on my own sense of reality, even, or especially, when subjects are sinister and tasks burdensome.
I love the phrase “a form of generosity in my relationship with myself.” I hope you can find that for yourself.
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The next Life Purpose Boot Camp Instructor Training starts tomorrow! To learn more and to hop on board:
https://ericmaisel.com/product/life-purpose-boot-camp-instructor-training/
My print interviews (at my Psychology Today blog Rethinking Mental Health) with more than 100 innovators, game-changers and alternative helpers in the mental health world begins tomorrow! The post introducing the series has just appeared today. To learn more about the (free) series: