Forgiveness

Some of the things I'll share here will be other people's words that I find to be so helpful. We are bombarded with so much online that we can't possibly see everything and I love when people share things that resonate with me. So I want this to be a place to store all the good things I find as well. Credit will always be given of course!

I saw this post today on Facebook - on the account "Walk For Peace" which is the official Page of Walk for Peace, the 120-day, 2,300-mile journey by Buddhist monks — with loyal dog, Aloka — walking from Fort Worth, Texas, to Washington, D.C. to raise awareness of peace, loving kindness, and compassion across America and the world. Go look them up and follow - it's worth it.

I have a tattoo on my wrist that just says "i forgive you". People would ask me who it was meant for. It was always meant for me.

Here is the post I saw today from that account:

The Hardest Person to Forgive

We can forgive others with surprising ease sometimes. A friend hurts us, and eventually we let it go. A stranger wrongs us, and we find a way to move past it. But when it comes to forgiving ourselves? That’s where we become stuck.

Regret holds us like nothing else can. We replay our mistakes endlessly — the words we shouldn’t have said, the choices we wish we could undo, the people we hurt. We carry these memories like heavy chains, dragging them everywhere, unable to walk forward, trapped in a past that cannot be changed while life continues flowing around us.

Forgiving ourselves does not erase what happened. It does not pretend our mistakes don’t matter or that we caused no harm.

What it does is release the weight so we can actually do something meaningful with what we’ve learned. It frees us to become better, to grow from our mistakes rather than being crushed by them, to walk forward with the lightness we need to bring peace to others.

How can we offer peace to the world when we are still at war with ourselves? How can we extend compassion to others when we withhold it from our own hearts?

Peace begins within — not just with calming our minds, but with learning to treat ourselves with the same gentleness, the same understanding, the same mercy we so readily offer to everyone else.

We are human. We may make mistakes. This is not a failure — this is simply what it means to be alive, to be learning, to be walking a path we’ve never walked before.

The question is not whether we will stumble. The question is: Will we allow those stumbles to define us forever, or will we learn from them, forgive ourselves, and keep walking?

Let us be gentle with our own hearts. Let us forgive ourselves—not as an ending, but as a beginning. Not as permission to repeat mistakes, but as freedom to become who we are truly capable of being.

You deserve your own compassion. You deserve to walk forward, lighter and freer, carrying wisdom instead of chains.

May you and all beings be well, happy, and at peace.