Page 48 - WhoAreWe...

should all do the hard work to be very good at. This is
simply because your ability to do something wrong, own up
to it, learn your lesson, and move on will heavily depend on
your ability to forgive yourself.

Think about it, why do you think it is so difficult to do the
whole thing with admitting your mistake and so on? It's
because you know you are going to be beating yourself up
afterwards asking yourself how on earth could I have done
such a bad thing, and I must be a horrible person, and so on.
Or even worse, pretending as though it never happened,
denying the truth. But the reality is that everyone messes up,
and everyone has room for improvement, and if you apply
the same thing to yourself that you did to a perpetrator and
do the hard work to try to figure out WHY you did such a
bad thing, you will be well on the way to self-forgiveness.
Once you do the hard work of honest self-introspection
come up with an answer, you will immediately feel better
about yourself, and you will be able to move on without
self-hatred, and be peaceful in knowing that mistakes that
are well-understood are often not repeated.

And of course all this further informs how important it is to
teach children that mistakes are most often opportunities
for growth and not proof that they are horrible, bad people.
Children that learn this at an early age will likely grow into
kind, loving adults that will have the ability to forgive
others as well as themselves, and this will help to provide
them with a life of true spiritual growth, as well as others
around them.

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