GUILT

Preston Smiles – Guilt is a lie. Guilt is a mental construct that has us believing that life should be some way other than it is. See I like to remind us all that everyone is doing the best that they can from where they can with what they have available to them at the time. So if that means that you made a mistake which we all do that’s what you did and life is perfect and always. So if that mistake causes someone else some pain, Yes, you get to own up to that and take responsibility but you also get to understand that we’re always co-creating and there isn’t a single mistake on this planet, not a leaf, not a hair on your head, not a hair in my beard there are no mistakes on this planet.

DIEDERIK WOLSAK – What happens to anyone when they’re little… what happens in their environment is entirely about them. So if your parents are gloriously happy you must be a wonderful little person if your parents are not happy there’s something wrong with you you’ve done something. Well, in my youth nobody was happy and most people that I know um did not have happy parents and so we all developed that same belief of very deep help belief in guilt and that guilt is really what drives most of the universe. It’s a primal guilt that goes back to the idea that I’m separate but at this level  at the level that you can work with it actually, it comes down to everything that happens – my fault, my parents were not happy – my fault my father and mother got a divorce – my fault, my father loses his job – my fault, my father drinks – my fault. You name it whatever happens it’s your fault.

SteveO – I had like real problems with guilt and forgiving myself. And now looking back on it, I think it’s kind of silly because there wasn’t anything I did that was really so terrible. I think that where I got really kind of sucked into it and all the self-loathing again is the ego you know? Like it’s sort of like to say that you know ‘I don’t think much of myself,  but I’m all I think about ‘you know? Like where I decided I hated myself it was just me thinking about me you know? And being self-absorbed and self-obsessed. When I can look at it at this point and really honestly recognize that it was more of an exercise in just being self-obsessed than accomplishing anything you know? I hadn’t done anything so terrible that I should want to kill myself or anything you know? I mean the purpose of the inventory work is to identify which behaviors don’t serve us and to discard them and to move on in a more productive way. By taking inventory and sort of putting myself on trial and deciding that I hated myself. I wasn’t, that wasn’t recovery that was just self-obsession and self-loathing which is all ego 

Joe Wolfe – Those are all properties of the ego’s thought system you know sin manifests guilt, which results in punishment you know? If you’re guilty you got to get punished because you committed a sin. It’s one big cycle I mean, it’s what makes the world go around look around you, you know, there hasn’t been a period in the whole history of this world where there wasn’t some sort of conflict someplace you know what does that tells you it doesn’t matter what the conflict is. It’s the constant reminder input by ego to survive. 

DIEDERIK WOLSAK – The only way I can be an ego is if I’m out of the oneness. How did I get to be out of the oneness? I did something so that’s the guilt and the shame and the punishment. So the punishment is no longer being in the oneness being part of the club, it’s a fun club to be in the oneness it’s a beautiful place to be. We’re no longer part of that says the ego so that’s the punishment. The guilt is I did something there’s not a single person on this planet that doesn’t have a lowgrade chronic sense of guilt and it’s not defined don’t know where it comes from but it’s always there. That’s what we live with that comes from the belief that I did something and the banishment is I’m kicked out of paradise. I took a bite of the apple that’s all I did. 

Carol Howe – Guilt is where you’ve decided something that I have done or said is capable of either ruining something about me, my life, someone else’s life some other situation. In other words, to feel guilty is to say my errors in thought or action, in other words, the errors of my thinking, or the errors in my behaviour with my body. That’s not really who I am, are so monumental that I have torn unity apart. That I have had, I have the capacity to decide that your life is now ruined. In other words, guilt is a really arrogant position to take because it says for instance if you say, “I am so guilty because of the way I treated you” or “I’m so guilty” not only do you inflict huge pain on yourself but the ground for that, the basis for that is saying my thinking my words my behavior are so much more powerful than yours that I have just ruined your life and you go “Really, is that what that says?”

So guilt is completely fallacious you know? It has no basis in anything whatsoever. It’s just an ego construct. The ego loves having that kind of power – which of course it doesn’t. But it likes to pretend like look at the power I’ve got. Remember, the ego is trying to replace God whatever it thinks God is it’s like it’s trying to replace it so it’s like if God can make things happen then me too you know look at all the harm I can do with and I’m so guilty because I was so powerful that I ruined your life and like well, No. that’s not what happens at all. If anybody’s life is ruined it’s because we have believed these awful small things about ourselves and we have caused great distress for ourselves.

Gary Renard – Right, what you’re seeing and that other person is actually something in your own unconscious mind that you have chosen to see out there on the screen in that other person. It’s something that you secretly believe about yourself that you hate about yourself that you have chosen to see out there on the screen that’s a psychological thing that is called projection also. And what happens is you project it outward to get rid of it so that you don’t feel it in yourself but it doesn’t really get rid of it because it’s still there the cause of it is still there in your unconscious mind and all that you’re seeing is a symbolic representation of what exists in your own unconscious mind. So it’s kind of like a symbol you know so you see something out there you hate it’s a symbol of something that is within that you actually hate about yourself which sounds kind of bad but actually is good news because if you forgive it by not making it real and think of that person as being what they really are then you are the one who is forgiven and that thing that you hated about yourself that’s in your unconscious mind is released. It’s healed and you can be free of it.

Carol Howe – If somebody’s in your life and you say that person drives me crazy because and then you can fill in the blank so let’s just say they aren’t trustworthy I know the words it’s like, I can’t count on their keeping their word I can’t count on their doing what they say they’re going to do okay so you go, boy, I hate it that that kind of a person is in my life and then what the ego mind wants to do is put all the focus on their shortcomings their wrongdoing their what a nuisance it is to have them in your life and so on and so forth or why would anybody be that way you know you? I hear a lot of people talk that way and it’s like if you just stop all of that you just drop out all of the looks what they are doing why would anybody do that and you say if this behavior and as you so noted in your mind in that particular example it will be about untrustworthy. If I have a person in my life in whom I’m seeing untrustworthiness in its various aspects. I can be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that I still accuse myself in some way of being untrustworthy. The circumstances could be different it might not be about what happens at work the degree might not be the same. Some people say oh, I might do that a tiny little bit but not nearly as much as they do so if you just stop all of that and say this person has been brought into my life is standing right in front of me as a mirror I keep looking over there as if I’m looking at a person so like if they’re there then I know with 100% certainty and I might as well not even argue about it that they’re reflecting to me something that I still feel guilty about. Now an important point I might be doing something where I’m not quite keeping my word now but I might rationalize why I don’t do it or I might not keep a trust that I was given but I will diminish it in some way or I might not be engaging in any of those behaviors at all now but I still hold on to guilt about when I did that last year. In other words, I can either still be engaging in the specific behaviors that I accuse someone else of or I can still be feeling guilty about when I did. So even though the behavior has stopped if the guilt remains I’m still going to see it reflected because the whole point of having these things reflected is not to drive us crazy, it’s to say here’s where you need to be kind to yourself here’s where you need to say, Yes I made a mistake I’m still beloved, I’m still lovable, I can do things differently now. In other words, everything is about being kinder gentler, and more loving of myself because indeed I deserve it no matter what my behavior has been.

Jerry Jampolsky – Not making decisions based on your ego. Make decisions based on unconditional love from a higher source that never changes a source that never changes where there’s no change going on at all. We live in this world the physical world where everything changes. So our lesson today is to step aside and read in my words love be with you all the day, a higher form of interpreting letting the love interpret all these ego functions and to know that when you’re living a life that’s filled with unconditional love and you’re not interpreting people’s behavior and you’re seeing no more value in guilt and hurting others it’s amazing how free and happy you can be.

STEVEO – In early recovery, I was doing the work where we kind of take an inventory of of our defects and I wrote down a list of things that made me feel terrible about myself things that I had done which were terrible and for which I needed to take action to make them right when I wrote down this list of things I determined that I just hated myself, I just had too much guilt I was just , I couldn’t forgive myself remember feeling like I couldn’t respect a God who could forgive me like just like all this crazy thing and I just like this is horrible self-loathing came in and I really felt that I wanted to kill myself and I shared that with some people and they led me to a hospital and I had already been in a psychiatric or but now here I am going to my second one and it was when I was in that second psychiatric ward you know, I wrote one letter that was somewhat helpful I read something I’ll never forget which talked about the the history of every alcoholic is plagued with specters of humiliation and  you know, guilt and shame and and that when we come turn, when we turn at a certain corner that the purpose of recovery is to turn that shameful guilt sort  of to an asset to where like having you know gotten through it, I can look at the everything and that’s what it was when I was in that second psychiatric ward and I read something which indicated that everything I feel so terrible about is actually an asset to me because a) it’s the fire underneath my ass that makes me want to get better and be in recovery for the right reasons you know to not be this guy who I can’t stand and who  I feel like I want to kill myself and B) that to have kind of come through that and and made my life better that everything that made me feel terrible is now like my most valuable asset because I can use my past to help other people.

CAROL HOWE – First of all, it’s helpful to realize the impossibility of trying to change the outside world without changing my mind. I have to first of all more and more and more that my overall thought process, my beliefs if I think I’m a crummy little person there’s no way I’m going to have a wonderful successful life, and other words there’s what I believe the collection of beliefs that I hold which is another way to describe what the ego is that collection of beliefs is a seamless whole with my three-dimensional world there is no separation between it. And that’s why when I let go of my guilt when I process my pain appropriately instead of hiding it and masking it and running to all my addictions and let go of the things that I’m holding against myself and others when I projected it onto them and every time I do I get lighter, I get bigger, I become more aware, I have more opportunities because that energy field frequency is rising and rising and rising and let’s say again so that you can see this visually pain and unhappiness and limitation happen when I’m vibrating at this more or less unloving frequency. 

The more I let go and let go and let go up here at this frequency you might say is where joy and fulfillment and peace operate well, I’ve got to get myself vibrating at the frequency that you might say is the joy frequency. I can’t be operating down here at I hate all the people who aren’t like me but I sure would like joy in my life it’s like well good luck it’s just not going to happen that way.

Gary Renard – This is our dream or it’s your dream. You know, the dream is not being dreamed by somebody else if there’s just one of us you know the dream is being dreamed by you. You want to awaken from it and the fastest way, not the only way but the fastest way to awaken from it is to practice the kind of forgiveness that doesn’t make it real because if your unconscious mind is interpreting everything that you think to be about you. If you’re thinking that they’re real your unconscious mind will interpret that to mean well, I’m real and I’m this body and I’m separate, and everything that I ever did really happened, and that I’m really guilty you know, it’s like, it’s just going to you but if you forgive in such a way that says well you know they haven’t really done anything this is just a movie you know it’s already been filmed. If you look at it that way and you’re forgiving them because they haven’t done anything your unconscious mind will pick up on the fact that you haven’t really done anything and that’s why you’re innocent. 

So you know, that’s the fast lane, that’s the fastest way out most people don’t go there because they don’t know about it but if you practice it for a while you’ll start to see that it works and when you start to feel better it changes everything you know, after a while maybe your body will start to feel lighter you know maybe it will start to feel more like the figure in a dream that it really is instead, of this heavy thing that you have to carry around maybe it’ll be more difficult to hurt it you know maybe, you’ll get an accident and you’ll say, Wow, that hurt but it doesn’t and you start to get excited. As time goes on and you get results that’s where the proof is in your own experience you don’t need to prove it scientifically  you prove it with your own experience.

CAROL HOWE – So the first thing you have to do when upset comes is allow that emotional state to be there instead of hiding it running from it running to your addictions to mask it you simply welcome it, you can use any word you want you can say befriend it, welcome it, invite it to the table give it all your very benign undivided attention. All of that implies not pressing against it and pushing against it and resisting it. It’s like any way you can think of acceptance allowing that emotional state which you have created not anybody else. In other words, this is created by your own guilt by your own fear and I need to allow it to be there with no resistance, with no judgment, and when I do that it will begin to dissipate the reason it will begin to dissipate is that my thoughts are creating my emotional state so when I change thought to one that’s more open, that’s more loving, that’s more accepting of whatever this is it changes my body chemistry and it changes all the time. 

So that the body chemistry that caused me to feel awful can gradually be changed to body chemistry that like oh things are fine this happens all the time when I have private clients they’ll come in all in a big twit about something and so we’ll look at the 25 words or less version of what seems to be troubling them get right on to how they feel and they can see how much of the time they’re hiding it, pushing against it, hating it, resisting it I don’t want to feel this and so we just stop all of that and so at some point in our session, I’ll say and guide them to do just this only I’ll be more focused with them of course than I am here and I’ll say, “How do you feel now” and they’ll go, “I feel so much better it’s like I feel lighter, I feel like I can breathe better” and you know any number of ways to indicate how much better they feel and it’s like, there you go, you’ve just made my case for me you have changed your mind, you’ve been willing to just pay attention to how I can guide you to change your mind. I can encourage you to change your mind you did it, you were willing to experience what was going on without resistance you changed your body chemistry you feel better.