Yesterday I decided, partly as a displacement activity to avoid writing this, partly because I felt a strange pull in that direction, to tidy a huge pile of old journals and notebooks, some personal, some related to work and projects.  Inevitably, as I sorted them, I delved inside, and, a few times, fell down a rabbit hole of reading and reminiscing.

For some years I’ve written, on and off, Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages (from “The Artist’s Way”)– it’s a beautiful, helpful, introspective process. She recommends not rereading them immediately, and I don’t – but here I was confronted with morning pages from six, twelve, nineteen years ago (I first worked through the book in 1997).

What struck me repeatedly was – not only that I seemed to have had the same issues in my life for some decades, but also – how much wisdom and insight I have always had into how to improve things. And yet, for many years things didn’t seem to improve.

Now, there have been several overtly definitive events in my life, in various areas such as relationships, jobs, big moves, trauma. Apart from those visited upon me from outside, they probably boil down to two things, in terms of my actions: either leaving too soon, or staying too long.

Underneath and behind those actions, of course, lay beliefs or thoughts – I made a mistake, I must not be lovable, How could I think this would work?/This should be working/ I can make this work/ There’s no way to make this work. And so on.

Perceptions of the world and what was happening that usually revolved around me and my self-image, even when the attention appeared to be fully on the other person/job/place/whatever.

For some years I held the view that I had made irredeemable mistakes. That I had taken actions, or failed to take actions, that meant I could never be happy again; I’d never get what I wanted; I had peaked and it was all downhill now.

I dug myself into a deep hole, a spiral of shame and despair.

I was coached and counseled to let go of these beliefs. To dissolve these thoughts and replace them with new ones. To inquire into them and, by doing so, loosen them and see whether something else might be true or truer.

These strategies can be helpful. I did try, but I believed my thoughts were based on objective truth – mistakes HAD been made, I HAD wrecked my life with some of my choices.

What I needed was a clean slate, or, as I began to think of it: forgiveness.

I spent some of my formative years in the evangelical church. I bought into the idea of original sin – that I was fundamentally flawed and needed to be “saved” in order to live an abundant life and go to heaven. Forgiveness was meted out by God and his offsider Jesus, but only if I confessed my many transgressions, and acknowledged that I was, at the heart of it, wrong, bad and broken. Those among us who have been traumatized, neglected or abused might be particularly vulnerable to these ideas.

These days I view all of this as dangerous, damaging codswallop, but still, for many years anything that smacked of these beliefs was very hard for me to stomach. Once I broke away from the church, I held to a different view of myself, one in which I was actually not broken or intrinsically wrong, but my hold on that was precarious and I could not countenance anything that challenged it.

So when I began to think about forgiving myself, implicit in the very idea of forgiveness seemed to be the notion that there was something to forgive – that some wrong had been done. How could I detach from that idea, while still freeing myself from the bonds of self-criticism?

I started to think of forgiveness not in the sense of a self-righteous and falsely benevolent way of pointing out harm while magnanimously accepting an apology (but not really) –  but in the sense a person might be pardoned of a crime – they are absolved and free, as if never convicted.

All the mistakes I believed I’d made – they had never existed (and they actually hadn’t). Everything could begin again, as if nothing had happened (because it actually hadn’t).

This clearly requires a new approach to thoughts and beliefs. This requires that I see the deep truth that I live in the feelings of my thoughts, not of my circumstances – that in fact thought is all we ever really experience.

So does this mean that I need to examine, or attempt to change, my thoughts?

No – to manage my reactions to what’s occurred doesn’t make sense when I consider that my thinking created “what’s occurred” in the first place. All I need to do is to remind myself I am always whole, and I always have peace of mind and clarity.

Forgiveness of myself means I can return, in this moment, to who I have always been, with all the same potential and possibility, and can begin anew, fresh, today.

That I am, now, exactly who I was born to be, always doing my best to live my life as well as I can, before my mind created thoughts of  mistakes, regrets and rifts.

This, my friend, feels like peace and freedom.