I’m not sure why I needed guilt.
I’m thinking I used it to make me feel bad & behave.
I’m positive that throughout my life when I fostered feelings of guilt,
Those thoughts led me into places that were sad & forbidding.
I’m not sure why I needed guilt.
Guilt is solely a product of my imagination, my memories, my thinking.
Knowing this has never ensured that the negativity I’m feeling in the moment will automatically disappear. In fact in the early stages of understanding what exactly thought is, I felt pangs of guilt just for thinking I was still feeling guilty about my life & how I was handling it. In the past guilt was there no matter what steps I took to understand why it surfaced. Once I allowed healing life as I knew it changed.
I have two beautiful daughters. Both were raised by me in unhealthy environments brought into existence because I decided that I always needed an unhealthy someone in my life, a man. They both survived. They survived my guilt ridden life while bringing into existence their own damaging feelings of guilt.
As a young adult my state of mind was stagnant and festered with guilt. I tried desperately to pull myself away from feelings of worthlessness by drowning myself in a dark, abyss of alcohol and crazy men. I was devoid of the ability to see where all my anguish came from confident it was those people who paraded through my life Hell bent on my destruction. And still as I persisted to live in my created unhappiness, I felt guilty for the survival at all &, worse, for exposing my beautiful daughters to those awful thoughts I made real every day.
And yet we all survived.
It wasn’t until I spent more than six years working in a homeless shelter filled with men and women racked with regrets, remorse, self-loathing that I learned the truth about my constant companion, guilt.
I listened. I was made to listen as I had placed myself in a position that required my rapt attention. Day after day I would hear stories. Over time hundreds of real stories of survival wrapped around feelings of guilt. Immediately I was transported with them into lives that danced with anguish, hardships, disappointments, and perilous lives most beginning when they were children just learning what love meant. I saw myself in their eyes, I felt my wounds in their scars and tears came unbidden as they cried over the choices that they had made to survive those awful days.
Over time I began to understand how I had manifested my own guilt to punish myself for choices I had made. And I began to heal.
I began a shift of understanding as I coaxed these spiritual beings into peace of mind.
The walk I took while standing amongst these magnificent survivors helped me to realize one very important lesson:
We are all doing the best we can using only the information we give ourselves to make sense of our lives. We do this every single moment via our own thought-filled creations. And these thoughts we create are without significance until we consciously decide they do and then, we feel. And at times we feel a lot!
If we had known there were better, healthier choices we would have made them. It truly is that simple and there is no guilt in that. There is no place for regret or remorse in “not knowing” and that path cannot be retaken for it exists only in our memories.
The fact that I survived at all, that any of us do, is a miracle all by itself.
I am proud that I survived a childhood of abuse. I feel gratified that I fought off my own self-destructive behaviors following that childhood and I have, without hesitation, compassion for the person I was and love who I am today.
A friend once said to me, “No one wants to feel bad. If they knew that they had a choice in that moment of distress they would certainly choose to feel differently.” It took me a minute to hear what this meant as I was convinced someone was making a choice to hurt me. But I listened. I was made to listen as I understood Wisdom was speaking and so I learned again.
If we knew in those dark moments that we could feel differently, we would. It is as simple and, sometimes because we hold so tight to old behavior, as complicated as that.
“Negative thoughts are like scratches on a window: they stop you from seeing life with clarity. When the negative thoughts cease, the scratches disappear and the window becomes crystal clear. Then the beauty and positive aspects of life can be seen.” The Missing Link by Sydney Banks
We all have the ability to alleviate feelings of guilt and know we are always doing our level best. Once we give ourselves permission to appreciate the truth of this we also begin to heal.
Guilt, in fact all feeling, is made real by a virtually unknown factor called Thought. Once this is known we can all feel blessed to be part of the creation of its universe in a state of complete peace.
About the Author: Marian Brown
I am a Peaceful Relations Coach with a degree in Social Work from San Jose State University and a teaching certificate from the Three Principle’s Division of the County of Santa Clara, Department of Drugs and Alcohol. I recently retired from InnVision, a provider of resources for the homeless in Santa Clara County where I worked as a case manager for men and women diagnosed with mental illness, addiction concerns and survivors of every type of trauma. I am also certified to teach domestic violence awareness groups for both men and women. I’m also a survivor of domestic violence/intimate violence from the age three until I walked away from all the violent madness in my life when I was 35 years old. Throughout my life I felt I was in a state of perpetual surviving and told myself from a very early age, “…it’s all mind over matter.” This innate knowing I was always aware of helped me navigate through some truly life threatening circumstances. Telling myself this I never truly understood what it meant until I was introduced to the Three Principles. This understanding enlightened me to what it means to be a survivor of my own thinking. My passion to share this understanding of our “inside-out” experiences we all live by comes from my own misconceptions of what I thought was the truth. I’d believed that I was a victim of my life. Once I found out it was always me in control, good or bad, right or wrong, I found this knowledge to be the golden key to gaining that seemingly elusive but always available and completely sustainable peace of mind.
