Forgive yourself.

# Forgive yourself (Listen up! This one's extremely important.)

Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over.

You're going to make mistakes as a parent. It's literally inevitable. You're human, and mistakes are just part of being human. It's how you handle your mistakes that matters most. Acknowledge them. Apologize for them. Make them as right as possible. Learn something from them. And then let them go. It's okay. I promise. After all, how else will our little humans learn that it's okay to be human.

I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.

Mothers can forgive anything! Tell me all, and be sure that I will never let you go, though the whole world should turn from you.

It is important that we forgive ourselves for making mistakes. We need to learn from our errors and move on.

Practice forgiveness. Start with yourself. Nobody ever actually forgets. Remember the lesson.

Forgive me, baby, for what I didn't do.

Sometimes forgiving yourself takes the form of you telling the story as you experienced it, not as someone else wrote it. Instead of “He first did this, then this, then that,” you are saying “I did, I felt, I…” And this is not to lay blame on you…it’s to make you the narrator of your own story.

Forgive yourself for your faults and your mistakes and move on.

Watch out for each other. Love everyone and forgive everyone, including yourself. Forgive your anger. Forgive your guilt. Your shame. Your sadness. Embrace and open up your love, your joy, your truth, and most especially your heart.

Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.

Forgive, as you hope to be forgiven.