GETTING RID OF GUILT

Tomorrow I am going to be 58 years old and I can truly say that I have never felt more happy or contented.

I love being my age!

I love how good it feels inside my body!

I look at my beautiful daughters (in-law too), all busy mothering and juggling a million hats..

The same with my wonderful young female clients... and I see how stressed they are. Life is simply too busy with too many demands, too noisy, too much peer pressure, not enough sleep or TLC....

I wish I could wave a magic wand and make all that stress and overwhelm disappear.

Now, with the luxury of hindsight, I can see that I wasted so much precious time and energy feeling guilty.

I was constantly guilty about something….

Guilty about not giving the kids the personal attention they needed.

That I didn’t have an income to help pay the bills.

And once I started earning money I got a new layer of guilt, that I wasn’t able to give as much time to the kids.

Guilty when the house was dirty.

Guilty for being a cleaning freak.

Guilty for not looking after my parents enough.

For wanting sleep instead of sex.

For reading a book or watching a movie.

Guilty for not being strict enough on the kids, or being too harsh.

And if I went shopping for myself, I used to feel so mortified that I hid the shoes or clothes in the cupboard for a while…
..
Etc, you get the picture.

I guarantee that pretty much everyone watching this video has something they felt guilty about at some point in their life.

So what I want you to do now is grab a piece of paper and join me for this exercise that I wish I had known about when I suffered from chronic self-imposed guilt trips.

Make a list of things that brings up guilt for you.

You know… you have bought yourself a pair of shoes that you will probably never wear..

You took yourself out for lunch instead of paying the hydro bill…

You bought a gym membership and never used it…

Now, we need to look at the guilt so we can unpack it.

Guilt is actually NOT an emotion.

That’s a surprise isn’t it, because it feels like a negative emotion.

But it is actually a mood.

And it zaps your brightness and vitality.

What is a mood?

Any emotion that becomes prolonged becomes a mood.

Prolonged drawn out fear becomes anxiety.

When people never get over their sorrow or heartbreak, their sadness becomes a mood.

Ever been around a person who is always burdened by sadness? That’s a mood..

What happens next is that the mood becomes an attitude.

A prolonged mood becomes an attitude.

In my twenties, thirties and early forties, I was so stuck in guilt, that it coloured my perspective.

It gave me a gloomy, constricted outlook on life.

And today I wish I hadn’t been like that.

It rubbed off on my kids too, they all suffer from THE GUILTS!

We laugh about it, and we are all working at changing it.

So to reiterate what I have just said, we have 3 stages:

Emotion prolonged becomes a mood.

Mood prolonged becomes an attitude.

Attitude prolonged becomes a perspective of life.

To discover the emotion underneath the guilt, you need to work backward.

Underneath my guilt, I had an attitude that there wasn’t enough of me to go around, not enough time, energy or money or attention or happy self.

I can’t really tell you what the emotion was behind that, but the science of Emotional Intelligence tells us that 90% of the time guilt is anger.

That’s surprising, isn’t it!

Guilt is anger turned against the self.

Guilt can hide anywhere in the body, and its favourite places are the lungs, making it hard to breathe free or giving you asthma, or the large intestine, giving you the bellyaches.

Now, even if you are not conscious of any guilt right now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have any guilt going on inside your body

So give this exercise a go.

When we have ugly emotions or moods, we are normally compelled to make them go away.

That’s why I used to hide my extra set of shoes or coat that I didn’t need.
It made the guilty feeling go away.

However to overcome guilt permanently you need to do the exact opposite.

Bring to mind something that you feel guilty about right now.

Think of the worst thing, something that you feel a lot of charge around.

Now really amplify that guilty feeling.

Find where it is housed in your body.

Put your hands on that spot.

Turn towards the feeling and keep tuning into it.

Make it stronger and more intense.

Sit with what comes up for you.

Now your body is processing this layer of guilt and it will never bother you again.

If you do this exercise repeatedly, it will result in working its way out of your system.

You will feel less guilt, less dull, and exhausted, and more vibrant and at peace.

Less guilt, more peace!!

More energy!!

More fun!!

And that’s what I want for you in 2020 and for the rest of your life

Much love, Grada