Welcome to the Buddhist Boot Camp Podcast. Our intention is to awaken, enlighten, enrich, and inspire a simple and uncomplicated life. Discover the benefits of mindful living with your host, Timber Hawkeye.

I have made plenty of bad decisions in my life. A few judgment calls were damaging to my own well-being and many unwise choices ended up unintentionally

hurting others in some way.

I've never had a problem apologizing to people for my wrongdoings and promising to be more mindful in the future to never repeat that same action or inaction again.

But when a decision I make ends up hurting only me, the conversation in my own head is not so civil. It unfortunately goes something like this.

You're such an idiot. How could you be so stupid? What a loser! Okay, calm down. You will do better next time. No, you won't. That's what you said last time.

Come on man, if this was a friend of yours, you would tell them to relax.

Yeah, but this isn't a friend, it's me, and I know better. God, you're such an idiot.

Repeat all of the above sayings on a loop and you'll get an idea of what's going on in my head.

Every time I made a mistake, that voice would bully me into admission that I'm the worst human

being on the planet.

As if the damage from the mistake itself wasn't bad enough, I would make it worse by beating

myself up about it.

This continued for years until one day I realized that among the many bad decisions I've made in my life,

never forgiving myself was by far the worst. It's actually the one mistake from which I apparently wasn't

learning proven by the fact that I was making it over and over again.

There was no forward progress. I was stuck and that's because not forgiving is a form of

self-imprisonment. Let's look at the entire concept of forgiveness and what it needs in order for

it to even exist in our social construct. We first create the duality of a wrongdoer versus a victim, and then we play the role of the victim

until we get the apology we demand, at which point we can choose to play the role of

the compassionate forgiver or not. But it's all just a power play. It's a game. I'm not saying we shouldn't apologize, more on that later. I'm saying the person I'm inclined to dub as the wrongdoer doesn't need to apologize to me or even be sorry in order for me to forgive them because forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.

The entire process is internal.

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