When I was a child, I was taught how to determine right from wrong by the reactions of others. While this helped me develop an inner compass of empathy, it also raised me to perceive life from a rather co-dependent viewpoint. Whether it was being afraid of upsetting my parents, getting on Santa’s naughty list, or even a fear of disappointing God, I learned to measure the validity of my choices by how much pleasure or how little pain it caused other people. As I became older, I began growing out of this co-dependent mind-set, no longer willing to live imprisoned by being “all things to all people.” I saw how devoting my life to helping others avoid pain had failed to provide me with the pleasure of acceptance, which only I could give to myself. I also saw how other people’s adverse reactions to the choices that were useful for me couldn’t cause them any tangible pain outside of their judgments.
I inevitably learned that while it’s useful to consider other people’s experiences, ultimately, their reactions couldn’t indicate how aligned or misaligned I was. This useful line I drew in the sand would be so clearly demonstrated in my relationship with my mom. Growing up, I wouldn’t dare do anything to upset her, primarily because I was conditioned to seek the reward of her love.
Year after year, I either noticed much of my good behavior going unnoticed, or more precisely, the eruptions of my mom’s ego coming from her lack of patience or degree of stress, with no actual relationship between my actions and her view of experience. I began to see how much of my mom’s life upset her. It wasn’t just me; it was servers at restaurants, her boss, my dad, my sister, her countless hours of volunteer work at the local temple, and even people in traffic.
This helped me see how frustrated, disempowered, overworked, and underappreciated my mom was as the source of her discontent, merely masquerading as a response to my behavior. It was useless to walk on eggshells around her. I came to see the beautiful woman who birthed me into the world was deeply unhappy regardless of my actions. This was where I began to align my choices with those that supported my well-being, instead of relying on others as a clear mirror of reflection. I was becoming a mirror unto myself and making great strides in overcoming the co-dependent patterns of my childhood.
Such strides became rather obvious as I grew up and had the chance to introduce my mom to her adult son. Up until that point, my mom was my greatest supporter, unless the value of my choices triggered the disapproval of her abandonment issues. I remember telling my mom I was moving from California to Washington to start my career as a spiritual teacher. I could see in my mom’s face the pain of having a child move so far away and how much space that would create for her loneliness to grow.
While my mom’s emotions didn’t prevent me from doing what I knew in my heart was right for my journey, like an obedient son, I made many promises to call often and visit her, in order to keep the approval I had spent my childhood relying on for validation, safety, and comfort.
Eventually, there came times when I missed holiday gatherings due to tour schedules, which gave me the opportunity to face my mom’s disapproval and unintentionally manipulative behavior yet again, head on. Her once threatening words of disapproval and projections of selfishness became cries for the love she relied on from others, that she had no interest at that point in giving herself. Eventually, a series of insurmountable health scares would lead my mom to learning how to love herself and embrace the teachings of my first book, Whatever Arises, Love That.
It also transformed our relationship into a very heart-centered bond of trust, equality, and respect, which couldn’t have been established unless I was willing to see how my actions aren’t always the cause of someone’s feelings. It was at this point in my life where I truly embraced the wisdom of the first Golden Rule: “You’ve done nothing wrong.”
This rule is one of the core tenets of spiritual mastery. In order to master the art of letting go, Golden Rule #1 acts as the go-to statement we always go back to, whenever in doubt.
Even though it is common for the mind to want to jump in with the most despicable life examples to contradict its wisdom, just feel into it for a moment. What is it like to sit with the knowledge that you’ve done nothing wrong, no matter what others may insist to be true? On an emotional level, even if only a small percentage of you can consider its validity, how does it feel to contemplate you’ve done nothing wrong?
Just as you have grown from an infant to a child and then from a child to an adult, so too is your level of consciousness evolving from one spectrum of perception to another. What may have seemed true when you were younger may seem wildly fanciful in adulthood. This didn’t make it wrong to think and perceive as you did when you were younger, simply because it took all your experiences in childhood to inspire the growth the “adult you” holds to be true. In the same way, the Universe doesn’t require you to spin your wheels trying to apologize for a past that played out exactly as it was meant to be. This is the incredible evidence of a spiritual journey every human being has been navigating since the moment they were born.
If you’re in a physical body, you’re on a spiritual journey. Some people might tell you they’re not “into spirituality.” Truth be told, we’re all on a spiritual journey because we exist. Throughout this journey, you will see life one way and then you will have an expansion causing you to see life differently. I’m sure you’ve had this experience, where, in retrospect, you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that? In the moment, how come I didn’t see it that way?” No matter how hard you work to know life lessons ahead of time, you are always going to see each moment from the highest level of consciousness available to you. However any moment is seen will cause you to expand to a higher level of consciousness that will then show you later what you didn’t see before.
As the main theme in my book Everything Is Here to Help You, the spiritual journey is a transition out of ego and into the soul. This means in every moment, we can either see from the ego’s perspective or from the soul’s perspective. If we see life from the ego’s point of view, we are bound to view life through the eyes of regret. From this perspective, we are led to think: “Since I now know what I didn’t know before, I regret that I didn’t have this perception then.” When you regret, the tendency is to blame. More than likely, you’ve only developed a tendency to blame because you’ve experienced being blamed yourself.
What the ego regrets in outcome, the soul rejoices in opportunity. The soul says, “Yes, I now know more than I knew before and how great that I had to live out that moment. I had to see it the way it was meant to be seen. I had to be who I needed to be. I needed to do everything that needed to happen in order to get to this moment where I’ve been gifted now with a greater perspective.”
Contrary to the soul’s perspective, the ego thinks, “Oh my god, I now see it differently than I did before, and I wish I could’ve seen it that way all along.” In order to keep itself well fed by inner judgment and self-criticism, the ego views itself through a lens of faults and flaws. From this standpoint, life is a punishment and a curse, instead of a gift and a blessing. Beyond the negative self-talk of the ego’s perspective, the soul honors the expanded viewpoint that you now have as life’s way of rewarding you for surviving a moment exactly the way it was designed. You survived a moment playing exactly the character life asked you to play. You did and said every single thing that life asked you to do and say, and the reward is a greater perspective that frees you from the need to be that version of a character ever again.
It is this very gift of perspective the soul rejoices that remains a vital part of a miraculous plan the Universe always has for you.
To further the healing perpetuated by self-blame, imagine a moment in your life where your behavior was the most regrettable. Notice how from the ego’s perspective, any tendency to feel embarrassed or ashamed of how you acted during this time. Simply take a few breaths to allow your body to be a space of relaxation that gives these uncomfortable feelings a safe place to land. As the shock and awe of embarrassment begins to fade, can you sense within you a deeper cosmic order to life that only had you play out the very words and actions to inspire a series of expansions that made you who you are right now? If you are able to look back on the past, aware of wisdom you didn’t have at the time, then the journey from that memory to the present time has undoubtedly served you well. Equally so, can you begin to accept how everything you needed to say and do to become who you are now is the exact circumstance others required to be who they are today?
Whether you are able to give yourself a much-needed break from self-criticism, or at least make more peace with how life was meant to play out, you are taking an exciting step forward. Whether you believe you did nothing wrong or not, the fact remains, no amount of regret can reshape the past that is only here to serve you.
In order to realize the truth of “You did nothing wrong,” we need to use self-compassion, one of the soul’s attributes, to shift out of regret and into rejoicing. Self-compassion is the ability to be easy with yourself. It is the opposite of harshness. It is a moment of growth that requires no punishment, condemnation, or criticism, in order to learn from anyone’s actions. No matter how harsh of a world you feel you live in, no matter how ruthless of a past you may have endured, self-compassion says, “Can you just take one moment and be the nicest, most supportive and open-minded person that you are encountering right now?” Can you meet yourself as an ally instead of an enemy? Can you turn inward and say to yourself, “Hello, friend, how can I be here for you?”
Have you ever, in the midst of stress or turmoil, encountered a fresh breath of kind and attentive customer service, where someone just went a little bit out of their way to make sure that you were comfortable, served, and cared for?
Self-compassion is when you are that attentive to yourself. Self-compassion begins with accepting that you don’t have to necessarily know exactly what’s right about every moment of your life, but beginning with Golden Rule #1, you certainly know that you’ve done nothing wrong.
There is no doubt that you’re going to be better and better and better than you’ve ever been before, but that doesn’t mean that the way you were in the past was wrong. Simply because, in order to get to this stage of evolution, you and everyone else had to be exactly the way they were. From this perspective, every gift of expansion is life thanking you for playing the exact role in every person’s life, whether or not you were the most popular person in the room or even likable in your own experience.
All too often, the ego believes if you are not the most popular person in the room, you must be doing something wrong. Most likely because you’ve been trained to be fueled by the validation and approval of others. How many times have you felt that if someone else in your life doesn’t agree with you, you’re wrong? Contrary to this people-pleasing mechanism, Golden Rule #1 helps you see if someone doesn’t agree with you, it could only be because you both are on two different paths. If someone insists you should go right, but you know in your heart to go left, maybe this is where your paths take you both in different directions. Maybe we are walking together but not all following the same pathways home. Maybe we’re just accompanying one another, for as long as we’re meant to be, because we’re all going in the direction of our highest potential, which doesn’t always lead us in the same direction.
The reason you are reading these words is because you are on a heart-centered path. A path that says, “I don’t have to imagine that I’ve done something wrong, grovel and beg for forgiveness from the Universe like I’m projecting parental qualities onto my own divinity. I can rejoice in my learning and grow without regretting. I can expand and shine without blaming myself. In any given moment, what I chose to do was not a flaw or a human limitation at play. Instead, it was the absolute perfection of divinity getting me to a more expanded vibrational alignment by having me play a character who only appeared to do a series of imperfect things to have experiences I would learn from.”
As you may already be starting to realize, it is impossible to see what is right in your reality if you spend time focusing on the things that you’ve done wrong. While the ego may perceive this Golden Rule as a bypass of self-responsibility, there is nothing to avert, avoid, or overlook at all. Because the ego perceives through beliefs of reward and punishment, it insists you must punish yourself, if others report harm or wrongdoing as a result of your choices.
Just because you’ve done nothing wrong, it doesn’t mean others are wrong for having their own perceptions of experience. You might not have done anything wrong, but neither has anyone else. Through the eyes of the Universe, you don’t need to project wrongdoing on yourself and others in order to offer the gift of forgiveness. In fact, the transformative power of forgiveness is prevented from healing your past and the atrocities of other people’s experiences when bumping up against the ego’s categories of right versus wrong.
There may very well be experiences that have happened to you where the choices others made were categorically opposite to the ethics and values of your consciousness. There may be feelings of unfairness; feelings of being taken advantage of; anger toward perpetrators; or resentment against those who didn’t listen, believe, or act assertively in your defense. Whether due to betrayal, neglect, or abuse, it is not wrong to feel exactly the way you do. While I am here outlining the trajectory of healing that each moment of pain inspires, I would ask you to be easy with yourself, offering the gift of self-compassion that reminds you, “You may forgive at some point, but it doesn’t have to be today, next week, or even in the foreseeable future.”
True forgiveness occurs as a result of free will. Often times it is giving yourself the right to not forgive that loosens the ego’s inner grip of protection that allows forgiveness to be offered from a more authentic space. Forgiveness isn’t a matter of saying any betrayal, neglect, or abuse was deserving. It’s a matter of acknowledging that those who have made an indelible impression upon your history have only set you in a direction toward the arrival of your highest destiny. It’s very easy to say thank you for the pleasurable experiences others provide, but it’s an entirely different paradigm to slowly move in the direction of authentically thanking everyone for their contribution in your journey—even when their actions were the opposite of the love and safety your innocence wanted and needed.
Such a level of unconditional love exists outside the domain of ego, so it’s natural for such a Golden Rule to merely remind you where you are in your journey. Since you’ve done nothing wrong, it isn’t wrong or unjust to refuse forgiveness for the actions of others. You must have the right to withhold forgiveness in order to build up the courage to offer it. Once offered, you will see how a willingness to forgive unconscionable actions helps you transcend the entire cycle of victimhood. As this occurs, it helps to reform your perpetrator on an energetic level to ensure no one else may be harmed. You can think of the word forgiving to mean “thank you for giving me the opportunity to act from a greater level of awareness than the unconsciousness that hurt me.”
This reminds me of the first time I glimpsed this depth of wisdom. I was sitting in my living room sometime in my thirties, contemplating the true meaning of forgiveness. At that moment, I was flooded with visions of my past: from scenes of being yelled at by my parents, to moments of being bullied in middle school, even beat up on a few occasions for the sheer amusement of others. Usually such images would inspire frustration, anger, humiliation, pain, and a sense of unfairness, but this time I saw them from a much different standpoint. It was as if I were witnessing it from a distance, like someone in a movie theater viewing the life and times of a main character. As I reviewed all of the people who had wronged me, I began seeing each moment of hurt as a setup of greater evolution. I saw how I had been chosen by the Universe to play the role of the victim, just as each of them had been cast in the role of the victimizer. I saw so clearly how we had each intersected one another’s paths in order to come out the other end more healed, expanded, and evolved than we were before. My role was to have every reason to harbor grudges within my logical mind, with endless justifications as to why it was only fair to label and condemn each character as an enemy. This would be the very belief I would be given the chance to surrender, including the notion of being vulnerable to future attacks if my ego’s job wasn’t to constantly stand guard.
I saw that by forgiving each character, I was instilling in myself an even higher vibration of consciousness than the impulses that caused others to mistreat and harm me. In doing so, I sent waves of energy throughout the cosmos to be delivered into their energy fields to inspire deeper emotional resolve. I saw how my willingness to forgive made each character more heart-centered over the course of their lifetime to decrease the likelihood that anyone else in their life, including themselves, would be harmed in any way.
From this standpoint, I felt less like a person wronged by others and more like one of their guardian angels. I was merely playing a character they wronged for the chance to give the gift of consciousness. When seeing myself from this perspective, how I had the opportunity to give the greatest gift of healing to those who inflicted the most pain onto me, something collapsed in my mind. I was no longer hindered or limited by beliefs in fairness or any “eye for an eye” mentality. Instead, I rejoiced in my willingness to be bigger than the pain and persecution I felt by giving to another exactly what they needed to grow beyond the desire to hurt others as a result of their unresolved wounds.
In this vision, I was acting as the Universe in form, instead of from a belief in being a character who needed others to hurt for the pain they caused. While wrongdoing had been done to me, no one had to be shamed or condemned in order for each of our hearts to be set free. Instead of this moment of radical forgiveness bringing more abusers into my reality, it actually became the moment when all of life seemed to conspire to support me in miraculous ways. In a way that could never make sense to my rational mind, I didn’t attract abusive encounters because I did something wrong. It occurred to usher me into a depth of transcendent forgiveness I am so grateful I was ready to accept. In being willing to forgive the seemingly unforgivable, I transcended the cycle of victimhood, which has since that moment rendered me free from perpetrators and abusers, now that forgiveness has become instinctive.
No matter the depth of hurt, forgiveness energetically heals emotional wounds, transforming perpetrators and victims into heroes. Sometimes, it is the actions of the legal system that create the breaking point in someone’s unconsciousness to allow something deeper to shine through. You may very well be motivated to follow through with legal recourse to ensure the unconscious actions of one person do not harm another, while spiritually cleansing your soul of any degree of darkness through acts of radical forgiveness.
If your history of pain is way more intense than my personal example, I wholeheartedly honor the even deeper opportunity you’ve been given to ascend into higher realms of consciousness through the forgiveness you have a chance to offer. With the utmost compassion and respect for the circumstances you’ve survived, the greater the pain or displacement any egregious act instills provides an equal amount of cosmic relief for those who forgive instead of fight. Even if you cannot see beyond the confines of your inner grudge, it sometimes requires steadfast commitment in battling with the past to create enough pressure for truths of a higher level to blossom within you.
If self-compassion is the attribute cultivated in Golden Rule #1, then forgiveness is a willingness to show equal compassion to all hearts, no matter the roles anyone plays. If this seems too far-reaching, just remember the wording of the first Golden Rule: “You have done nothing wrong.” Nothing in that sentence suggests the existence of others; therefore, in the beginning, there is no reason to consider whether no one else but you has done anything wrong.
As a rule of thumb, always be the first recipient of your self-compassion and allow forgiveness to spread out on its own time frame.
To begin the process of infusing yourself with more self-compassion, please repeat the following statement out loud.
In order to be who I was born to become,
life couldn’t have happened
any other way.
Take a deep breath and see how it feels to embrace a depth of acceptance beyond anything the ego can believe.
In order to be who I was born to become,
life couldn’t have happened
any other way.
Just feel that for a moment.
Life couldn’t have happened any other way. Even though you have choice in every moment, your choice is simply to reflect back to the Universe the level of consciousness you’re currently operating from. In order to be who you’re born to become, life couldn’t have happened any other way. Translation: you did nothing wrong. Even just the consideration of this truth creates the cultivation of self-compassion. This is because only self-compassion can hear its depth of meaning. Only self-compassion can agree with this. Equally so, only the ego can disagree. Only the ego can hear you’ve done nothing wrong and say, I beg to differ. No matter how harsh, opinionated, or narrow-minded your inner critic seems to be, it is always important to have great humility and compassion for the ego. Like a precocious little child, its purpose is to remember your history of experiences to ensure each one inspires the healing and transformation it was created to provide. Through the eyes of the Universe, there are equal amounts of compassion for all, which allows you to become sincerely endeared by the ego instead of upset by it.
Let’s take it even deeper. If you’ve done nothing wrong, neither has your ego. How deep is that? I say this because on the spiritual path, how many times have you gotten to the point of it being like, “Oh well, yeah, I can get into the alignment with my soul in my private meditation practice, in my yoga practice, and at spiritual events, and then there are these people, places, and things that trigger me.” In a modern-day spiritual journey, you walk around almost like a member of the ego police. Maybe you’ve had these conversations where you go back and forth, tattle-telling on your ego to others.
When you’re one foot out of the ego and one foot into the soul, you’re aware of your conditioned behavior, but it’s experienced as an ego that’s horrified by itself. This is how blame and regret come into play. All too often, instead of judging others, we just turn judgment onto ourselves. It can actually be very painful. This is why you need great compassion, love, and heart-centered kindness. In the process of doing deep spiritual work, you can harm yourself just as much as someone else can. I would like to absolve you of that. You can certainly be better, grow from your experiences, and evolve as a result. But you do not have to punish yourself along the way. Karma is not a predestined jail sentence. It is not a debt you have to pay back. Karma, either negative or positive, is simply the things you say to yourself in response to what happens. Any form of negative karma is merely the tendency to say unkind things to yourself as a result of being the character you don’t want to be. When you don’t have to punish yourself, even for the things you think are punishing you—karmic patterns begin to heal.
How many times have you asked yourself, “Why am I attracting this?” You’re attracting this because the soul’s evolution is about building unconditionally loving relationships with all parts of yourself represented as each emotion. In order to grow out of the ego’s swirl of regret and graduate into the vibration of rejoicing, it is essential to cultivate self-compassion in response to any particular outcome. This means things will happen just so you can say to yourself, “I’ve done nothing wrong.” You will manifest experiences that might even embarrass your ego, just for the opportunity to say, “In order to be who I was born to become, life couldn’t have happened any other way.”
Once there is nothing that can happen in life to prevent the receiving of self-compassion, or restrict the offering of forgiveness, there is no further wisdom for adversity to teach you.
EXERCISE: Your Spiritual Evolution
Think of all of the things in your life that you think you did wrong. What are the things you hold against yourself?
Let’s unravel the case you have against you. What are the things that when you pass through the gates of heaven you might think, “I hope we don’t talk about that.”
Could it be possible that the things you think you’ve done wrong were actually exactly right for your highest evolution? How were the things you did wrong actually right for you?
Take a moment to openly consider it.
If that feels like a moment of relief, you’re one step closer to letting go. If not, only more self-compassion is needed.
When you embrace the wisdom of Golden Rule #1, it helps you dispel old myths that suggest the outcomes and circumstances of life occur as a reflection of your vibrational frequency. Nothing could be more disempowering than to endure the hardship of loss, change, abuse, betrayal, and neglect, only to then judge yourself as being low on the spiritual totem pole. While the ego attempts to organize each effect with the discovery of a cause, the end result is to blame some perception of misfortune on the experiencer.
Since the soul views everything as a gift of opportunity, vibration couldn’t be the reason for why things occur. The Universe does not judge any of its creations or orchestrate reality from less than a perfect standpoint. In reality, vibration doesn’t determine what does or doesn’t happen to you. Instead, vibration determines your level of resilience: how quickly you pick yourself up from each unexpected crash and how gracefully you move through uncertainty with no one, including yourself, to be blamed for the change taking place.
While raising your vibration is a pivotal spiritual practice, it does nothing to stack the deck of outcome in your favor. Equally so, anyone without a practice of raising their vibration is equally as likely to manifest the outcomes of renewal and erosion that come to life in each of our journeys. The benefit of raising your vibration is having a useful amount of space between you and your external experiences, so that any emotions getting triggered as a result of your life circumstances invoke neither more shutting down nor lashing out at yourself or others. In the new spiritual paradigm, we raise our vibration to allow forgiveness and self-compassion to be more instinctive, just as we practice self-forgiveness and forgiveness as ways of raising our vibration even further.
Instead of racing against time, hoping to raise your vibration in an attempt to free yourself from the anticipation of more pain, just keep in mind: every being had to be a child before they could become an adult. Energetically speaking, every person has to start off at the lowest vibration in order to create a foundation that leads to the highest. Since neither the lowest nor highest vibration ensures all pleasure or only pain, we embrace vibrational alignment as how willing we are to either go with the flow or fight with life. When loving yourself through each unexpected loss or hardship replaces the need to dissect yourself under a spiritual microscope, or judge the actions of others, you will celebrate the resilience and awareness of high vibrational realities in their most practical embodied expressions.
From this space, you no longer judge abundance or misfortune on energy fields, as if vibration were a spiritual form of social status. Instead, you are here to cultivate great compassion for all the circumstances everyone has faced and are likely to encounter, simply as a means of inspiring highest truths into being. When you have done nothing wrong, the old-school notion of blaming anything on your experiences could only be a superstitious way of refusing the gifts the Universe planned to give you.