How to Forgive Yourself

This week is the Jewish New Year or Rosh Hashanah. I’m not particularly religious anymore but this holiday resonates with me. As part of the start of the new year we are supposed to use the time between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, to go to people we may have hurt during the year and ask them for forgiveness. Then we symbolically throw away our sins by throwing bread crumbs in a flowing body of water.

The process of asking for forgiveness is therapeutic for myself and the person I’m asking forgiveness from. But the person I find hardest to forgive sometimes is myself. Do you ever feel this way?

This is my list of things I’m asking to forgive myself for this year:

for overfeeding my body,

for berating myself,

for not giving myself enough sleep,

for stressing myself out,

for making mistakes with my children,

for criticizing my body,

for not always being kind and loving to myself.

So, as the summer ends and we are about to enter fall, take time to forgive yourself if you’ve done something that has harmed you. And if you feel moved to do so, take some bread and throw it in moving water and let it carry away the sins you’ve done to others and yourself.