Guiltless living

By Nathalie Khalaf
Holistic Counsellor

We have all heard about guiltless food and sweets. But what about guiltless living? Guilt is that heavy feeling which does not allow for joy or pleasure in our lives.

Self-love

I became introduced to the concept of self-love through the professional I worked with in Jordan who helped me get through my depression. Self-love was a big topic; it is about being true to ourselves first and above all as well as learning to feel good about what makes us feel good without feeling guilty. It is challenging, I know, especially when it comes to relationships and social duties. But releasing guilt can help us find happiness in our lives as well as with the relationships we have.

Emotions: energy in motion

When I got introduced to the concept of self-love and leaving guilt behind, the biggest challenge was when it came to releasing pent-up emotions towards those I loved the most, and not feel guilty about it. I learnt that all our emotions are, in fact, energy-in-motion and those are a crucial part of our existence. All we need to do is become aware of the emotion and allow it to flow through and out of us. 

When we feel joy and love, we have no problem sharing them. They seem to pour out of every cell of our body and are hard to conceal. When it comes to undesirable emotions such as hatred, sadness, jealousy, guilt and anger, it is quite normal for us not to want to feel them, so most of us learn to suppress them in order not to feel them.

Most of us are not taught how to address our “undesired” feelings. We are, perhaps shamed or punished for feeling them, so most of us go through life suppressing that energy and not giving it a second thought. So that energy-in-motion becomes stagnant. 

Suppressed emotion

Energy cannot be controlled, nor can it be contained for long and will eventually find its way out. A suppressed emotion will somehow find its way to the surface. We have outbursts of anger, or feel extreme jealousy, hatred, or sadness. We feel overwhelmed and out of control and judge ourselves to be “too emotional or bad”.

If we feel jealous of or angry at someone we love, we feel guilty! This happens because a part in us makes us judge ourselves as bad and we feel guilty for having such an emotion. This judgment is ingrained since childhood when one is told off by parents; thus we judge ourselves as being bad children and this continues into adult years. Feeling guilty really stops us from even wanting to have pleasure or feel joy. As energy, unless released, it can trigger resentment which could build up into anger; anger towards others as well as towards ourselves. When we do not allow the energies in our body to flow through and out (by simply feeling the emotion), that energy gets suppressed and becomes stagnant. Stagnant energy — just like stagnant water — turns bad and may create physical illness at a later stage. 

Once aware of thoughts such as “I don’t deserve this thing or person”, or “I am not good enough”, they must be stopped. We can train ourselves to become mindful of what we are doing now, of living in the moment and then add a lot of self-love to that.

Guilt versus self-love

The amount of guilt we feel is inversely proportional to the amount of self-love we have for ourselves. To put it plainly: If we have a lot of guilt, we probably have little self-love. If we have a lot of self-love, we feel little guilt. 

Only when we work on loving ourselves for everything that we are, accept everything about ourselves with no judgement and forgive ourselves for all we judge as wrong, will we achieve inner peace. That inner peace needs us to release all other energies and all undesired emotions: Anger, hatred, sadness, jealousy and resentment (to name a few).

We need to allow ourselves to feel, to express sadness and anger, to allow for the flow of stagnant energy. Once we are no longer holding on to any stagnant emotions, we can have inner peace and health.

When we love ourselves fully and place ourselves first, it means not engaging in what we do not wish such as social duties, or putting up with something that does not bring us joy. We stop doing things and saying things just to please others — because we understand the importance of pleasing ourselves first.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine