Day Shift — Learning to Forgive Yourself and Let Go of Shame

"We're on the planet to grow, and we grow by making mistakes."

If I'm not making mistakes, I'm not doing my job. And if I'm doing my job and making mistakes, I am always going to be able to see how I could have done yesterday better than I did it.

Today, I want to talk about guilt and the trouble that I’ve had with it, and that some of you might relate to.

You know, the word sin, as many of you have heard, is defined as “missing the mark” or as “an error.” That's actually the literal definition of sin: to make an error in judgment, an error calculation — to miss the mark — and then to alter the way I'm approaching my life in the next moment, based on my assessment of being someone who missed that mark.

I was once told by a psychiatrist — one of the wisest people I ever knew — that guilt is, by and large, a worthless emotion. It comes from being a herd animal, being a part of a pack. It’s the feeling that one gets when one is just far enough outside the center of the pack to attract predators, but not so far away as to have the predators attack only that one member of the pack of the herd. So guilt is this extreme discomfort that makes one either want to get back into the center of things and take a breath there, or get as far away from all these others to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling.

Another way of looking at guilt is that what's actually happening is I am judging my behavior of the past through the eyes of my present state of consciousness. In reality, everything I experience is brand new. I've done podcasts before, but I've never done this one on this day, in this configuration — having what I just had for lunch, having had the experiences that led up to this moment. This is all brand new.

When I look at this experience tomorrow, I am going to be looking through the eyes of someone who has learned by having gone through this experience. And by definition, because I am a creature of learning, not a creature of habit—I'm a creature of always evolving—I am going to see how I could have done things differently, and perhaps even better.

We're on the planet to grow. We humans grow by making mistakes. We grow by stepping into the unknown and finding out what works and what doesn’t. We step forward, we fail. We stand up, we step forward, we fail. We stand up, we step forward, we fail better. Self-forgiveness has to be a part of this equation, or we're not giving ourselves permission to be alive—permission to be what we're meant to be, which is an ever-evolving experience of consciousness.

I am consciousness having a human experience.

Consciousness is always about expanding, about becoming more of what it is meant to be—which is everything, which is wholeness, which is fulfillment. Humanness is about staying small enough not to be seen, not to be heard, not to be hurt. And between these two poles, human life is lived.

I have to find a way of letting myself off the hook. What works for me is to just imagine a consciousness far greater than my own that is the whole of what is, that is the universe itself. And is that consciousness concerned with the wrong turn made by this tiny little molecule down here? Nah. It knows that this tiny little molecule learned something by making that wrong turn, it's going to turn right the next time—or not—which is all part of the play and display of consciousness.

You know, we're here to make the mistakes and learn from them—and, God help us, enjoy them.

So today, I will at least make the effort to leave guilt and self-judgment aside. I will give myself permission to not know how to do something, and I will do it anyway, as well as I can, trusting that I have been designed to learn in just this way.

Thanks for listening. Have a great day.

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Jeff Kober is an accomplished actor, photographer and vedic meditation teacher. He has had regular roles in notable series like The Walking Dead, Sons of Anarchy, and NCIS: Los Angeles, and has appeared in numerous films including Sully and Beauty Mark. Kober is also a writer and artist, and has previously penned screenplays and co-authored the book Embracing Bliss.