Never Feel Sorry for Yourself!

Posted by Guy Finley

One thing that makes it so difficult to drop feeling sorry for ourselves is how real it feels when we are full of self-regret. But any perception of reality that requires us to submit to any such self-centered suffering is always a lie! Here’s just one of several facts to be revealed that will give you to courage to walk away from ever feeling sorry for yourself again. Study it until you suddenly smile!

The secret attraction behind self-pity--why it’s so hard to set down--is that the part of us that feels like nothing makes the part of us that points out this nothingness feel quite special!

Negative states, in general, are part of an interior conspiracy to produce the illusion that no choice exists for us other than to cave in to their punishing presence. But, in truth, it is not we who are without choice in such moments. Rather it is the negative state that has no choice but to disappear as soon as we remember that no darkness is greater than the light that reveals it. In our heart of hearts, we know the truth of this liberating idea because we’ve all seen the great law that sits behind it.

We know that love is greater than hatred, courage slays fear, and that what is light, bright, and good only shines the more for anything that tries to darken its way.

The key to dismissing the parts of us that love to attend “pity parties” is to blow out the match that lights the candles of bitterness before they become inflamed.

Here is another life-saving fact, so welcome the healing it brings by being willing to see the truth hidden within it.

There lives nothing real in our past--regardless of how disappointing or painful it may have been--that can grab us and make us its captive, any more than dark shadows have the power to keep us from walking into the sunlight.

Now, add to this fact the realization that there is never a good reason to go along with feeling bad about yourself, and you’re on your way to living in a world without self-pity. Call upon the following special key lessons to guide you as needed. Use them to help strengthen your wish to be free of all dark self-compromising states.

1. The only thing feeling sorry for yourself changes about your life is that it makes it worse.

2. No matter how you look at it, you involve yourself with whatever you resist!

3. Being wrapped up in self-pity completely spoils any chance of being able to see new possibilities as they appear.

4. The only thing that grows from cultivating any dark seed of sorrow is more bitter fruit.

5. Feeling sorry for those who want you to feel sorry for them is like giving an alcoholic a gift certificate to a liquor store.

6. Your thoughts can no more tell you what is true about your possibilities than a set of streamside boulders can know the nature of the waters that rush by them.

7. Feeling sorry for your self is a slow-acting poison. First it corrupts, then it consumes your heart, choking it with dark and useless emotions.

8. You cannot separate the reasons you have for feeling sorry for yourself from the sorry way you feel.

9. The heart watered by tears of self-pity soon turns to stone; it is incapable of compassion.

10. When you agree to live with sad regrets, you ensure they’ll still be with you tomorrow.

One last thought. Before we can know happiness beyond the reach of any sorrow, we must ourselves be whole, for any happiness apart from self-wholeness is only half a happiness and must, in time, prove itself so.

(Excerpted from The Courage to Be Free, Weiser Books, 2010)

Guy is the acclaimed author of The Secret of Letting Go and more than 37 other books and audio programs that have sold over a million copies in 16 languages worldwide.

For more information about Guy Finley and his life-changing work, visitwww.guyfinley.org.