How We Forgive Ourselves

(wind blowing) (serene music) You have a lot of time on your hands in the monastery. There's a lot of time to think about stuff. And it would be very easy just to sit there and replay things over and over again. Feeling bad about the things you might have said or done in your life. And I remember the teacher, at least at our monastery, said, "Okay, you get a minute. You get a minute of regret, that's it." (soft music) Something that has always kind of fascinated me is the idea of sort of guilt and regret. I meet so many people who say they are just always caught in that cycle of guilt and regret. And obviously, so much of the teaching of meditation, and the way we kind of approach meditation, the way we approach life, is about how to be present in the moment. And yet, by definition, if we're caught up in thoughts of guilt and regret, we're living in the past. So it's worth just sort of unpacking that a little bit, and saying, maybe, is it possible to live with less guilt, with less regret? Is there a way of sort of letting go of it? I think the point is that regret has its place. I think we, I would say guilt, arguably, has its place as well. More as a signal, not as a way to kind of beat ourselves up, to criticize ourselves, give ourselves a hard time. I think guilt is a, or the way I see it, the way I sort of live with it in my life, is that its a signal that I've done something that's not in keeping with the way that I would like to live my life. And that signal tells me that there is a possibility that I can learn from that, and that in the future, not repeat that mistake again. Recall that mistake. So, rather than kind of dwelling on it and playing it over and over again, thinking I wish I could have done it differently, the point here is that if we could have done it differently, we would have done it differently. Then people say, "Yeah, I know, but I knew there was another way." Well, yeah, we knew there was another way. Intellectually we knew there was another way. Retrospectively we knew there was another way. But in that moment, we genuinely did the best that we could do. (serene music) We're all human, you know. We're all just trying to work this out. We're on a journey. And it's a shared journey. But along the way we're gonna, you know, things are gonna happen. We're gonna do things, we're gonna say things, that don't necessarily meet with the way that we would like to live life. And I think that's the importance of living moment to moment. If we're living, really fixated on an expectation, then it's an expectation that was formed in the...