Jason Estes declared 2025 the year of forgiveness, first and foremost forgiving yourself. The first half of the year is self-oriented, the second half of the year is outwardly oriented.
This year may be difficult for many. Each of us will have to forgive ourselves for any negative thought, for any judgment, for any self-criticism, for the slightest self-rejection, for all our mistakes, for all our shortcomings, for cruelty towards ourselves, for all our failed creations, for all our squandered dreams and plans.
Until it shakes you and cleanses you so much that you can remain in a state of bliss. Until you can say: “I totally accept, love, and value myself. There is not a single gram of complaint, anger, or criticism towards myself inside me.”
The slightest gram of dissatisfaction with oneself, complaints towards oneself, the slightest gram of judgment of others, go hand in hand with shadow projection. If you judge in others what you do not accept in yourself, welcome to the topic of forgiveness.
But the toughest part, as I assume, will begin in the second half of the year, when we get to the topic of forgiveness towards the world and towards other people.
I see my value for people, for the world, and I can change a lot around me — this is what everyone came with. There are no others on planet Earth. Did everyone do what they came with? And this self-forgiveness may not be easy.
Judgment, complaints, and dissatisfaction — three signals of the need to forgive yourself
Through the situations you encounter, you will be able to see how deeply this self-rejection, complaints towards yourself, and judgment of others are seated inside you.
Therefore, I recommend investing in self-observation.
The first point relates to the external — overt or camouflaged judgment or complaints towards other people.
Most likely, a shadow projection will be triggered when you see something in others that evokes a strong emotion, something that you do not currently accept in yourself.
The second point is related to dissatisfaction with oneself, when the images of “the real me” and “the ideal me” do not match.
There is an ideal image of what you should be and what the world should be, and a real one — how things actually are. If these two images differ greatly, dissatisfaction arises. Can I change this? Am I able to control it or not? For the most part, this will be draining.
Dissatisfaction can also arise in relation to the external world.
I have a good example close by — my husband. The point of failure is the desire for THEM to be perfect: people must be perfect, services must be perfect, everything must be perfect.
There is a clear intolerance for how things are in reality. And this is a reason to fall deeply. The further it goes, the deeper the falls will be, deeper and deeper, when you refuse to acknowledge the facts that this person is like this, the world is like this, the structure is such and such.
Cleanse yourself of everything virtual that you have superimposed: your preferences, assumptions, what it or they should be. They should not.
This can also include the spiritual postulates you have read about in books all these years. They come to life and manifest in reality: “I don’t owe anyone anything.” Well then, no one owes you anything either.
Usually, in the 3D world, we use everything for ourselves: I don’t owe anyone anything, I don’t owe you, I don’t have to do this, but everyone still owes me.
This imbalance will be highlighted until it is balanced.
You cannot owe everyone everything. The victim consciousness has been worked through, crossed off the list. But many will glitch on this topic until the mind stops delving into old memory archives and pulling everything out from there.
But for those who are being born now, this option does not exist.
Pay attention to dissatisfaction with yourself, dissatisfaction with your reactions, dissatisfaction with how you look. Complaints are likely about the external, while dissatisfaction is internal.
All of this combined, like a cold shower, will splash over you until you forgive yourself and accept the unrecognized parts within you.
Radical Self-Forgiveness
I recommend the book “Radical Self-Forgiveness: The Direct Path to True Self-Acceptance” by Colin Tipping, which offers a method of three letters.
It is somewhat similar to the “3-2-1” practice from our course “Dance with the Shadow 4.0,” where you need to describe a situation in three steps: from the third person, from the second person, and from the first person.
Here, there are three separate letters.
The first part — you write a letter from the position of a victim, from the position of a wronged person, describing some situation. The second letter — you try to write with compassion for the offender, that is, with compassion for yourself.
We encountered this in the “Acceptance Workshop” when participants performed the technique of neutralizing and crushing negative thoughts.
When you imagine that your closest friend is in the same situation you were in, what words would you use?
The point is that we are often more cruel to ourselves than to acquaintances, friends, or loved ones. If your friend were in the same situation, what recommendations or advice would you give them?
Most likely, compassion, understanding, and kindness would kick in — things you lack toward yourself.
It is roughly the same here — a compassionate letter, writing down all the actions for which you scold, blame, or shame yourself.
The third letter — from the perspective of spiritual mentality, spiritual worldview, when you fuse together the idea that people in our lives do not meet by chance, that the soul planned many situations before incarnation.
Where there are scenarios where you must suffer, fall in love, where you must be sacrificed. There are many forks without details, and where there is no predetermination, but the scenario itself — that you need to get into trouble or get hit in the face with a rake — exists.
Moreover, if you did not get hit in the face here, then after some time it still happens, because the experience must be gained. And we realize this mentally.
In this letter, all of this must be connected to a specific situation so that it does not sound like self-soothing or self-justification.
Forgiveness is one of the four components that increase your ability to love. Join the tracker “Capacity for Love”
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If you do this practice for at least 21 days, preferably longer, you will see that you gain more lightness through forgiveness and letting go, and through gratitude and acceptance — expansion.
When you need to show compassion for yourself
Be gentler with yourself. Remember how people coo at little children: “Oh, my little sunshine, oh, my such joy!”. How long has it been since you spoke to yourself like that?
If you are in a good state, I am sure many treat themselves similarly. But what happens when life gets messy? That is exactly when you need to show this compassion and love for yourself. And it does not come as a default option.
Therefore, forgive yourself when you could have acted differently and did not, for every failure, for every criticism, for every dissatisfaction with yourself, for every “I am not what I should be,” “I did not act as I should have,” “I did not feel as I should have,” “I did not behave as I should have.”
See also Protection through Forgiveness: How to Forgive Yourself and Others
What situations have come up for you recently that are worth forgiving yourself for?