What does your self talk sound like?  When you make a mistake or do something silly can you be kind to your self and find amusement in the situation or do you condemn your self and relive the incident for the rest of the day?  You wouldn’t dream of doing that to someone else.  You probably wouldn’t even give it a second thought.  Sometimes I can do this quite well and sometimes I struggle with it.  Boy is that an appropriate word, struggle.  Struggle means resistance.  If you beat yourself up for something you did you are in judgment that you or what you did was bad leaving you totally out of the present moment.  You are resisting it because you are not looking at the thing you did but at the judgment of it.  That is why it won’t go away.  If on the other hand, you took this approach: you did something silly, acknowledge it by looking at it with a little amusement and saying “oh well next time I’ll handle it differently” you could then let it go. 

You can deal with guilt that way as well.  Guilt is a giant waste of time, energy and the present moment.  What ever happened; happened and the way you handled it was the way you handled it.  It is over. Now it’s time to stop feeling guilty about something you cannot change.  Remember, there are no innocent victims.  What we experience in life we bring to us so if you treated someone badly they were as much a part of the creation of that event as you were. It’s time to stop allowing guilt to take your energy down every time you think about it.  It’s time to bring it into the light, experience the feelings that come up and let the emotion attached to it discharge.  Acknowledge it, forgive yourself and anyone else involved, and let it go.  This exercise is really liberating but you have to decide that you are finished with being held hostage by guilt or judgment.  This is a great exercise in self love.  Love your self enough to stop torturing your self over something you cannot change.  Sometimes it is so much easier to forgive someone else than it is to forgive your self.  Not forgiving your self keeps the event that you just want to forget alive and tied like a noose around your neck.  Be that magnanimous validating person to yourself and let it go.

Namaste