Forgiveness

One common theme I've talked about with people interested in losing weight or learning about raw foods is a sort of feeling of guilt for allowing themselves to get overweight in the first place. This kind of thinking and feeling is not helpful for learning to do anything new-including raw foods! Until you can learn to forgive yourself, it will be hard to be healthy and to reach your ideal weight.

When you have a problem with someone else, it is easier to forget about this. Most people do not demand you forgive them, or that you ask for forgiveness. It's easy to just simply forget about the situation. Although the need for forgiveness in that situation is still there, it is not nearly as destructive to your well-being as the unforgiveness you have with yourself.

When you have a problem with something you did, it is still easy to ignore the situation, BUT it will never really go away. You can't escape yourself as easily as other people! If you do not actually forgive yourself, you will subconciously find ways to "punish" yourself until you do.

One added benefit of learning to truly forgive yourself is that it becomes much easier to forgive others. When you learn to master the ability to forgive someone (YOU) for doing something you had control over, how much easier to let go of pain and disappointment over something you had no control over (OTHERS).

Some things I have found that have helped me change negative patterns are hypnosis and tapping (or EFT-emotional freedom technique).

Tapping/EFT do not make you FORGET the pain others or yourself have caused to you, but they do make the emotions less intense, and therefore either to forgive. I'm not sure exactly how it works but anytime you repeat something many times, it helps to set new thought patterns.

Hypnosis cannot make you do anything you don't already want to do-so it's important to be in the right mind set and to really want to change when you do this. It only helps you eliminate old thought patterns, and replace them with the new, more positive ones.

There are many free and low cost hypnosis audio files on the internet, and my favorite EFT videos are at http://www.tapping.com/videos.html