Sandi L. Boucher delivers a short, personal YouTube talk urging listeners to forgive themselves. She explains a cultural tobacco teaching—offering tobacco signals that speech is "straight from the heart" and asks listeners to "listen with your heart"—then emphasizes that self-forgiveness is necessary to release past burdens and embrace future opportunities.
Chapters
Hi, everybody. Sandy Boucher here, and welcome back to my world. As you know, I upload videos on a regular basis. And usually the idea for these videos is just something that comes to me during the day. Someone will say something to me or I'll see something that reminds me of a teaching that I want to pass on to you, and I'll race home and I'll record a video. But every now and then, I get a special request from someone who wants me to speak to a certain topic, and that that's the basis for this video. Today, I'd like to speak to you on a very important topic, especially at this time of year, and that topic is forgiveness. It's a new year, it's a new decade, and I've done quite a few videos on looking forward to the great new opportunities that this time period brings us. You can't really do that, though, unless you leave the past behind. And I'm not talking about just forgetting about it. I'm talking about forgiving yourself. In my culture, when we speak of something that's straight from the heart, we often use tobacco. I may offer tobacco to someone to pray for me so that they can burn it in their smudge bowl or in their pipe. I may offer tobacco to an elder to share with me a teaching or to give me guidance on a certain topic. Or the one that's very personal to me is I often offer tobacco to my children. And when I do that, it highlights for them or it illustrates for them that the next thing I'm about to say is straight from my heart. And then I'm asking them to listen with their heart. So often when we listen to someone, we're busy analyzing what they're saying, deciding whether we agree or disagree, and formulating our response. In my mind, that's listening with your head. When I offer tobacco and ask you to listen with your heart, I ask you to listen to the message behind the words, to realize that it's not the words that are important, but the message. So today I would like you to pretend or to receive some virtual tobacco. And for the rest of this video, if you can, I suggest you close your eyes and listen with your heart. The most important sentence I'm going to say in this entire video is, you deserve to be forgiven. I'm going to let that sink in for a second. You deserve to be forgiven. If our children come to us and they're crying and they're upset and they've done something wrong and they're sorry, we give them a big hug. And we accept their apology and we explain whatever lesson we hope that they learn. And then we go on loving them. We don't hold grudges, we don't hate them. And we probably forget it almost as fast as the conversation happened. Your inner child, your spirit, deserves nothing less. In fact, it needs that forgiveness. I've often stated that the only debt that we owe the past is to learn from it. No one wants you to carry the burden of the past. The people that love you just want you to be happy. They want you to learn and they want you to go on. And I honestly believe that you can't pick up the opportunities of the future without laying down the burden of the past. You need to forgive yourself. I guarantee you, if after all these years you're carrying guilt and pain and shame, perhaps for past actions, you've paid a high enough price. And all the things that you didn't allow yourself to enjoy because of that guilt, let it go. It serves no one. Love yourself as you would love that child of yours. Love yourself as you would the partner that you cherish. And by doing that, become the partner that anyone would cherish. Every single one of us blossoms under the umbrella of love. And I honestly believe the most empowering love of all is the love of self. I hope you enjoy this year. I hope you embrace all its opportunities. And I hope that you make yourself open to that by starting the year by forgiving yourself. I love you. Bye bye.
