Q: “How do I get rid of guilt and stop beating myself up after I sin?”
After you mess up and realise you’ve done something wrong, the temptation is to become Judgy-Mc-Mufti Pants and start beating yourself up and drowning in guilt.
I say ‘temptation’, deliberately.
It is, indeed, your nafs (ego) that leads you down this dark, self-denigrating path of self-sabotage.
Most people never become aware of this fact and foolishly believe that they feel guilty because they sinned.
Ha!
I used to believe that too. But it turns out to be total nonsense.
Why?
It’s an old trick of the nafs, designed to keep you feeling bad while believing you’re a good person deep down inside.
Sinning doesn’t actually cause guilt.
Think about it…
There are some people who sin and feel no guilt whatsoever (including you and me sometimes). And there are some people who feel guilt when they’re totally innocent and haven’t done anything wrong (also including you and me sometimes).
The reason the nafs (if we could personify it) wants you to believe that LIE is that it gets you trapped in a cycle of negative thinking and feeling that you keep perpetuating because you think you deserve it.
And the worst part is… it gets you actually believing that you’re a GOOD person because at least you’re not one of those “evil sociopaths” who does the sin and then feels nothing, right?
Then a short while later, somewhere in the middle of beating yourself up, you distract yourself from your mind for just long enough for you to… you guessed it… do the sin again.
Awww, biscuits.
Now you’ve gotta beat yourself up all over again, hoping it’ll work better this time.
So what does actually cause guilt?
And how can we free ourselves from this sin -> guilt -> self-sabotage -> sin again cycle?
Simple.
The answer was given to us by the Quran and the Prophet Muhammad, peace & blessings be upon him.
You might have heard of it.
It’s called:
“Forgiveness”.
Forgiveness is literally the process of letting go of guilt.
Guilt is the feeling you have when you forget how loving and forgiving Allah, the Most Loving is.
You beat yourself up after doing something wrong because you forget that you’re not that big of a deal.
Your sin is TINY compared with Allah’s expansive forgiveness.
And Allah didn’t create you to be perfect – He created you to see if you’ll turn back to His Abundant Forgiveness after you mess up, so you can deeply understand and appreciate what divine forgiveness really means.
There are basically only 2 options after you mess up:
A) Fill your mind with stories and negative thoughts about yourself and how bad you are.
B) Fill your mind with nothing but an awareness of Allah’s Infinitely Loving Presence and Forgiveness.
According to the spiritual path of Islam, take the 2nd path and you’ll be forgiven for the sin and more importantly, much less likely to repeat it over time.
Don’t get me wrong – it’s not a one-hit wonder.
You won’t necessarily stop doing the thing you don’t want to do because you clear your head one time and remind yourself of Allah’s infinite forgiveness.
It is, however, a guarantee that if you keep coming back to forgiveness (certainly the way we teach it in the Nafs-Mastery program), sooner or later you’ll have…
An Insight.
An inner-realisation that makes whatever sin you were doing, no longer make sense to you on any level. And when that happens, you won’t even feel like doing it again.
This has happened to me more times than I can count, for all kinds of foolish, lame sins.
It ain’t because I’m so great.
It’s because Allah is the Greatest.
If you want more on how to overcome the tricks of the Nafs and begin the journey of mastering it, go here:
