Mistakes in our spiritual journey.

Making mistakes is part and parcel of our daily experience. As human beings we know that we are fallible, prone to do wrong.

We often console ourselves with the popular wisdom that the important thing is not to not make mistakes, but to learn from our mistakes.

But sometimes we make mistakes that we regret so deeply that we cannot forgive ourselves for them. We ban the memories of such mistakes deep into our inner being where they often fester like sore wounds.

We remain aware of them. They are deeply painful, so much so that we often cannot bear even to think of them.

And, whilst we may be loving people, caring in our behaviour towards others, even to the point that we may forgive them for the worst of their bad mistakes, we often refuse to reconcile ourselves with our own mistakes of the past. We are hard on ourselves, unforgiving. We lack compassion. We love others, but we fail to heed the words that we should love ourselves. As a result we are stuck in the past, chained by the destructive.

The solution is to show compassion for ourselves. We should care for the wounds which we inflict on ourselves.

We show compassion by accepting what went horribly wrong.

It may be that we should make a conscious, simple decision to leave the bad mistakes behind by accepting them and move on with our lives.

Or showing compassion may mean to embrace them by recognising how they contributed to our spiritual progress, made us understand the deep forces in our lives and the need to live differently, closer to God.


Embracing one's mistakes by meditating on their role in the process of being pilgrims, can be therapeutic. We are often transformed through what we fail to do or through the hurt we cause. And to recognise the negative process of transformation, is in itself transformative.