What is the one thing you can do right now to get closer to your lover? You may be surprised to learn it's not something you can buy or a trick you can start doing in the bedroom. This is free and simple, and yet many of us are never quite able to get it right. The answer is: Forgive yourself.

Forgiving yourself may sound like a deceptively simple solution to a big issue many of us struggle with - but most of us don’t fully realize how much hurt and negative energy we direct at ourselves every day that blocks us from love and true happiness. Holding negativity inside prevents us from opening up to others, including that one special person we desire to get closer to than anyone else.

The inner black list

It’s a habit most of us have, to keep an internal directory of all the mistakes we’ve made throughout life and all the things we should have done differently – maybe we believed someone who turned out to be lying to us and we ‘should’ have known better, maybe someone gave us a chance and we didn’t make the most of it when it mattered, maybe we feel that we won’t measure up to the ideals we hold for ourselves, and maybe deep inside we just plain don’t like ourselves very much. Keeping this up will only lead to heartbreak.

No fate is worse than the one you construct for yourself out of fear

Holding onto past hurt and a flaw-based self image prevents us from moving forward, and above all it’s notorious for messing up our relationships because we end up projecting negativity onto the other person, subconsciously expecting them to reject us for any or all of the “proven reasons” on our list of self-judgments. And unfortunately, the fear of being rejected often becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

What are you hiding?

Rarely do we think consciously about this tendency to hold ourselves at eternal fault for the past; these issues tend to come in the form of the proverbial skeletons in the closet, the invisible list of wrongs and lacks and flaws that stay in the background most of the time – the problem is we don’t tend to realize how much this inner score-board of negativity actually affects us.

In reality this kind of pattern will hold us in a self-made emotional prison until we decide to break free once and for all – realize that you held the key all this time. You are who you choose to be, not who you’ve been told you are or what the past dictates. Every moment is a fresh start, so make the most of it. And another thing: how many of us keep an internal score of all the good things we’ve done? Maybe we should!

Keeping the past around

When we come together in love with another person, all barriers are torn down: if we hold our distance out of fear (namely, that our mate will ultimately reject us) we will never truly be satisfied in any relationship - because we'll be subconsciously waiting for it to end. Or we might settle for something that doesn't truly fulfill us, in the subconscious belief that it's a "safer" option.  

Many of us create variations of the same relationship over and over throughout our lies - we may have had an emotionally unavailable parent and somehow end up with friends like this in our teenage years, and later a spouse with similar tendencies. The common factor here is us - our self-perception, our emotional patterns. As pioneer of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung, said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” 

Letting go

Our subconscious minds are full of myriad beliefs and patterns that make little logical sense to our rational thinking, and our destructive unconscious patterns keep being triggered and brought up until we face and resolve them. Take away their power once and for all right now - forgive yourself.

The most important and loving thing you’ll ever do for yourself is to let it go. The past is gone. And any mistake you ever made taught you valuable lessons that enabled you to grow as a person. In this moment, you are who you are now, not who you were then. Forgive yourself. It's the only way you'll ever be free. 

Cassady Cayne is a writer and natural intuitive with an academic background in psychology and history. She was thrown into the Ascension process overnight when a spiritual encounter triggered her to have a powerful Kundalini experience. Cayne regularly writes about Twin Flames, love, spirituality and energy practices at www.twinflames1111.com/blog