THE CONCEPT OF FORGIVENESS, IT IS ALL ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL WELL BEING

THE CONCEPT

When is the last time you physically hurt yourself?

What did you do to get the pain to stop?

And how long did you wait to do something about it?

When we’re in physical pain, we’re usually extremely proactive about figuring out how to make it go away immediately because, you know, it hurts.

Even if we have to go through more pain from pouring a disinfectant that stings on an open wound or suffering through getting stitches, we do it, right away, because we’re very focused on our ultimate goal: relief.

When it comes to our emotional pain, however, we’re apparently way more game for seeing just how much torture we can endure, wallowing in our guilt, shame, resentment, and self-loathing, sometimes for entire lifetimes.

We relive our worst moments over and over and over instead of letting them go, we pick at the emotional scars and refuse to let the healing happen and the pain subside.

We won’t rest until we’ve made sure someone else feels as badly as they’ve just made us feel.

You may have miss

How to deal with menstrual cramps and fatigue

The Resurrected Life

Unique behaviours among wild animals.(1)

The two factors that unconsciously influence our decision making.

If I have to suffer my entire life, I will make sure you see how you’ve wronged me!

We cling to the resentments that take up our brain space, waste our time, spin us out, keep us angry and depressed and very often make us physically sick and sometimes even kill us.

Lugging around guilt, shame, resentment and self-loathing is The Big Snooze running the show, pitching a fit, demanding to be right and to be seen.

Your higher self, on the other hand, could give a crap about what anybody else thinks or does because your higher self is madly in love with you and that’s all that matters.

Whatever happened, happened.

Holding on will not change this fact, it will just keep the negative feelings from the past alive, keep you a prisoner to your pain and lower your frequency.

The moment you decide to forgive and let your negative feelings melt away, you are on the road to freedom.

Forgiveness is all about taking care of you, not the person you need to forgive.

It’s about putting your desire to feel good before your desire to be right.

Taking responsibility for your own happiness instead of pretending it’s in somebody else’s hands.

It’s about owning your power by giving all your anger, resentment, and hurt the heave-ho.

If you’re having issues with someone you care about, explain how you feel without putting the blame on them and regardless of the outcome, forgive them.

Your talk may bring you closer together or you may discover that you don’t want to hang out with them as much or at all, but either way, if you want to be free, you have to let it go.

If you’re feeling hurt or resentful toward someone, free yourself and let it go instead of stewing on it or getting revenge by sending them a box of rats in the mail.

Why do you care if they understand how lame they are or not.

What good does that do you?

And don’t pretend it’s because you want them to become a better person.

You could care less.

You want retribution or an apology or to be acknowledged as right.

Get over it.

Let it go.

The longer you stay attached to being vindicated, the longer they hang around in your consciousness, stinking up your life.

Do not fall prey to the false belief that by forgiving someone you’re letting them off the hook.

Because when you forgive someone, you let yourself off the hook.

How do you actually let it all go?

ERASE THE OTHER PERSON FROM THE EQUATION

When someone does something awful to you, take that person out of the equation so you can open yourself up to have a more pleasant, and productive, reaction (and life).

It’s not about them anyway, it’s about you.

If you have nobody to be angry at, it’s hard to be angry.

Instead, it opens the incident up for questioning.

Why did this happen?

How was I involved?

Why did I attract this to myself?

How can I grow from this?

How can I find compassion for everyone involved?

When you’re consumed by resentment, the lesson can’t get through all your inner, and outer, screaming and yelling.

Do yourself a favour and use irritating situations and people as opportunities for growth, not pain.

DECIDE YOU WOULD RATHER BE HAPPY THAN RIGHT

Sometimes the road to freedom lies in deciding you’d rather be happy than right.

Is it really worth lugging around all those foul feelings just so you can be right?

Think to yourself, “What do I have to do or not do, or think or not think, right now, to be happy?”

And if the answer is “let them think they are right,” then so be it.

FIND COMPASSION

Finding compassion for yourself or someone else who did something so so so so awful is like pulling a bullet out of your arm:

You may kick and scream and hate it at first, but, in the long run, it’s the only way to start the real healing.

One of the best tricks for doing this is to imagine the person you’re resentful of as a little kid.

Think of this little person acting out of fear, doing the best they can to protect themselves and attempting to deal with their own suffering in the only way they know how.

People act poorly because they are in pain or confused or both.

Understanding this, and imagining the person who you want to behead as a sweet little innocent child with big puppy dog eyes, will help you find compassion for them, which is the key to forgiveness.

And same goes for anything you feel you need to forgive yourself about.

You too are just a little bunny trying to work it all out.

Find compassion for your sweet little, sippy cup self and let it all go.

CONSIDER IT FROM ALL ANGLES

It’s important to remember that everyone is living in their own self-created illusion, and that you have no idea what they’re acting out or where they’re coming from, so just because you think something is totally not okay, in their illusion, it could be fine and your way could be totally not okay.

Look at it from another perspective, loosen your stranglehold on it being my way or the highway, let some air in, and you may be surprised how quickly resentment flies out the window.

By being inquisitive about, instead of a slave to, your reactions to other people, you get the double whammy bonus of not only setting yourself up to forgive them much more easily (because you realize that it’s really about you, not them), but you receive the great gift of being enlightened to some of your own not-so-special traits so you can grow and learn from them.

According to Byron Katie,

“We don’t attach to people or things; we attach to an uninvestigated concept that we believe to be true in the moment.”

REMEMBER THAT YOU WON’T EVEN REMEMBER THIS

Try and think about someone who had you totally freaking out and all pissed off three years ago.

Can you even come up with someone?

If you can, can you get all worked up about them now?

Whatever or whomever you’re needing to forgive in this moment will most likely be a mere blip not very long from now (depending on the severity of the situation, of course).

So why make a huge drama out of it if you’re only going to forget all about it one day?

See it as the future non-event that it is and start forgiving and forgetting right away.

When it comes to forgiveness, what you actually have to DO is not hard.

It’s like quitting smoking, you actually do less than you do when you smoke.

You don’t have to go to the store to buy cigarettes, you don’t have to open the pack, light one up, find an ashtray, etc.

All you have to do is stop.

All the work is in letting go of your self-created attachment to cigarettes.

Same with forgiveness.

All you have to do is let go of your self-created attachment to this other person or belief.

FUGGETABOUTIT

Once you’ve truly forgiven someone, wipe the slate clean.

So often we form judgments about people and then, no matter what they do, we see them through the lens of that judgment.

Which means we’re just waiting for them to piss us off again.

Which means we’re still in the forgiveness-lite stage; we’re pretending we’re cool but we’re really still holding on to some resentment.

Release all expectations, let everyone off the hook, treat people as a blank slate over and over again, expect only the best from them regardless of what they’ve done in the past and you may be surprised.

What you focus on, you create more of, and if you keep expecting people to annoy you, they will not let you down.

Focus on their finer points and encourage their good behaviours if you want to create more of it.