Why Forgiveness Allows Leaving the Past Behind
Have
you ever felt depressed about seemingly uncontrollable events happening in your
life and started to “dis” yourself, i.e. start beating yourself up mentally for
having allowed a stressful event to happen? A friend of mine and I were talking about this last night,
and although learning to love yourself — even in this most desperate of
circumstances, is eventually needed to move out of this situation.
But
this may not be where you are able to go. What might be easier is to forgive
yourself — forgive yourself for having been responsible for your part in this
creation — and then of course, to forgive all other people places, things, and
events that you might be blaming.
Here is an excerpt from my book, “HEARTGASM!
– Increasing Intimacy & Ecstasy with Your Beloved”©
about
forgiveness:
Forgiveness – Severing
the Ugly Cords
Binding the Past to
Your Present
Forgiving the
Unforgivable Requires Opening Your Heart to Yourself
Forgiveness is prime
among the things you can do to clear a space in your consciousness and get on
with your life. Mental garbage clutters up our mental space and makes it hard
to think clearly. I once took a course in energy healing and through
visualizing what “thoughts” might look like if you could see them, we became
familiar with “thought forms.”
I soon started to think of negative thought forms as dark little boxes of
energy floating around in one’s aura. A really practiced psychic practitioner
can actually see these thought forms.
Have
you and your partner cleared a space for the possibility of sex, or are you
still mad at each other? Chances are, a couple’s being mad at each other starts
with being adamant that you are right. So much so in fact, that you must
make the other person wrong. With this attitude, there is no space for
forgiveness or negotiation.
Learning more about
forgiveness is just the beginning of a process where you will begin to see that
it is not the other person, but you that you are not forgiving. Once you can
begin to forgive your self, you will soon see that not forgiving the other
person is just holding you back from a happy and fulfilling life.
The Buddha on Forgiveness
“Resentment is the kind of anger that you carry around for
a long time. It is like a hot coal that you pick up and intend to throw at
somebody else, but the whole time it is burning you. We give up a lot of energy
by holding on.”
The following is a good
example of not being able to forgive. Almost everybody has some relative that
did something so horrendous to them, that they will never, ever
forgive them.
Unfortunately,
this gives deceased relatives the power to continue hurting us all our lives,
even though those people may have been dead for 20 years.
Anna’s Forgiveness
Breakthrough
At a workshop I
facilitated in Mullumbimby (a little village near Byron Bay), Australia,
there was a woman, Anna, who was
unable to forgive her whole community, including her mother and entire family.
They were holding something against her for which she did not feel responsible.
She felt she was completely right, and all the rest of them were completely
wrong in unfairly judging her.
When asked how heavy a
weight this was to carry around, you could see just by her body language that
it was unbearably heavy. She said this had ruined her life, and even though she
had long left this place behind, on being questioned, she admitted that she
dragged it along behind her everywhere she went.
“What
if you could forgive your community,” I posited, “and you could let go of
this old baggage you are dragging around? You know, you are not hurting them
by being unforgiving. It is you, yourself, that you are hurting. How
much more hurt and pain are you willing to keep submitting yourself to?”
She then flew into a
rage, which very soon broke down into a flood of tears, all the while sobbing,
“I cannot forgive them! What they have done to my reputation and to me is
un-forgivable.”
I
held her while she continued sobbing, reminding her that it was her choice to
give it up – that she could keep holding on to it as long as she wanted to.
After a few minutes,
she sat up and dried her tears and announced, “You are right. I don’t want to
feel like this any more. I don’t want to forgive them, but I will.”
“And who else are you
willing to forgive?” She immediately knew it was herself that she also had to
forgive.
At that point I guided
the entire group through the “forgiveness process,” which
I had the young lady in question read out loud. Nothing could have more clearly
demonstrated the forgiveness process, than what the entire group had not only
witnessed, but participated in, just by holding the space for this amazing
breakthrough to happen.
I
think we can all now agree with Mother Theresa who said, “We know that if we
really want to love we must learn to forgive.”
Who is it that you
have to forgive? Is it un-forgivable? Why?
Getting out paper and
pen again, write what & whom you consider
“unforgivable.” An example of something you might write could be, “I can’t forgive my mother for
what she did to me.”
Why is being right
more important than “getting off it” and getting on with your life? When are
you going to be so sick and tired of dragging your old baggage
around that you are
willing
to give it up?
Once you have
determined who in your own life you need to forgive the most, I suggest going
through a process forgiving all people, places, things, and events tied into
your feelings of not wanting to forgive — part of which is forgiving yourself.
Then continue to do this every day for the next week, or as often as is
necessary, to let go of the old baggage of “un-forgiveness” you are dragging
behind you everywhere you go.
¸.•❤•.¸
In closing, I encourage your comments about this post. If you’ve got people you need to
forgive, please share your feelings about this. Or maybe you have a forgiveness story you’d like to
share. And, as always, I
appreciate your sharing this post on Twitter and Facebook.
Love and blessings,
Toni