Wednesday, November 6, 2013


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


No comments:

Post a Comment