When you can’t forgive someone, you’re only hurting yourself. Here’s why:
- Holding on to unforgiveness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die (from a quote by Nelson Mandela on Resentment)
- Holding on to unforgiveness leaves you stuck and struggling in an undercurrent of anger, resentment, sadness, and a myriad of other energy-depleting emotions.
- When we hold on to negative-energy vibration-feelings we are wasting, draining, and blocking our Authentic Power.
- Our heart contracts when we hold on to unforgiveness. This is unnatural; the heart is based in love and is emitting powerful love energy if we aren’t blocking the flow.Are there some people in your life that you simply cannot forgive? How about entire situations that you can’t let go of? Learn simple ways to forgive, thereby taking back your power and putting an end to suffering.
For starters, see if you can view forgiveness and unforgiveness from a new perspective: Forgiveness is a gift we give to ourselves. It is not condoning the actions of another. Sometimes we think we have control if we hold on to unforgiveness. In fact, holding on to unforgiveness drains our power and keeps us in negative energy vibration.
Look past the event, or the individual, to see the truth: Be willing to forgive for your own good. A Holocaust survivor, Eva Kor, wrote that we “have the right to live without the pain of the past. . . Forgiveness is really nothing more than an act of self-healing and self-empowerment. I call it a miracle medicine. It’s free, it works, and has no side effects.” (Happy for No Reason p. 138 by Marci Shimoff and Carol Kline)
Here is an exercise I’d love to have you practice, based on Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping:
Find a situation in which you are still holding on to unforgiveness. See if you feel in that situation as if you were wronged by someone. Then notice that you have been seeing yourself in the situation as the victim. This makes healing, and forgiveness, impossible.
Now look at the situation through the eyes of LOVE. Imagine the event as a drama being played out on a stage. You’re the witness, or the observer. From this perspective, you may see things differently. You may have a shift in perception. Instead of seeing yourself as the victim, state to yourself instead: “Isn’t it interesting that I created that scene in my life!”
This is the first step: owning your own part in the situation, and ending the blame game. You stop making another person wrong. Consider the truth that people show up in our lives for a reason. We NEED the actors on the stage to take us to our next level in spiritual awakening.
Forgiveness occurs when we embrace the importance of it for our own peace of mind and quality of life. It involves shifting the way we perceive others and the world, through the eyes of LOVE instead of FEAR. Eventually we get to the place where there is nothing to forgive. We recognize that all of our prior events that kept us locked into “unforgiveness” have been there for a reason. They helped us transition into our own spiritual awakening in which we finally awaken to the TRUTH of who we really are: spiritual beings having daily human experiences that open our hearts and facilitate our awareness of the presence of love in, around, and through us and in others.
What if you could look at forgiveness not as something that seems unobtainable, but as something that is amazingly easy to accomplish? Give it a try! It truly can change your life.
