Forgiveness used to seem like a weakness to me. It felt like giving someone a free pass for poor behavior. What I didn’t realize was that I was staying frozen in time in the energy of the event rather than seeing how it could possibly serve me and moving on. I’ve since learned that forgiveness doesn’t mean that what happened to you was ok. Forgiveness means you’re no longer willing to be wounded by what happened.
The best part, or most important aspect of forgiveness, is that the energy you carry because of being unwilling to forgive is blocking your ability to love and to be loved fully, because you have to carry the illusion of separateness to maintain the unwillingness to forgive another. You have to believe that YOU are also unworthy of being forgiven. This goes against our true nature and creates a karmic debt that’s not in your favor.
Forgiveness doesn’t even require the other person to know that you have forgiven them. It’s an energetic experience you can do all on your own.
You can’t forgive until you feel the wound and either:
- Understand their level of consciousness that made them do what they did (especially in the case of our parents)
- Or understand that what they or you did may have been a normal part of childhood exploration and they or you may not have known better
- And/or see in their actions a desire to make right the harm they caused
- See where you may have played a role, if an adult when it happened (what boundaries were missing, how did I co-create this)
I also love these quotes from Gary Zukav in his book, The Seat of the Soul:
“When most people forgive they do not want those that they forgave to forget that they forgave and forgot. This kind of forgiveness manipulates the person who is forgiven. It is not forgiveness. It is a means of acquiring external power over another.”
“Forgiveness means that you do not hold others responsible for your experiences… Complaining, for example, is exactly that dynamic of wanting someone to be responsible for what you experience, and to fix things for you.”
“You cannot know what another person will do. Therefore, when you depend upon another person for the experiences that you think are necessary to your well-being, you live continually in the fear that they will not deliver. The perception that someone else is responsible for what you experience underlies the idea that forgiveness is something that one person does for another. How can you forgive another person for the fact that you have chosen to step out of your power?”
Who do you need to forgive today?
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