Forgiveness & the Freeing of Your Heart
December 3rd, 2019
Forgiveness can be a subject that causes strong reactions; if you are someone who feels very strongly that some acts, some people, do not deserve forgiveness, ask yourself whether you feel that people have been unfair to you, that there were instances where someone else’s actions have harmed you and your immediate world. Most of us have been hurt or treated unfairly at some point, in fact some evolutionary psychologists would argue that we’re wired to see ourselves as the injured party almost always. Whether we actually were treated unfairly or whether it’s our own construct is irrelevant, the feeling that remains is the same, the belief is created, the trigger is created and the reactions occur.
Another belief which prevents healing is that forgiveness can only be given once someone is contrite, remorseful, shameful and acting out changed behaviour. Although I would agree changed behaviour is positive, my belief is that its energy should not be of remorse or shame. Real changed behaviour comes through healing and this is the cyclical nature, the intertwined nature of the whole subject and why forgiveness is the key puzzle piece to ancestral and past trauma; those that behave hurtfully towards others are themselves in pain and though their healing is, of course, their own responsibility, by holding onto the harm they’ve caused and the negative energy of it, we continue to perpetuate it in our own world. We are continually drawn to that which has that same energy, craving resolution and finding the same result; pain, trauma. And the cycle continues.
The end of the cycle comes when we can face the initial hurt and release it. For many of us these hurts occurred as children, for others it is an ancestral hurt that has been passed down; how your mother was treated by her father or how your race was treated historically. Universal or personal, familial or identity related, these unforgiven hurts and crimes are stuck in our very beings and we experience situational mirrors.
When we forgive, we release. Forgiveness and condoning are not the same thing. Forgiveness is saying ‘I no longer choose to hold onto what happened, I recognise that your actions were harmful to me but human to human I acknowledge they were not about me but were about yourself and your experiences and as such I let go of them and release them back and I am free.’ If I can help you realise one thing it would be that someone’s treatment of you is never about you and is always about them. This works both ways; someone who can always express love and compassion is in the blissful state of loving themselves entirely, of having healed all their wounds, this is not weakness but what most of us are knowingly or unknowingly aiming for. Someone who expresses complete forgiveness, always, has healed all trauma. This is another reason to forgive; if we are all of us healed, we stop hurting each other. The more healed people in the world, the less chance of someone hurting you.
If life seems very hard, in whatever way, firstly I wish to express compassion to you, next I would like to help you heal. The first step to this is honestly and openly examining your experiences and your ancestral heritage and finding the hurts. Sometimes they’re big, sometimes they’re smaller, most often there’s a mix. Once you can recognise where the initial hurts were, the next step is forgiveness; release. This is most often a process, a process of discussion and removing the attachment, of healing. There is often forgiveness of self as well, releasing the ‘I deserved that because…’
We are all humans, imperfect and fettered, acting out stories about ourselves and the world that we learned before we were able to deconstruct them and rationalise them. Even the worst ‘monsters’ of humanity have experienced trauma. We can, and I would offer ‘should’, though that’s not a word I like much, remove ourselves from proximity to some people; we need, for our wellbeing, to set boundaries and hold to them. Forgiving someone won’t necessarily change their behaviour. It will change our own. The more forgiveness you hold, the more love and compassion you display, the more you will believe that that is the natural state of behaviour. Now when someone acts negatively to you, you move away from them, from that energy, because you don’t feel a recognition in it, you don’t recognise love in that behaviour because you have healed the narrative that says ‘people who love me hurt me, love equals pain’. Maybe a parent taught you that ‘nothing worth having in life comes easy’, a lot of us were taught that, believe that, how much suffering is allowed in that sentence? The forgiveness to that may be ‘I recognise that it was meant to encourage me to strive to do all I can for my happiness and that was all’. Belief systems like this teach us that anything that we receive easily is not what we want or need, leading to constant dissatisfaction. They also teach us that suffering, struggling, is good and natural and how we should feel if we’re on the right path. This is entirely opposed to the expectation that we should be happy and healthy and mentally and emotionally well at all times. No wonder we suffer. We can use the same method to forgive and release belief systems and linguistic constructs as we use with human situations and experiences. Recognise that harm to you wasn’t the creating force. Release it energetically, knowing that its root was never in you but outside of you. And then create boundaries. I don’t allow the widespread media any platform in my world, its words are harmful, I have set a boundary which I adhere to. Most of us see the world as a terribly bleak and frightening place, but we are allowing a lot of bleak and frightening rhetoric into our lives. Humans have a great capacity for love and kindness, the Earth is miraculous, cultural diversity is beautiful and awe inspiring. The more you reject fear and welcome love, the more this becomes your truth, the truth of your experience. Forgiveness and release allows space for these things.
