Do you have a ball and chain around your ankle which shackles you to your past because you will not forgive? Are you one of 99% of people on the planet who truly can not find it in their heart to forgive someone who has done them harm?
Believe it or not, forgiveness is for you. It’s not for the other person. It is one of the most self-centred and self-serving things you can do. Forgiveness is a form of self-love.
Put another way, and if you truly love and respect yourself, you have to learn how to forgive. If you choose not to the event and feelings are shackled to you like a ball and chain.
You can not move forward, you will keep looking backwards. It keeps you trapped in the past like you are frozen in time…
It only becomes part of your past when you stop thinking about it or stewing on it, or you are no longer triggered by it.
It is not part of your past if you are stewing on it, and the more you think about how you were hurt, abused, neglected or otherwise harmed, the more vivid the hurt becomes. It burns inside you like a raging fire deep within you.
Buddha has a saying, the more you hang onto past pain, the more you hang on to that past pain, the more it flares up in your hands and continues to burn you deep down inside.
You owe it to yourself. Decide to forgive today. You have a much better life awaiting you! Need help? Check out Louise Hay How to Love Yourself Affirmation Cards.
Here Are The Most Common Reasons Why You May Have A Tough Time Forgiving
You Believe That The Person Who Hurt You Doesn’t Deserve Forgiveness
What happened to you may have been unfair and uncalled for. It may have been very traumatic. The problem is, forgiveness is not about the other person. It has nothing to do with whether they deserve it or not.
You May Refuse To Forgive Because You Are Consumed By Revenge
Thoughts of revenge keep the harm that you feel you suffered, alive. It continues to burn. Today. Right here. Right now.
Far from dampening your memories of pain, humiliation, abandonment, or abuse, thoughts of revenge make sure your bad memories burn bright hot. It is a fire that consumes you deep inside.
The more you focus on it, the more this internal emotional and psychological inferno grows. It burns you, not the other person.
Wanting revenge only makes you change for the worse. Let go of revenge and focus on something else more worthy of your attention.
You May Refuse To Forgive Because You Don’t Want To Let Your Guard Down
Forget about “forgive and forget.” That is a dead-end – figuratively and sometimes literally. You CAN be safe when you forgive.
Just because you forgive doesn’t mean that you give the offender the green light to harm you again. There is another option: you can choose to forgive and remember. This maybe your default action anyway.
When ever you go through an experience, it’s always a good idea to remember the lessons that experience brought. The pain that you went through is one of life’s lessons. It doesn’t have to consume you. Just remember it’s lessons so you can benefit from it.
Focus instead on picking up the pieces and making sure they don’t continue to cut you.
You May Refuse To Forgive Because You Feel Like Nothing Is Going To Change
Certain parts of your life are already shattered because of this past act. Isn’t it time for you to forgive and move on so that these fragments don’t continue to hurt you today?
As already mentioned, this doesn’t mean that you have to forget. Instead, this means that you have to learn from what happened and allow it to move you forward.
Learn from that situation and that person. Don’t let the pain of that experience poison your other relationships or the rest of your life. You have far better things waiting for you.
When You Do Forgive Please Take This Into Consideration:
Real Forgiveness Takes Place On Both The Mental & Emotional Level
A lot of people have a tough time forgiving others because they cannot translate their realisation of their need to forgive with a real emotional sense of having forgiven.
In other words, there’s a disconnect between what they feel in their heart and what’s going through their mind. It’s too easy for people to compartmentalise forgiveness as a purely intellectual action.
The reality: unless forgiveness sinks from your mind to your heart and impacts not only what you think but what you say and do, you haven’t forgiven.
You will continue to remember and live out the past hurt and trauma. And it continues feelings to fester and grow. Have you seen our FREE Holistic Health Magazine on Releasing Emotions – Healing Emotional Pain
Benefits of Forgiveness
Releasing Negative Blocks with Forgiveness – When you let go of grudges, hurts and bitterness, you improve yourself on so many levels.
Your relationships become more harmonious on all levels as you no longer think everyone will hurt you.
Your mental health is improved as you are no longer living in the past. Read more about Importance of Mental Health Awareness.
It can help decrease your high blood pressure as you have let go of the anger and emotion around it.
You can truly start living your life on your terms without any of the baggage from the past.
Your self-esteem improves as the Buddha famously analogised, refusing to forgive others is like carrying around a fire in the palm of your hands. The only person that it’s hurting is you. One of the most common ways this is expressed is through your self-esteem.
One of the secrets to forgiveness is to allow your heart to break.
The reason why you’re feeling so angry is that you feel that you’re just trying to keep it together. You’re just trying to keep your heart in one piece. But no progress is possible until you let your heartbreak.
Let it out. Let the pain out. There’s a tremendous amount of negative feelings there. It seems like the tears never stop.
So I ask you this are you ready to truly forgive so you can craft the life you truly deserve?
You can find much more information on living a holistic lifestyle in these free magazines and on our YouTube channel.
Sandra Meehan is a Global Leader in Women’s Empowerment. Educator | Mentor | TV Host and Producer | Master Alchemist | You are not what happens to you. You are who you choose to become. By Carl Jung
Sandra lives by this motto in all aspects of her life. Is the Co-founder of The
PowerFULL You with her daughter Rebecca Bowden.
The PowerFULL You is a place where spirituality and physicality come together as one. We are all spiritual beings; it is physicality we have come here to master. Sandra helps women all around the world do this with here online programs and physical products.
