It is my honor to introduce you to my first guest blogger in UNITY. Virginia O'Connor is a personal motivator and author of a great book called "Girlfriends Are Pennies From Heaven." You can purchase her book through her website listed below.
Learning To ForgiveForgiving may be one of the hardest things you can do. Webster's Dictionary tell us that to forgive means; "to give up resentment against or the desire to punish."
Forgiveness is an energy of some sort. It is a decision, a commitment, a feeling. Many of us can relate to the experiences associated with forgiveness. It is an honesty with oneself and the other. It is understanding that someone close to us who hurts us, can also, at the same time, love us. It is knowing that another person's actions defines who they are, not who we are. It is a fight against anger, hate, and the desire for revenge.
Forgiveness also gives us power, the power to stay or leave that person. It gives us the power to rise about self pity and gain wisdom from the lesson taught us and the ability to be compassionate to ourselves. Just about every wound that requires forgiving also contains important learning: learning that comes with a very high price tag.
One of the reasons forgiveness is so hard is because we think that by forgiving someone, we are allowing an enormous injustice to be done. Perhaps, we feel that by forgiving them we are saying it is OK to do it again. Or, if we give up our anger the person will have received no punishment of the harm done.
Maybe we don't want to forgive until we know that they are really sorry and won't do it again. And the worst thing we do to ourselves is to re-live, over and over again in our minds, what they did and how they hurt us. We don't want to forget. We want to make them hurt for the injustice they have done, we want them to feel our pain.
As I write this, I recall the times I have been emotionally hurt so badly that I could feel the rage and torment rolling like a jet plane inside me. All I could think of was vengeance. How can I make the person feel pain worse than I was feeling? My constant thoughts were of my wounds, how much I hurt, and how could that person do that to me. It was a full blown pity me party with loathing, fury, bitterness, wounds and thoughts of revenge accompanying me at the party.
When we have been hurt by someone who is not sorry, unable to apologize, doesn't care how much they have hurt us, or shockingly enough, happy that they hurt us it is almost impossible to forgive them.
They revel in their power that they can control our emotions to such an extent that our pain is something intolerable. It makes them fell dominant. These are the kind of people we must walk away from. No need to forgive, just get out of their way so we can survive.
Underneath all these negative feelings is fear. Fear that they will hurt us again. Fear that we have been made to a fool of. Fear that the other person really doesn't care. There is also the basic emotion of sadness. Sadness for the loss of the relationship, sadness for ourselves, for our pain, sadness for we can now not trust, sadness for a feeling of being empty inside and for feeling that we have been victimized.
Holding onto the pain, actually gives the person who hurt us, greater control over us and our lives. what do we get from holding on to the pain of not forgiving? It cost us our energy, our health, our vitality, our joy, our freedom and in some cases, if held too long with too much hatred, our life. Simmering in resentment makes us sick.
Our life may become so wrapped up in the wrong we feel done to us that we make it impossible to feel any joy. If we allow these negative feelings to fill our spirit, we may find our self swallowed up by our own bitterness. If we can't let go, we might pay the price repeatedly by bringing anger and animosity into every relationship.
So, what can we do for ourselves to make us the conqueror of our emotions and lives? We can give these constructive feelings time to heal. realize of course, that the more time we give them, the more of our life we are wasting. We can do as I did, read all the books about forgiveness and try to digest them into us to make us feel whole again. We can pray. We can do our best to forget. We can do things that bring joy into our lives. We can find a passion that will completely absorb us that we have no time to think about our past wounds.
We can realize that we really do not have to forgive the offense but we can try for our own peace of mind, to let it go. As strange as it may seem, in the letting go of our angry feeling we experience a loss. It is the loss of something that we have been so involved with, for so long and has become a part of our inner circle of feelings, that it is difficult to release. It might just be that we are holding on for the sake of holding on and what the person did to us is no longer of any relevance. Losing the negative feelings is a loss of who we have been. Accepting loss is one of the most persistent demands of human life.
The goal of letting go involves rising above a violation and making peace with the circumstances. we can take our own power back and make a better life for ourselves. We can become less obsessed with injuries we suffer, big and small. We can be kind and gentle to ourselves or get involved in helping others.
We are the deliberate creators of our lives. We have a choice. We can live with the negative feelings or we can live with joy. The choice is ours to decide. It is not easy but sometimes, the more difficult path is the one that will bring us serenity.
