FORGIVENESS

I read a great article on forgiveness this morning. Nothing is a coincidence.

I often do not realize how I am still clinging to memories that cause me to react to events in my life the way I do when I know darn good and well that the present situation is only a trigger for something I am still clinging to or have a residue of and has nothing to do with the truth of the moment.

The "committee" convenes in my head and tells me stuff I know is not true. It is something I have told myself years ago about things that happened and this thing takes center front stage and screams so loudly that it drowns out all reasoning. Eventually I come to my senses but meanwhile I cause myself and sometimes other people a lot of unnecessary misery. I am thankful that this last incident created suffering mostly within me and did not affect anyone else so much.

So, even though I thought I had “forgiven” some of the people and incidences of my past, I found that there is still some residue left and if I want to be free of it enough to let me catch it before the committee can meet and throw me to the ground, I better wake up and smell the coffee and get on with forgiveness. It may be that what is left is to forgive myself for creating an image of those incidences that told me I was not loved, that I was only a nuisance and bother, that I was stupid, that I was unwanted, and that I caused the abuse. I told myself that if I could just behave, stay out of the way, be a “good girl”, give enough love, that all would be well.

The article focuses a little differently on forgiveness than my example but it did talk about how not forgiving can limit your blessings and can continue to create scenarios of like manner until you can forgive (not forget but forgive). I suspect that habit will try to drag you back even if you manage to forgive others or yourself but once it reaches the habit stage, you should be able to recognize it for what it is a bit sooner each time until perhaps you no longer give it power to disrupt your life not even for a short time and you will no longer feed it. It should eventually die of starvation but I haven’t quite been there yet so I can’t tell you from experience.

What often keeps us from forgiving is the fact that ego can tell you that you are completely justified in not doing so. So who are you hurting by holding onto that? Certainly not the others involved. They may be completely out of your life or have died. In the case of forgiveness of yourself, you have to be gentle with yourself and understand that you didn’t know any better. If you had, you would have done differently or processed things differently.

Being unforgiving is like trying to travel the road with baggage that slows you down and makes the trip a lot harder than it needs to be. It can cause illness as well.

Forgiving is not forgetting but it is being able to do what it takes to see that if you or others could have done differently at the time you or they would have. Forgiving is knowing that often what happens is triggered by ignorance passed down. Behaviors are often the outcome of self hatred that has been passed down from parent to child because no one woke up enough to break the chain. Chain breakers have an awesome responsibility but it is a privilege to be nominated for that purpose.

It may seem too little too late sometimes but we make amends and we do forgiveness and, trust me, it not only frees us but others whose lives we touch even if we messed up some along the way.

Click on the link below or copy and past in your URL window to read the article on forgiveness.

http://www.innerself.com/Behavior_Modification/Power_of_Forgiveness.htm