Forgiveness

Forgiveness is a topic that has come up quite a bit lately not only in my practice, but in my personal life.  Many people have the mistaken idea that if you forgive someone you say what they did that hurt you was okay.  Forgiveness really is about letting go of the negative energy you have around something someone did that hurt you.  It's taking back your power and not allowing that person's act to continue to hurt you in the future.

Forgiveness is important in our ability to learn, grow and evolve in our lives.  More importantly, it's essential if we want to be happy.  Holding on to feelings of anger and resentment toward someone who has hurt us can keep us from moving forward in our lives.  As long as we're focused on something that happened in the past, we can't move into the future.

It is difficult to give up our negative feelings toward the offender, because they 'deserve' to be punished in our view.  But ask yourself this question:  is expending negative energy on this bad guy hurting them - or you?  The answer, of course, is it is hurting you!   So, we choose to forgive, not for the other person, but for ourselves.

Forgiving does not mean that you condone, or even accept, what the other person did.  It also does not mean that you have to continue to have a relationship with this person if they are likely to hurt you in the future.  It does mean that you can let go of what happened and move on.

A topic for another time: forgiving ourselves.