Forgiveness

patgarcia ♦ March 9, 2012 ♦ 8 Comments

In order to be successful at any thing in life, you will have to learn how to forgive others.  If you do not, then you are handcuffed in the prison of your own emotions that will spoil your joy, and keep you from moving into the delight that one experiences emotionally after achieving some great feat or accomplishment.

Too many of us are walking around in our lives with unforgiveness engraved on our hearts.  We think about injustices that have taken place in our past and use that as the fuel to generate hate and dislike, or to avoid or damage someone else, who has hurt us. In our hurt, we wait until the appropriate time, and catching the person off guard, we lash out and pay them back for the pain that we have suffered.   They have hurt us and we hurt back.  However, this way of living causes a carnage of destruction in which the cycle of unforgiveness never dies.  It makes us reach out to destroy.

True, we may receive temporary satisfaction, but it is only temporary.  The increasing number of people who are seeking out psychiatrists and psychologists due to suffering from mental breakdowns, burnout and other mental health diseases, because of their unwillingness to forgive,  has risen tremendously.   Tortured by mental anguish and hurts received from others, they strike back only to realize afterward that getting back at someone else or doing unto them as they have been done unto you does not bring them any relief, nor does it bring them the peace of mind they were seeking.

These same people, then, run to the Mental Health Clinics.  Nothing against Psychologists and Psychiatrists or any of the Mental Health Technicians, they are needed in this world, I studied Psychology myself for six years.   One of the  core question to be asked when someone is suffering from mental anguish is the question of how much old mental baggage  are they  willing to let go of.  To let go means examining yourself to find out how much are you willing to forgive others  so that you can move on with your life. You will not find peace of mind on an analyst’s couch, if you are not willing to forgive.

You are probably saying to yourself that this woman is crazy, if she thinks I am going to forgive whatchamacallit for what he or she did to me. What they did was  wrong!

Please notice, however; I did not say that there are no injustices in the world.  There are injustices, and they take place everyday. You will receive unfair treatment; someone will not like the size of your nose, or the color of your skin, or the way you talk. There will be times when someone will have an aversion to you, just because you are you.  Injustices take place in this world, and they take place more often than we would like to admit. However, the key to walking away from the injustice is to discover the inner strength that you have within yourself, by being willing to forgive. If we want to live a life free of emotionally bondage, then learning to forgive others is one of the keys that will lead us into successful living.   There is no other way around it.

So how do I learn forgiveness? First of all, it is not something that is easy to learn, because learning forgiveness means practicing it, when someone hurts you. The more you practice it the more you grow into it.  Secondly, you do not have tell others that you are forgiving them or have forgiven them.  Often, the others do not know that they have hurt you, or insulted you, or did you wrong.   So the first thing to learn about forgiveness is that it is a personal contract between you and your principles and beliefs.  It is something that you decide to do.  Whether the other person knows it or not does not matter. What matters, is that you know you have forgiven. Speaking out to yourselves in moments of silence when you are alone, I forgive………………by calling out that person name, or writing out forgiveness of that person in a journal, and more than likely you will have to repeat this process more than once.  It takes time to let go of the injustices that you have incurred, but if you get up every morning speaking out forgiveness of that person or writing it out, you will notice at some point in time, that the burdensome feeling that you had toward that person, or that country, or that business no longer exist.

Again this is only one step.  Have you noticed that I said with time? That means there is no one step, one time serving, one size, overall method, to get rid of unforgiveness. The cure takes time as all of the other  priceless beatitudes of life. So, rid yourself of thinking that forgiveness will happen over night.  If it does, then you are one of the lucky ones.  It took me years to learn it by practicing it daily and meditating on certain passages of the book that guides my life, the Bible.

So, learn to forgive and get on with your life.  Life on earth is too precious to waste with the seed of unforgiveness.  There are many people who could have been, but they were not, because they were unable to forgive the past, forgive others or forgive themselves and move on with their lives.

Be blessed this weekend.

Shalom!

Pat Garcia