Forgiveness Will Set you Free
This is how you heal everything
‘Forgive, to cease to feel resentment against another.’ — Merriam-Webster.
Forgiveness relieves us from pain. It sets us free.
Forgiveness is so powerful, so healing, it is integral to nearly all religions and spiritual paths. It forms the basis of Christianity, a religion 31% of the world subscribe to. Buddhists see forgiveness as ‘removal of unhealthy emotions that cause harm to our well-being’.
Hindus also see forgiveness as the path to freedom. In the Bhagavad-Gita (16.3), Lord Krishna says, ‘… forgiveness is a godly quality that forms the foundation of liberation and anger and harshness are ungodly qualities that keep us in bondage.’
Everywhere we look, someone is exhorting us to forgive.
But what is forgiveness, and why is it so valuable? And how do we do it?
Forgiveness is releasing resistance
We may believe forgiveness is something we do for others. We see it as ours to dish out like a reward or punishment. People either ‘deserve’ forgiveness, or they don’t. This distortion of what forgiveness is keeps us in chains.
Forgiveness is letting go. It’s not about ‘forgetting’, but about dissolving our bondage to illusion. It isn’t about justice, or giving others what they deserve or don’t deserve. It’s not something we do for others. Forgiveness is about restoring our own minds to wholeness.
Forgiveness is sanity, a choice we can make in this moment. As we forgive others, we accept forgiveness for ourself. Forgiveness is healing because it allows love to flow without restriction.
The unhealed part of us hates forgiveness and rejects it. It throws up countless objections, and may even be doing so now as you read this.
‘I can never, ever forgive!’
‘They do not deserve my forgiveness!’
‘Some things can never be forgiven!’
Through unforgiveness, we give our power away. We place ourselves in the perpetual victim role, and others in the role of oppressor. We give them a high status, and ourselves a low.
Forgiveness is not about letting someone else off the hook. It’s about letting ourselves off the hook. Let Karma, or the natural laws of balance, take care of justice. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord means leave the vengeance to God. You don’t need to punish anymore. You don’t need to resist parts of your experience anymore.
Seeing through the illusions to the Truth
To be free, we need to see that everything we ever thought we knew about ‘them’ is all in our minds. It was a story we wrote.
The whole of life, everything that ever happened — all that you thought, sensed, believed — is like an enormous sponge cake. There is no evidence there is anything other than this one big cake. You are equally all of the cake all at once. But unforgiveness will isolate sections of the cake. And those little sections will rot and cause pain.
When we have resentments, grievances, trauma, stuckness, issues, anger, unhealedness, we suffer. We create blockages in our energy flow that keep us in a state of disharmony. When we don’t forgive, we are too busy resisting ‘the past’ or the things we don’t like, to perceive the truth of this moment
But ‘the past’ is a construct contained in this moment. So resisting the past is resisting part of this moment. And when we resist part, we resist all.
We may re-wound ourselves with thoughts of, ‘They didn’t love me. I’m not good enough. They hated me.’ Or attempt to wound them with thoughts of, ‘They are vile creatures. I hate them!’ We hurt ourselves with our anger, falsely believing we are hurting them.
Unforgiveness gives our suffering more power. It is a drain of energy from where we are now, back to that initial moment of injustice. It is a breach of our integrity. It pulls us out of Reality — the purity of now — to unreality, the story of grievance we made up in our heads. Unforgiveness keeps us in pain.
We may believe our anger, or our shame — which is our lack of forgiveness for ourself- will protect us from more hurt. We hold on to grievance because we’ve held on to it for so long. It’s part of our identity and we don’t know who we are without it. It holds us in place, woven like a thick cord into our memory stream. It’s a wall in our minds — a placard of anger we hold up against a section of all that is- and say, no, not that! It’s self-blockage.
The unhealed part of us knows forgiveness will be its annihilation, that it will no longer be. It clings to unforgiveness as if clinging to life. Your mind will return to your places of hurt and re-trigger your wounds. You loop back to the scenes and re-experience a jolt of adrenaline, anger, indignation, pain. This is your primitive self’s way of trying to protect you. It puts you into a state of hyper vigilance so it doesn’t happen again.
Unforgiveness is about keeping separation in place. It’s saying, “I am not them, they are not me.” We cast out parts of ourself we don’t want, and by doing so we fragment. I would never be like them! I would never do what they do!
But this is the foundational error in our thinking. Everything is us. There’s only One here. You are the entire world. The entire world is you. All others are inside you. This is your dream. There is nothing that isn’t you. Our belief in extrinsic reality keeps us divided into disconnected segments.
This has nothing to do with ‘Them’ because you are the central point of consciousness here. ‘Others’ are a figment. Only Spirit is real. This is between you and Spirit only. When we forgive, we stop resisting bits of ourself, we stop casting out the unwanted. We become whole.
Only love is real. Unforgiveness, therefore, is an attempt to make the unreal real. But, you may say, it was real to me. Yes, you have a ‘memory’ in the now of it once seeming real to you ‘in the past’. But what is real to you now? Can you see how memory- the past — is only a collection of images, words, emotions here in the now? If you are still trapped in that unforgiven moment, you are trapped in unreality. Reality is only here-now, this one pristine, ever reborn moment.
So how do we side with forgiveness, with Reality? How do we withdraw our allegiance to separation, to illusion?
How do we forgive?
“…whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Matthew 18:18
Forgiveness is about understanding we don’t forgive ‘others’. The very thought of ‘others’ keeps us in illusion. We only forgive our Self. We release the part of ourselves that we’ve been resisting and calling ‘not me’ and lift it up to the light of Truth. The world is in you, you are not in the world. You are all of this.
There are ways to arrive at this way of seeing. We may develop more empathy for ‘others’ by seeing them as the small child they once were. The parent who abused us becomes easier to have compassion for when we visualise them as a child. We may come to see the Reality of them if we imagine them as a baby. At the very least, this can help us see them as less intimidating.
We need to empty ourselves of our clutter, our stories, to see the Spirit that they — and we — are. To see them — and ourselves — through Love’s eyes. They are not their errors, their mistakes and illusions. They are a soul. Light. Life-force. Energy. Stripped of the story we wrote about them, we come to see their soul is as innocent as all souls. Other people are not what they seem to be. This is a grand masquerade ball.
And, once you see this, forget about ‘them’. This is about you, not ‘them’.
A lion kills a deer but remains in innocence. A small child kills an ant but is still innocent. When is innocence lost? When do we become culpable? A chimpanzee tribe commits genocide on another tribe, but we don’t think chimpanzees are evil. All animals, in our view, remain innocent no matter what they do. We sometimes extend this belief in natural innocence to ‘primitive’ tribal people. But we don’t extend this belief in original innocence to ourselves, or most adult others. When did we decide who should be condemned?
Love never changes, no matter what seemed to happen. The force of life remains the same through it all, no matter what seems to happen in the dream of form. God is the constant. Imagine something flying in front of the sun, blocking out the blaze for an instant. The sun didn’t stop shining, however much we believed it did. The shining of the sun is Reality. Our belief that it was darkened is the dream, the illusion. As we see Truth, we let go of the illusion that there is anything to forgive. It was only a passing dream.
Sin may be seen as anything that separates us from God, or from wholeness. This is why we don’t judge sin but, rather, see it as a mistake, something to look past and dissolve. When people separate themselves from God, from Love, they are to be pitied, not condemned.
As you release others, and the past, so do you release yourself. As you release the world, you heal the world. The world is in you, so it is yours to heal.
Practical steps to forgiveness
Ask for higher help. I call on the Holy Spirit, but you may choose another name. Release the unforgiveness upwards. Keep asking until you feel the shift in your energy, until you can think of the person or event without pain or emotional charge.
Realise it’s your dream.
See it as a story you wrote.
See it as a play you wrote, with everyone performing their part
Look at the scenes from outside, as though it were all happening on a movie screen and you are sitting in the audience.
Imagine people as they were as children or babies.
See people as Spirit. See yourself as Spirit. Know there is only Spirit.
‘Nothing’ people who have hurt you. Whether or not they remain in your life, you have the choice to stop giving them your energy in the form of thoughts and emotions. Clear your private spaces inside yourself of ‘them.’
Train yourself throughout the day to observe your thoughts. Every time you think something painful, say, ‘Love holds no grievances.’(ACIM). Or ‘Through my forgiveness, I set myself free.’ It may surprise you how many times a day you think something unforgiving. But, with vigilance, you will train yourself not to think those thoughts. You switch off the unforgiveness programs — unhealed thought streams — running through your mind.
Create all the distance from them you need. Sometimes, this involves cutting people off altogether. Sometimes, it’s just having time away from them and setting more boundaries.
Come to see it all led to now, this one perfect moment. Find gratitude. Like a tapestry of many dark and light threads, see all things work for the whole.
Practise Ho’oponopono (say, I’m sorry, Please forgive me, Thank you, I love you, everytime you think something that causes you pain.)
Create a special, safe outdoor place in your mind — a beach, a meadow, a desert- where you go to forgive. There’s a basket on the ground. You put your grievances inside it like rocks. The basket is connected to a powerful balloon which rises each time you place a rock. Eventually, the balloon rises high into the sky. It gets further and further away until it is gone altogether.
Write down all the ways you were ever wronged on a piece of paper — or several pieces of paper — and burn them until they are ash. Anytime you remember a grievance, think of the flames and ash.
Imagine yourself going into a forest and laying down on the dank, musty leaves. All your unforgiveness pours off you like melting wax from a candle. Your grievances sink into the ground to become part of the forest floor. Soon they will rot away into the layers of leaves and sediment. You walk away, cleansed, pure, and whole.
Breathe in Love, breathe out unforgiveness.
Bring all the unforgiveness into your heart and burn it in the furnace of your heart-flames.
Ask the Violet Flame to purify you.
Knock down the walls of unforgiveness in your mind with a sledge-hammer and let the light flow free.
Read and understand ‘The Empty Boat’ parable. This is a Taoist parable that appears in the Zhuangzi: A man is floating in his boat downriver. Suddenly, another boat runs into his own, but there’s nobody in the other boat. It’s an Empty Boat. Because the boat is empty, the man doesn’t get angry. He simply moves around the other boat. But when there is somebody in the other boat, the man is furious! He is in a rage, shouting and cursing and very upset. See those who have hurt you as empty boats.
Give up the word ‘should’. Accept all.
Conclusion — Going to the Source of all Love
Heaven is a state of self-sufficience. The Self provides all love and meets all needs. Souls aren’t wandering around in Heaven trying to get other Souls to love them. They don’t need other Souls in order to know Love. They know they are Love.
Somewhere along the line, we came to believe ‘other people’ were there to meet our needs, to supply us with love and approval. When they didn’t — when they abused, hurt or rejected us — we rejected that part of ourselves. We resisted the experience, but by doing so we resisted our knowledge of our own wholeness.
Right now, in this moment, pull your energy back from the ‘other person’ who failed to love you as you ‘should’ have been loved. Stop reaching out tendrils of energy in their direction.
Quit hoping others will change and love you and heal the sections of rot in your sponge cake. Don’t ask a character in a black and white movie to do something impossible. The characters aren’t real and they never were. Only Spirit is real.
One day, you’ll see the impossibility of suffering, or evil. Those things are a tiny blimp of nothing in the big All of everything. A rotten crumb in an infinite cake. And that crumb has already fallen away, dissolved, ceased to exist.
Pull back that external reaching and go to the Source of All Love instead. That source is in your own heart. Don’t look for love ‘out there’, horizontally, from ‘them’. The Source of Love is vertical. It’s within you. It is you. Close your eyes, breathe, slow down. Simply be.
Without unforgiveness clouding your mind, you begin to perceive the reality of Love. Maybe it’s only a whisper at first — like a single, faint, melodious note floating on the breeze. Love’s voice is quiet and easily drowned out.
But now, in the silence of your forgiven mind, you hear.
