What does forgiveness mean to you? To ‘forgive and forget’ is often said but rarely actioned, as it can be interpreted as ‘What you did to me is ok’, when that’s the last thing on Earth that will ever be ok. So you hold onto the memories, the anger, the resentment and the fear, and everytime you think of that person or event, your jaw tightens, your shoulders get closer to your ears and your stomach starts hiking up the acid production.
It’s not a nice place to be, and holding onto those emotions can lead to illness on a physical level. Louise Hay states that the liver is the ‘Seat of anger and primitive emotions’ and that the probable cause of indigestion is ‘Gut-level fear, dread, anxiety’. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to let go of all those negative emotions and feel free from the people and events that have caused you pain?
So how about a change of definition of forgiveness... Doreen Virtue, in her Healing with the Angels Oracle Cards, explains forgiveness as ‘I am no longer willing to carry around pain in response to your actions’, and Oprah Winfrey’s favourite explanation is ‘Giving up the hope that the past could be any different’.
Hold those words in your head, roll them around in your mind. Can you feel them anywhere in your body? It made me take a deep breath the first time I heard Oprah give her definition. I was watching one of her lifeclass webcasts on facebook (highly recommended) and had to keep re-running that part just so the words could sink in and I could feel the release in my body.
It might be that you have no-one to forgive but yourself, and sometimes that can be the hardest. Again, you can’t change the past, and you won’t be doing it again, so don’t beat yourself up about it. Doreen Virtue goes on to say ‘When we hold unforgiveness in our hearts, we only punish ourselves’. So stop it. Take a deep breath and forgive yourself. Aaaah, there you go, feels better doesn’t it?!
