Forgiving others is essential for spiritual growth. Your experience of someone who has hurt you, while painful, is now nothing more that a thought or feeling that you carry around. These thoughts of resentment, anger, and hatred represent slow, debilitating energies that will dis-empower you if you continue to let these thoughts occupy space in your head. If you could release them, you would know more peace.
Below I share how to forgive someone who has hurt you in 15 steps:
Step 1: Move On to the Next Act
Your past history and all of your hurts are no longer here in your physical reality. Don’t allow them to be here in your mind, muddying your present moments. Your life is like a play with several acts. Some of the characters who enter have short roles to play, others, much larger. Some are villains and others are good guys. But all of them are necessary, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the play. Continue Reading
I was having dinner with my friend Ram Dass not long ago and talking about forgiveness, a subject I’m studying for my new book. He leaned over and said to me, “Wayne, I’ve never believed that it’s up to us to forgive anyone. That is not our role.” Let this profound statement sink in and think about how it might apply to your own experience.
First, we have to face the notion that in order to consider forgiving someone we must have been blaming them for something. We must have anger, resentment, blame, even hatred going on in order to feel the need to forgive. Forgiveness is really an act of letting go, releasing the anger, the hatred, the bitterness, the thoughts of revenge that we have been carrying around. We can do this letting go without even encountering the person we want to forgive. It was one act of profound forgiveness toward my own father, whom I never saw or talked to, that turned my life around from one of ordinary awareness to one of higher consciousness, achievement, and success beyond anything I had ever dared to imagine.
We forgive by releasing all resentment, anger, and bitterness and thus set ourselves free from the negative feelings that weaken us. Continue Reading