Maybe you’ve heard the adage, “Forgiveness is a gift you give yourself.” We may value and appreciate the transformative power of forgiveness, but no one really tells us HOW to do it.
When it comes to trauma, betrayal, unwanted events and the violence that has happened to us in the past, forgiveness and letting going are not easy.
In fact, they may seem impossible.
But I’m about to share with you HOW to forgive and how knowing the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation can change your life.
Take a moment to reflect on how you define forgiveness.
Consider this energy medicine perspective:
Forgiveness is the conscious act of reclaiming our energy,
and restoring personal empowerment in the creative force of our life.
You might notice that holding on to those old hurts takes some—or a lot—of your mental and emotional energy. The repetitious thinking-feeling patterns (they are called vicious cycles in energy healing) can represent a huge energy drain on your mindbody system.
If you’re exhausted, overwhelmed and just plain old sick and tired of the past holding too much of your attention and too much power over you, now is a good time to ask: “Does my body feel good about holding on to all of this? Could there be a better way to think, feel, believe, behave and be in the world?”
What are some of those patterns, energies, thoughts, and feelings you would like to heal, liberate, and let go of as we shift into another cycle around the sun?
Forgiveness is about your relationship to yourself
Consider that forgiveness is about no one but you. It’s an act that takes place in the sanctuary of your own inner being.
From an energy medicine and emotional self-regulation perspective, forgiveness is about liberating yourself from all the energy drains those old thoughts and emotions present in your NOW life. Forgiveness is about recalling your energy to you, acknowledging that, yes! You justly hurt, that whatever happened was wrong, it was unfair, it was tragic, it was deceptive, it violated your trust.
I don’t know about you, but with some issues in my life, I’ve spent decades off-and-on obsessing about offenses, wrongdoings, injustices, and betrayals. With various personal traumas over my life–not to mention all the institutional, cultural, and political happenings that I have found intolerable–I spent years locked into thinking-feeling patterns that have kept me in a state of anger, resentment, frustration…even rage.
Worst of all, and most draining, they kept me in a state of vigilance and survival, waiting for the other emotional shoe to drop.
My beliefs framed my perceptions and set me up to maintain inner conscious and unconscious fight-or-flight states, and that’s draining!
Claiming your inner peace
At some point I realized that forgiveness was about me and whether I wanted inner peace.
Forgiveness had to do with me loving myself, despite what happened. It was about me grieving the loss of what I thought my life was going to be. It was about hopes and dreams that crashed and burned. It was about feeling trapped.
Ultimately, forgiveness was about acknowledging deep disappointments, rejection, isolation, abandonment, vulnerability, and feelings of having no worth and no place to be safe.
Forgiveness had nothing necessarily to do with communicating my pain to others or ever enjoying a sense of reconciliation or mutual understanding with the people, institutions, culture or politics that had harmed me.
Forgiveness had to do with me acknowledging fully to myself the extent of harm. It had to do with me reconciling all that happened within myself, in my personal consciousness.
With that realization, I understood and assumed some empowerment over the past. It allowed me to see that I had authority to choose my relationship to the past, to self-regulation of my emotions, which is equal to freedom from the past.
It’s equal to an ability to direct my creative energy to create the future I want, rather one that’s steeped in the energy of old pain.
This didn’t happen overnight for me. It took me years of learning, reflection, expanded awareness and engagement with challenging emotions.
But freedom and wholeness within oneself is spiritual gold worth the work.
And life is always changing–difficult situations and confounding relationships are always possible. So, consider that doing the work develops a shift in perspective, a sort of fitness, and creates within us a greater capacity for resilience—that ability to better navigate, regulate, renew and restore ourselves by choice and will, no matter what life deals us.
Shifting out of survival consciousness into creative mode
We inherited a survival-based consciousness—a model of reality that values “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” Many of us naturally long for justice to be served when unfair or what we view as morally objectionable actions take place. But that kind of thinking will never grant us real INNER freedom and healing.
There are too many things outside of our control to ensure justice will prevail with every person, place, and time.
All we really can control is how we regulate ourselves in this moment,
which is the same as saying all we really can control
is how we perceive, respond, and co-create our present reality.
Besides, survival-based consciousness inherently sets us up to maintain a state of vigilance, expecting another blow to be dealt, another offense or transgression to occur.
It places us in a defensive posture in our life, rather than a creative one.
Survival consciousness—which abounds in the culture around us–places us in a state of bondage to the past. It keeps us spiritually, mentally, emotionally and, therefore, physically connected to those people, places, conditions, environments and acts that created the harm in our life.
And this bondage in a very real, energetic way, keeps a part of us bound IN the past. In fact, you might notice with trauma, that there’s an aspect of your reality that time just stopped, or you mark time as “before” or “after” the event. That’s because our identity and our personal reality was so significantly impacted by the harm, that for us, it changed our relationship to time.
It’s like there’s a little loop in the timeline of our life, and we keep going back to that past, looping around in our vicious thinking-feeling cycles, reliving the events. Rehashing what we should have said or done. Rehearsing what could have been or should have happened.
And all the time we are doing that, our body is creating neurological pathways that match those emotional states of the past, and the body is producing the biochemistry equal to those emotions, and we are feeling the past is right now, still happening in this present moment.
Furthermore, we hold our NOW self and what we NOW know accountable to that PAST version of our self who didn’t yet have the insight and wisdom that time allows.
That’s not fair to NOW you. You deserve to benefit from your wisdom—those memories you hold free from the emotional charge of the past. You learned. You now know better what you want and prefer.
To forgive is to recall that part of you that was hurt “back then” into the present moment. Into your present reality. And that’s an act of self-love only you can perform.
If we want to be free we are invited to embrace a creative and intuitive-based consciousness—a model of reality that values self-love and inner state of harmony and wholeness no matter what happens to us.
Freedom from bondage requires awareness and self-love
Just as no one will truly know how much you have suffered from the wrongs that have happened to you, know one other than you will truly know and enjoy the liberation and freedom of you recalling your energy back to you.
Here’s the thing: if you want that delicious feeling of freedom in your body, it’s going to take some work. And by work, I mean a shift in your attention and awareness.
To change our relationship to the past, we must interrupt those old patterns and replace them with new thoughts and feelings.
We have to recognize the stimulus-response patterns that happen in our brain and—through heightened awareness of and attention to them–create a choice point to change.
Forgiveness is unlearning the past
I invite you to take a moment to consider the people, places, events, dynamics or things that cause you to feel an undesirable emotion in your body. Ask yourself if you’d rather be free from that or continue to live with that feeling. Try to name the emotion and consider why the feeling is present. (To help with this look online for an emotion wheel or emotions chart.)
Remind yourself that forgiveness is about you acknowledging what’s happened, reconciling it WITHIN YOURSELF, choosing love for yourself, and it’s not about justice and reconciliation.
What would be more loving to you? What emotions would you prefer to feel? Name those, take a moment to practice heart-focused breathing and rehearse and activate those emotional states right now in THIS moment.
Rehearsing the thoughts and emotions we prefer creates neurological pathways in our brain and body equal to those thoughts. The nervous system interacts with the endocrine system, which produces biochemistry equal to those emotional states. Through thought and mental rehearsal alone, the body shifts from the biochemistry of survival and vigilance (adrenaline, cortisol) to renewal and growth (DHEA, oxytocin, serotonin, dopamine.)
How empowering is that?
It’s about creating more of what we want
This month, The Healing Garden’s Healing Circle on December 27th (flyer below) is all about Forgiveness and Letting Go. Join us to learn how to engage the process of forgiveness and intentionally heal any unfavorable bonds with the past. We are creating community around this work and invite you to join us. Check out www.TheHealingGardenMaine.org to join our mailing list and stay in touch with upcoming events.
