Forgiveness is the key to transform your life

Forgiveness. It's a process. As humans we can really struggle with letting go and forgiving. A simple view of it is that I need to just forgive someone once and boom that's it. But it's a process to even get to that starting point.

Forgiveness is not something that just happens. Most of us do not wake up one day having found a place of forgiveness. For most of us we must work through our emotions, that we have often hung on to for a long time. These emotions can present as being annoyed, upset, disappointed, angry, resentful. You can imagine them as big red balls, gripping onto you. If you look at yourself you might see big red balls and be able to name them - “I’ve got a bit of anger here, jealousy there, upset and hurt here”.

We often think that forgiveness is outside of us, we must forgive the actions of another person. You know the story; I must forgive my parents because they did x y and z and because of x y and z I’m now like this.

But that’s not really what we think forgiveness is all about. We think the most important person you must forgive is yourself. But arriving at this realisation, is all part of the process. As you start working through and winding back, you’ll confront your thinking that “(s)he should have done this or they did this to you, and they didn't do that”. You’re holding on to all these things that bring your energy down and keep you stuck in the experience of what was lacking in the moment you were hurt.

Many of us hold onto the red balls for too long, all these balls are representations of our interpretation of the experience or represent a decision we made about ourselves because of the experience. All these stories we hold onto about what has happened in our past become a tangled ball of string. As you begin to try to work through the process of forgiveness, you must be gentle, because pulling on one piece of string will cause the whole lot of tangled balls of string to get tighter.

If you are still hanging on to some things from your childhood these could be quite deeply buried. The practice is to begin to see your parents as they were; they were products of their parents and doing the best they could. But you might pull that string and find it is pulling on something else that you haven’t forgiven yet. So, as you begin, you’ll wonder what's going to come up next? It's like peeling back the layers of an onion – yes onions are known to bring a tear to the eye – and as one layer drops another will appear.

The process is generally recognising your feelings around any situation you haven’t forgiven, finding empathy and compassion for the people involved and at some point, in your life you realise it's my turn to take responsibility and really make some choices about who and how I want to be. You must ask yourself “is it worth me still being bitter or hurt or broken because of something that happened many, many, many years ago or is it time now for me to let that go and just forgive?”

As you begin to forgive, you'll notice there will be quite a lot of forgiving going on because you must forgive yourself for holding on to all that stuff, and then you have to forgive everyone else the people who did it, the people who supported it, the people who supported you in your victimhood and your identity at the time. Because a lot of people will support you to hold your identity rather than encourage you to work and move through it.

The events that happen to us, make us who we are. Some of us go through some significant trauma and it's going have impacted you in a significant way. There's still a point of making peace with that trauma and not having it be the center of your identity. For significant trauma we recommend seeking professional help. Please find the appropriate person or organization to help you to work through this stuff.

Because we can be covered in those sticky red balls, a whole lot of stuff may have to come out before we are ready to move on to forgiving.

Yoga can help you to learn how to stay present with what might come up for you. It teaches you to breath well, be in your body and be here right now. We know that yoga is one way to build a connection to yourself. Because you're building the physical container, within the container you're building the ability to control our mind, through breathing techniques, eating differently, purifying the mind and the body to build the container. To hold a bigger life force. To hold a space of letting go.

When we say Yoga builds the container, what we mean is we are pulling you out of collapse. Quite often when you are unforgiving of a matter you've collapsed and your body's weak and/or it’s too taught and tense. Remember there is fight or flight and there's freeze and flop as well. It's a trauma response.

So, for us a huge part of the forgiveness process is starting by building your physical container, starting by deepening your breath, starting by being willing to see the situation differently. Even being willing to ask yourself 'what my piece is in what happened here?' We must train ourselves to see that everything that happens to us is just a life experience and what happens is we interpret the experience and write over the top of it. We say, “I was a bad person I got angry, OR they were a bad person they got angry”.

The human brain likes to protect the identity that it knows. It likes to keep us where we are; inside of our comfort zone. So, we must realise that part of the forgiveness process is being willing to be the person who no longer has that ‘sin’ as something to anchor into. We must be willing to move away from and finally let go of the person who committed the ‘sin’, even if we haven’t had anything to do with them for years. If we haven’t forgiven, we are holding onto them.

Unforgiveness holds us in the past and keeps us attached to someone who's not even in our lives anymore. Most of the time we haven't let them go energetically when we're still holding on to the unforgiveness. And we're holding ourselves back from moving into a completely new life experience. Just ask yourself, what would your life be like if you were no longer trapped in the anger and bitterness of that experience?

Most of us carry around this identity which is created from the scripts of us determining who we are because of all the things that have happened to us. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, based on what has happened and what others have said form our identity. Even if it is painful and causes bitterness and resentment, we do a lot to hold onto our identity.

We can rip up the script and recreate our identity. But it takes willingness to move yourself through this process. From a yogic perspective you can write a new script every day. As every day and even every breath we start anew. But you must be willing to let go of the moment that occurred before the exhale.

The interesting thing about forgiveness, is that it is normally the people you care most about whom you must forgive. Just consider someone you never knew ringing you up to tell you that they thought you were a bad person because you did something, and you were never going to hear from them again. You would probably think, weird but okay I won’t ever think about you/that again. But if someone you were invested in, called you up to tell you, you were a bad person because you did something and they were never going to talk to you again, you would probably have some feelings about that and need to forgive the situation.

From this perspective the people you are holding onto most are the people that you cared the most about, or you had some emotional attachment to. You can still care for them, you don't have to accept, or you just must accept what they've said/done, you don't have to attach any emotion to that. Obviously, there's a process to work through in a therapeutic situation, to recognise that sometimes the events are only significant and impactful in your identity formation because you were so attached to them. If it really mattered to you back then, it still matters to you now and in the future, until you have forgiven it. That’s the hardest part sometimes it's people you love the most or loved the most, who you really struggled to let go of. The paradox of the forgiveness process is that in not forgiving, you're not letting them go because maybe there is a part of you that is not ready to let them go.

The easiest place to begin when you are starting the process of forgiveness is gratitude. At the end of each day write down five good things that you're grateful for.  When you wake up spend a few moments setting an intention for the day and anchoring into a positive feeling, this can set the tone for your whole day. You have the option to leave everything that upset you from the day before behind, focus on the things you are grateful for. Your mind can take you down any road you like, you get to decide.

From gratitude you can move your practice to forgiveness. You can begin to unravel that ball of string and to let it go. Just remember it takes a while to unravel because if you've spent 40 years writing the story of you, that’s 40 years of 365 days of identify forming that you are going to have to unravel and rewrite.

Just remember forgiveness is a practice. You're not going to wake up in the morning and be over everything that has hurt you in your life. You might have to work hard at forgiveness, you might have to journal, meditate, see a therapist or two so you can peel back those layers of the onion. As you work through the process just remind yourself of all the benefits you will be bringing to your life when you have let the hurt go.

 To listen to our YouTube Thankful Thursday episode on Forgiveness click here - https://youtu.be/u0Ux4jZX3Q8