Broadcast Soul: On Forgiveness

NOTE: This is a repost of a February 2009 post.

Forgiveness is a big thing both in discussing as well as in practice. Someone asked me what I thought so I figured I'd post some of my opinion here.

First, I think that too many people connect forgiveness with excusing and I want to separate the two. I feel like forgiving someone for something they did which negatively affected you does not excuse the action they may have committed upon you. I also think that too many people connect forgiveness with allowing the person who hurt you to remain in a position in your life where they could hurt you again. I think that to let a person remain in a position to hurt you again is you sending a message to yourself and the other people around you of what you feel your true worth is with regards to how much respect you think you deserve.

Why forgive? Here is a perfect link the folks at Radical Forgiveness have provided for us all to learn from & of course they say it much better than I do. Scientifically lack of forgiveness has been linked to many many health issues. The biggest one that comes to mind is Cancer. Some other things lack of forgiveness does to the body are that it raises blood pressure, depletes immune function, makes you more easily depressed and causes enormous stress to the body. It also causes people to hold weight.

I believe that we first must forgive ourselves for having expectations that were unrealistic or that weren't based on the truth about the person we expected these things from. Secondly, we must forgive ourselves for not seeing the truth of the situation that caused us to allow ourselves to be put in such a position in the first place. In general I think that the reason we get mad or hurt or upset with people and have need to forgive them in the first place is because we had an expectation of them that they did not live up to. This expectation was obviously wrong or we wouldn't be disappointed and in a place of having to forgive them. This is the reason I believe we must forgive ourselves. I REALLY feel like it is the foremost thing that we must put on the list in order for us to move forward through the pain of being hurt by someone else.

Additionally, I think it is important to remember that forgiving a person who commited some negative act upon you does not mean you must keep them around. The beauty of forgiveness is that the person does not have to be present for you to forgive them. I believe it has to be done (forgiving) but that does not mean that person should be permitted to have free access to doing the same thing again. Think about it, if a dog bites you and you look at the dog in your heart and understand that he only did what was in his nature to do (or that he didn't have good training) that does not mean you go in the fence with the dog again right? If you do you will be bitten once more. So to me it is a matter of understanding the other person and their nature and moving on, either by keeping them in your life or not depending on WHAT IS TRULY BEST FOR YOU.

Also, letting your ego go out of the process of forgiveness is important. Where does ego come into the subject of forgiveness? Besides admitting you had a part in your own disappointment, there is also the ego you have attached to the other person. You have an expectation of how the other person should be and they have not lived up to it, so now your first urge is to school them on how they have done you wrong and then put another expectation on them by expecting them to change to match what you expected from them in the first place. This may or may not be possible for them and I think ego has something to do with you expecting them to be different than who they really are to some extent. Of course you may feel you have to make it clear to the person how what they did made you feel and that you don't want them to do it again, but after explaining this to them I believe you cannot put expectations on them. The place to put the expectations are with yourself in my opinion. If this person commits the same sort of infraction once again it is your decision to stay or to go, to put up with it or not, you can leave if you don't like something and the other person will have to deal with the consequences of their actions on their own without you. You cannot control someone other than yourself so all you can do is STICK TO WHAT IS BEST FOR YOURSELF even when it makes you bend over with pain to do it. Sometimes I believe that painful release is much better than going through years of slow growing pain of never being treated with the respect you deserve.

When it is all over remember that neither of you is better than the other no matter how everything happened or ended. You are not less than they are just because they AND you allowed this to happen and you are not better than they are because you don't treat people the same way they obviously do. We each have our gifts to give the world and it is not our job to judge the gifts of others no matter how easy it is to go straight to that place. One great example of that fact is our last President. George Bush did a lot of negative things and managed to screw up a lot of our lives and guess what..... I'm thankful for that because if he hadn't done all that we would not have seen the light and begun to move toward change for the better. Now we have a President who speaks the same language as Spirit when he says "we are all one" and this could not have happened without the failures of George Bush and others like him to shine light on what we did not have. The natural urge is to want to kick George Bush in the nuts when you see him but I say fight that urge and just leave the room instead because he was the bottom we had to hit in order to realize we needed to climb out of the pit we have dug for ourselves.

Individual relationships can be the same way. The people you feel may have wronged you have drug you through the mire so that you could recognize who YOU really are and not fall into this position of being abused again. In the end I feel it is important to remember that we are all one in this together working for the good of the whole just like the cells of the body work together to keep the body running healthily we must do the same. This is the big reason we have to forgive ourselves. We are all a part of the bigger picture and need to stay focused on the importance and specialness of who we are as individuals in order to make up that whole. In 1 Corinthians 12 of the Christian Bible Paul speaks on this concept making it clear that no one person is more important than another. It is not for us to attach our egos to what we do for the greater good or we will lose site of our goal. Consider the cells of the body - the heart cells obviously get more resources than most others while others work quite hard at keeping things together at great sacrifice to themselves such as skin cells for example. Do the skin cells judge the heart cells? No, because if they did they wouldn't have time to do their job. As Paul says in his sermon in 1 Cor. 12:16-20 "And if the ear should say, "Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body," it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body." The same goes for us as humans in the world we must forgive ourselves and accept who we are as individuals as well as accepting others in their positions within the whole in order to move into this new age of being the change we want to see in the world. Remember you can't have world peace without inner peace.