Forgiveness will set you free

#9 - Easier said than done, yet it is absolutely necessary.

“As long as you make an identity out of your pain, you will never be free from it.”
- Eckhart Tolle

Ahhhhhh - The Human Experience is nothing but FUN and FLUFFY and CHEERFUL at all times, right? Well, I suppose the answer to that question depends on your perspective of your personal experience. But yes, that audacious question was meant in jest, because living in a body on a planet where every-body is bouncing back and forth between the polarities of “good” and “evil” is not something that is meant to be easy, but rather educational.

Perhaps the “good” and “bad” experiences we collect in life are meant to starkly contrast each other to give us direct experience of the feelings that come from both poles, so we can each make an educated choice about how we desire to live. 🤔

Every-body knows how it feels to get hurt, whether it be emotionally, physically, or any other myriad of ways that are possible. We hurt others whether our actions are intentional or not, and others hurt us too. But we also hurt ourselves from time to time, and that might be the toughest type of hurt to overcome.

But what if we all actually signed up to come to Earth to learn how to overcome, in order to live? What if the feeling of suffering is meant to be a roadblock that we choose to hurdle over, to then discover that “real life” begins only after we do that? Ye-haw, partner, the bronco’s buckin’ 🤠

You have probably heard the quote, “hurt people hurt people”, right? If we can imagine every hurtful action as a chain link, and every hurtful re-action as another link that extends the chain, then every single time hurt people hurt people, they help to build “the chain of hurt”. That chain is a heavy burden that coils itself around the neck of anyone linked to it, and you can trust that every living person, especially myself, knows from personal experience how heavy it can get.

If hurtful actions help to build the chain of hurt which binds our hearts to the feeling suffering, and this Earth is a place of equal and polar opposites on all fronts, then that naturally means that there is a “chain of love” as well. What does that chain look like and how does a person relinquish their tether to the former in order to build the latter? 

The answer is - Forgiveness.
*Doing my best Mandalorian voice* - “this is the way”.

When we grasp with a white-knuckled grip to the events of the past that hurt us, we actively wall off sections of our heart, creating inaccessible pockets full of pain and regret that fester as they wait. Grasping always creates the feeling of suffering over time, yet it is our choice to decide if we would like to suffer for a short time or a long time when we observe ourself doing it. Only as individuals can we then take the action necessary to release. 

It is a fact that we can only live in each “now moment” that arises, but our minds are capable of transporting us back into the past through our memory whenever we desire. When hurtful events happen to us, those events create strong and sticky memories that often outweigh the good memories we also store. When we focus our attention on the painful memories instead of the loving ones, our body physically responds to our thoughts. The stress-response that we evoke then further reinforces our thinking, which keeps us trapped within the pain we want to escape from.

In this “now moment” if we think of something that happened years ago that hurt us deeply, we can feel the physical stress-response happen. Our hearts begin to race, our eyes dart, our palms perspire, and monkey-brained thoughts start swinging around, seemingly on autopilot. Next, self-sabotaging stories begin to unravel within our mind about who’s fault it was, and we start confirming those stories by holding imaginary arguments where we “say our piece” to that other person in order to “set the record straight”. But often this all happens without the conscious realization that suddenly we are again feeling how it felt when that event first transpired. 

But if we can only ever live now, and we find ourselves again feeling the same way we did back when the bad thing happened, then that means we are consciously recreating the past over and over again. The experiences we want to put behind us are always happening to us while we recreate them within our minds, until we choose to let go of our grasp on them. 

If we are constantly feeling how it felt to live through those tough memories, the stress we cause ourselves can become so unbearable that we might then try to offload our pain onto others in order to lessen our own burden. This action almost always helps to add links to the chain of hurt. ⛓️

For any person who is able to observe themself with Emotional Intelligence, it is possible to break their link to the chain of hurt, with the act of Forgiveness.

The concept of Forgiving sounds simple in theory, but it takes some folks many lifetimes of work to figure out how to do it, because it requires us to willingly step into the pain again in order to then move through it.

But, if we are going to feel the pain anyway as we re-create the traumatic situation by hosting imaginary arguments with our “foes” in the shower each morning, why wouldn’t we at least try to release ourself from that cycle of suffering? We each have a responsibility to ourselves and to the others to break the chains of hurt that restrict us from living up to our kindest potential, or they will continue to bind us to suffering of our own design.

Our ability to forgive signals our surrender and acceptance of the fact that despite the harsh, ignorant, and antagonistic behavior of others, we are able to rise above ourselves and whatever action took place to stop adding links that further entangle more people into the chain of hurt.

We each possess the ability to heal our pain and to refuse to pass what happened to us to the next person. This choice to heal is a truly selfless act that will greatly improve the lives of countless others down the line who would have been strangled by the chain of hurt if we had not chosen to break our own link to it first. One of the greatest gifts a person can give is to willingly accept and transform the pain that others force upon them, choosing to be the end of that chain.

Once a person breaks off of the chain they were linked to, they immediately begin to build a new chain of loving action. By releasing their grasp of their old pain and moving beyond it, their sacrificial gesture alchemizes their old hurt and they instead pass a new love of their own creating on to the next person, who then passes it on again.

Why? Because healed people heal people 🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝🤝

By practicing the power of Forgiveness we open ourselves up to a whole new world full of miracles where anything is possible. We become limitless by choosing to absolve the pain that kept us shackled to feelings of suffering. To forgive someone who hurt us is to truly understand that the other person did so because they were hurting as well.

A genuine and unconditional empathy is the natural byproduct of this realization, but it takes an Emotionally Intelligent person to rise above the easy road to take the higher one where this realization happens.

Yet here we are at an incredible time in history, together. The time to rise.

When we forgive, even the folks we might feel do not deserve it, we consciously choose to help them lessen their burden by accepting their pain without absorbing it into our own identity. It is said that “actions speak louder than words”, right? Perhaps the action of forgiveness, rather than combative “eye-for-an-eye” behavior, is how we lead by example to create the peace we all wish to see in ourself.

When peace starts within, our natural instinct is to give it to all whom we interact with. When we do this, our action then echoes into every corner of the world through the newly formed chain of love, though we might not fully understand how far our love has travelled once we give it freely. We simply have to trust the process and know that as we remove the walls we once built in our hearts, the natural byproduct of our action extends to all whom our whole hearts touch.

We can not receive that which we truly want through a closed fist and an angry heart. When we tear down the walls that we once built to protect ourselves, we realize the great power that was hidden inside of us all along.

This week’s practice: We must look within ourself to observe where healing that can only be done through forgiveness is needed, and we must begin to loosen our grasp of the stories we keep telling ourself about the person/situation/conversation or whatever it was that hurt us in the past. Every time we observe ourselves re-living previous traumas, we recognize that we are consciously re-creating them, while accepting the work that must be done.

Do not forget to breathe rhythmically through the nose, and to stay hydrated. Your heart already works hard enough as it is :)

Send a message to me if you want specific help to move forward with this, but just know that you and only you can choose your own healing and you absolutely can guide yourself through it when you earnestly try.

Thank you for being here with me, and thank you for caring for yourself.

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If you are asking yourself, “Who the f&#@ is this guy and why am I sitting here reading what he has to say”, then start here at #1.