FORGIVENESS: the biggest misconceptions, the greatest advantages…
FORGIVENESS…
is not an intellectual exercise, to be merely ‘understood’ as a concept. It is a whole body experience you have, an authentic moment of realization, shift, redemption, grace, letting go, that frees and releases you from your pain, anger, fear or hate.
Feeling negative emotions continually, or habitually around a subject or another person, harms you, the person holding them. Forgiving reduces or removes the patterns that have kept you in bondage — a slave to craving revenge, nursing wounds, numbing out.
Big Myth-conception: Forgiving does not mean ‘excusing’ a behavior or an event, or pretending bad behavior –cruelty, abuse — didn’t happen. Forgiving does not claim that kind of innocence. But it does derive from discovering the ‘innocent’ roots of violence, how it is created, born, perpetuated through family socialization, and societal enculturation, from one generation to the next.
Forgiveness is not an action you withhold as a punishment to a perceived or actual perpetrator. Neither is it proper bait to extract an apology, or otherwise attempt to control or manipulate or shame a ‘bad actor.’ Thinking this is righteous behavior, to sit in stark moral judgement, to deny any validity to the notion of “There but for the Grace of God go I…” is to assure your own bondage in negativity.
Forgiveness is not a thing that can be manipulated to make ourselves feel better. That is, we hear that forgiving feels good, so we decide to just do it, and bypass any personal inner work: it won’t arise through manipulation. However, we do feel better in forgiving, because the experience of letting go sets us ourselves free to move on, to feel alive anew. Forgiveness comes in the wake of a surrender: perhaps to unknowns, and yet, what is instinctively known is that the future, what’s next will be more life-giving.
Acts of forgiving, deeply, heart-fully felt and offered, set the giver and receiver both free, frees the energetic connection between them. ‘Bad actors’ are often so deeply moved, that their paths take a clean, life-giving fork, all by themselves. No manipulation from the ‘forgiver’ is needed.
Forgiving is a win-win-win: the more liberated, kind, compassionate, caring and nurturing humans there are among us, the better off the whole world will be. You may have a surrendered moment of Grace around an entire family, population, nation. Intuitive readers of energy feel the shift as it happens, and it continues to evolve.
You cannot simply ‘will’ yourself into forgiveness! But you can Intend it, and then open to being transformed, one day at a time, trusting your Life will show you how, bring you exactly what you need to free yourself.
What left? To wish you many blessings on this path: it is an honor and joy to be on it with you. MS
