Most of my adult life I believed that by forgiving someone, I was condoning the action or behavior I found offensive or hurtful. After all, I had repeatedly been told that to “forgive and forget” was a virtue.
Let’s unpack this and see if it makes sense.
One definition for the word forgive is-stop feeling angry or resentful toward (someone) for an offense, flaw or mistake.
One definition for the word forget is-fail to remember.
Let’s start by examining the idea of forgetting something. Everything we see, hear, touch, smell, taste, creates a signal of sorts in our conscious mind. It then becomes a memory which is then stored in our subconscious mind. It usually takes a trigger of some sort for that memory to appear in our conscious mind.
If someone does something to offend or upset us, we have an initial thought which results in a negative emotional reaction which ultimately gets permanently stored in our subconscious. The idea of forgetting is, in my opinion, a misnomer.
That means that at some point in the future a trigger will bring the “memory” of the offense to the fore. And this may happen multiple times over the course of our lifetime. If we continue to let the memory dictate our emotion, we will relive the circumstances of it repeatedly.
It’s almost like we are keeping the offender in jail, and we are the jailer. We are giving energy or power to the negative thoughts.
How do we stop being the jailer? FORGIVENESS! It is important to recognize that forgiveness does not mean that we condone the offense. It means that we choose to turn a negative experience into a positive one. We choose to rid ourselves of the negativity associated with the memory of the offense and replace it with love, compassion, empathy and tolerance.
Once we do that, our vibrational frequency increases and we can move forward on our journey to a life we would love living.
The next time you are slighted or offended or hurt, remember that by choosing to forgive, you free yourself from the burden of being a jailer, of holding onto the negative energy surrounding the offense. In doing so, you are giving YOURSELF the gift of forgiveness.
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