Forgiveness
Hello my dear readers! Holidays are coming, I hope you are excited and ready to enjoy this wonderful season. Have you been thinking about a gift that you should give to yourself this year? I have an idea for you! I think that the best gift we can give you ourselves before New Year is forgiveness.
Here is the link to my video for today's article: Forgiveness.
There is a beautiful quote by Lewis B. Smedes, "To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you". When we cannot forgive, we become slaves of our negative emotions, which do not really serve us.
Forgiveness doesn't mean to support wrong behavior, it means that you release the feeling of resentment within yourself. So you are doing it for yourself, first of all. You don't have to reconcile, you don't have to prove anything. You just release something that doesn't do anything good for you.
I think that there are three types of forgiveness:
Forgiving other people
Forgiving yourself
Forgiving life
I want to share couple of ideas which helped me to forgive. I must say that I am very fortunate and I forgive other people very easily. I don't have to train my brain, don't have to put efforts. But it was hard for me to forgive myself for my mistakes and at some point I also couldn't forgive life for some events that happened to me. But I found a way to be able to change my thinking and I hope that my methods will help you too.
If you want to forgive another person or yourself, you can just remember one simple truth, "It is hard to be a human". That's it. It always helps me. We all have different genes, different environments and experiences. All these things affect our brain. And based on way your brain is formed, you make your decisions and take actions. And if someone just doesn't know how to be kind or understanding, if someone hurt other people when he is in pain, it's just because of the way their brain is operating. Yes, we can work on ourselves and improve our decision making machine, but not everyone has the right tools, not everyone has access to them and for some people because of genes or certain diseases it is harder than for others.
I personally hurt multiple people in my life. I didn't have intention to upset someone, I just wasn't smart enough, didn't know how to be more understanding and compassionate. And because of this lack of knowledge and experience, I acted not in the right way. It can happen to anybody to some extend. Some people are just more fortunate than others and they find the tools to be more mindful and exercise their brains, they know better how to be skillful communicators. But it doesn't mean that people who still don't know how to be more mindful cannot be forgiven.
If you want to forgive life, you can practice gratitude. This way you can train your brain to notice good things that happen to you and be more focused on positive side of life. There is always something to be grateful for. I recommend you to do daily gratitude exercise. You just need in the end of the day think of something good that happened to you in the past 24 hours. This way you train your brain to pay attention to life's kindness and generosity. And it will help you to be happier and more forgiving. This was one of the most useful brain exercises that I have done in my life and it had tremendous positive effect on my life.
In the end I want to share very important thought. Usually we cannot forgive because we are afraid that unpleasant event will happen again. You can have a fear that person who hurt you will do it again, you might think that you can repeat your own mistake which caused suffering, you are afraid that life will bring you new difficulties. And behind all these fears there is one thought - "I will not be able to handle this". And forgiveness is a wonderful opportunity to prove to yourself, that you actually can handle any challenges. So don't lose this opportunity, embrace it, use it. When someone or something hurts you, show yourself that you are still okay, that you are not scared, that you forgive and move on. And the more often you do this, the stronger you become!
I want to share the links to the documentary about forgiveness that I really liked:
This is the link to my gratitude video:
Thanks a lot for reading my article. I hope it was useful. Please take care of yourself.
Be Strong And Love Yourself!
From Dasha with Love!
Love Wins!
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