Some people carry their pain around with them as if they were badges to be proud of. “I’ve been hurt by so many people before and everybody I meet will start to hurt me again. Oh everybody is out to get me. It’s a dog-eat-dog world.” You’ve heard these expressions before and some people use specific pains as tools for protection and perhaps even to give them more power in some situations.
Again, what I urge people to do in learning how to forgive or forget, especially parents who have been unwittingly causing pain to their children or teachers who have said the wrong thing sometimes or even relatives or care-takers who have been looking after children especially the child in you from the past, we need to turn to them and forgive them. So apply the same principle, not good and bad but what was useful and what was not useful, what was the learning in that situation? What did you gain and what did you lose?
When you take a look at the gains and the losses, be very clear about what exactly it is you lost. Then you will start to realise that really, you lost nothing at all. If you had some other way to learn the lessons that you learnt, you would be a totally different person from what you are now. Specifically, going back and giving to the child that you remember was you would be an amazing thing in itself. It is possible to do this right now. In fact, if you take a few moments to sit down quietly and think about how much you wish there was someone who could help you, the child of many years ago will come in and protect you and look after you.
YOU are the person that can do that. Take a moment, relax, take a deep breath, think of the time when you as a 4 or 8 year old could use someone loving, someone like yourself, having only your best interests at heart, go back to that time and take a look at the child that is you. Bend down and give that child the biggest hug that you can ever imagine and let that child melt into you or you into that child and let that child know that you’re going to help the child with all the resources that you’ve got, with all of the knowledge that you’ve got. Your sub-conscious mind is an amazing thing. It does not distinguish between what is real and what is not, what is past and what is present or what is future. Everything is in a single continuum for it.
So when you do this exercise with you as a 4, 8, 16 or 20 year old, it makes no difference. Go back and say to that person, that is you, “I give you my love, I give you my joy, I give you my happiness, I give you my knowledge and wisdom” Asyou fuse yourself into this imaginary person which is you, you start to find an abilty to forgive and perhaps not to forget altogether. What is important is that you forgive the people who have hurt you in the past.
Forgiving , if you split it into 2 words is really ‘for giving’. Who are you giving to but yourself? By letting go of all the hurt, pain and perceived cruelty that other people have placed upon you, then you start to realise that you have been dragging around a lot of corpses and your emotional baggage has been dragged into relationships and it is time perhaps to start travelling light again on this road to happiness, on this road home.
But forgetting when split into 2 words, you get “for getting” What are you ‘getting’ in response to forgiving other people? Well, you are getting freedom. You are doing all this, you are forgiving for you to get more knowledge, more wisdom, more learning and you open yourself up to more experiences and to the joy and the richness and the abundance that has been yours to begin with. You see, you were born rich but somewhere along the way, you convinced yourself that you didn’t deserve all of this. You convinced yourself that you were not worthy.
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