Forgiveness

“Refusing to forgive someone is like continually drinking poison, hoping the other person will die.” Anon.

If I had to pick one practice that can effect the most spiritual, physical and emotional healing, it would have to be forgiveness. Yet the idea of forgiveness is frequently met with major resistance. Rather than allowing a painful memory to fade, people often feel compelled to tell and re-tell the story, either to themselves or others, as a way of reinforcing that wrong was done to them.

What they fail to realize is that this verbal or mental re-creation of the incident has significant dangerous consequences. Neurobiology shows us that reliving the memory of a frightening event can trigger the same hormonal and chemical reactions in the body as experiencing it in reality would. Now that science has been able to prove the connection between emotional stress and disease, deliberately putting ourselves through the emotions of that event can be seen as very self-destructive. Ironically, in the attempt to underline our identity as victim, we become yet another perpetrator against ourselves.

One of the reasons that people are unwilling to let go of their terrible experiences, is because they feel that “forgiving and forgetting” is somehow letting the perpetrator off the hook. Yet, if you think about it, by not forgiving we just keep feeding the energetic connection between us. Do you want to be so intimately and permanently bonded to this person? Can you look at forgiving them as being not so much about releasing them, as cutting yourself free?

Sometimes it helps to simply re-frame it as a choice. The one thing that no-one else can do to us is to control how we react to what happens to us. Try to see forgiving as the act of taking back your power and choosing not to allow this person to fill you with literally toxic, negative emotions.  Sometimes, in the words of George Herbert,  ‘Living well is the best revenge’.