Forgiveness… it is espoused by very nearly any program for personal growth or healing, whether scientific, religious, or new age.  The reason behind the effectiveness of forgiveness is not mystical, however.  The reason that forgiveness is so essential is simple:  True forgiveness involves releasing your hold on grudges that are constantly draining your mental energy.`

When you hold on to grudges, you are devoting mental energy to maintaining them and the emotions that you associate with them.  Since we’re talking about grudges here, this also means that emotions you are devoting your energy to holding on to are negative .  Think about it… you are intentionally causing yourself to feel bad feelings.  That doesn’t make sense, but if you allow your subconscious mind control, things don’t have to make sense.

1. Understand What Forgiveness Is

   True forgiveness begins with acknowledging and accepting responsibility for any emotions that you attach to an act.  “They” didn’t make you angry.  “They” did something, and you became angry.  The difference between the two is critical.  The first one assigns blame for the feeling, and responsibility to change that feeling, to the person who committed the act.  The second one brings it back to where it belongs: you.

   Forgiveness always comes from within, never from outside.  That is because outsiders have no control over the emotions, the feelings, inside of you.  The best they can do is inspire you to decide to change yourself.

2. Understand What Forgiveness Is Not

   Forgiveness is not justifying or forgetting.  It is not pretending like nothing happened, or letting actions go without consequence merely for the sake of “forgiveness”.

   Many people confuse forgiving an act with justifying the act.  When you justify an act, you search for reasons to show that the act was never bad, right from the beginning.  But that doesn’t fool your subconscious… it knows what you really feel, what you really believe, and so it will continue to hold negative emotions, though your consciousness may disguise them as feeling guilty either for having provoked the action, or for not having truly “forgiven” it.  Your consciousness is not fooled by false justification… and if you REALLY believe the act was completely, 100% justified, then you’ll have no forgiveness to grant.

   Forgetting and pretending nothing happened are actually the same thing… because you’re highly unlikely to ever truly forget.  Once you feel like an act has harmed you, your subconscious stores it away in patterns having to do with getting hurt, so that it can recognize similar situations in the future and act to avoid that hurt.  Thus, both of these things are false fronts, and do not contribute in positive ways to either you or the person who you want to forgive.

   Letting actions go without consequence is VERY commonly mistaken for forgiveness.  In reality, it’s one of the worst choices you can make.  If actions have no consequences attached, then the person committing those actions doesn’t learn anything from them.  If someone does something that hurts you, and there are NO bad consequences, they will do so again in the future in the same situation.  Now keep in mind, knowing that they hurt you may be a bad consequence for some people, but even then, that still requires that you let them know that they hurt you.  That means that without consequences for the action, not only did you get hurt, but the person who did it won’t even learn that they did something wrong.

3. Understand Why Forgiveness Is Important

   Negative emotions have a natural tendency to become entangled.  That means that when you attach negative emotions to an act, those emotions become entangled with any OTHER negative emotions you have tied to another act.  They become one interconnected mass, the total size of which grows with each new act to which you attach negative emotions.  The fact that they are entangled also means that as you add more to this mass, already existing emotions become harder to release, and new ones are more likely to stick.

   This entangled mass is what causes situations where one annoying but inconsequential act snowballs into massive amounts of negative emotions.  Basically, it catches onto the existing entanglement of negatives and rips the whole thing into your conscious awareness, but WITHOUT THE REASONS BEHIND THE WHOLE THING.  That is, all of your negative emotions that you have piled up get focused on this one, inconsequential thing, and so you completely overreact, out of all proportion to the “cause”.  Often, you won’t know, even later, WHY you did that… so you’ll come up with some sort of reason that half fits.

   All that energy that you are dumping into holding onto this entanglement of negatives is energy that could be spent to improve your current life, work for the future, deepen relationships, or any number of other things.  Because of inertia, though, you continue to spend that energy on anger, frustration, pain, and other bad things from past events.  If you were to consciously choose which thing to spend your energy on, what would you choose:  positive things in the present and future, or negative things from the past?

4. Take Action

   Letting the negative emotions attached to an act go is an intentional action.  You choose to stop devoting the energy to continue feeling the hurt.  You choose to untangle the negative emotions from the act you are forgiving from whatever other emotions onto which you are holding.  You acknowledge that the act hurt you, but that it is in the past, and that you’re only slowing yourself down by holding onto those emotions.

   Once you have let the emotions associated with an act go, you can make practical choices about how to respond to the action.  You can decide, in fact, if it’s worthy of a response other than to note it in passing.  Some acts may not be.  Others may require you to respond drastically.  With your sight cleared of all the negative filters from anger, pain, or whatever else, you can actually make these choices consciously and in an educated manner.  You will no longer feel the desire to simply strike out, to make someone else pay for your hurt.   That means that you can choose appropriate consequences, and actually let go of the attention you were giving to the act (this includes subconscious attention, which is actually the most dangerous kind, since it’s difficult to recognize as even being present, let alone the cause of stress and bad feelings).

Forgiveness can be a cascading event.  Forgiving one action removes some of the negative emotions from the entangled mass present in most of us.  As anyone who has untied a nasty knot can tell you, each thread you remove makes the rest easier to detangle.  You also learn the process, and become adjusted to it, making it even easier to do.  You may find that with a few conscious efforts at forgiving specific acts, it starts to become natural… though you will still find instances that require your conscious attention from time to time.

True forgiveness requires conscious acknowledgement of an event that hurt you and the negative emotions that you attach to it.  It requires that you acknowledge these feelings, and then let them go.  It requires you to take responsibility for the feelings that you associate with the act, because as long as you blame someone else for making you feel that way, you won’t be ABLE to let them go (how can you let feelings someone else controls go?).

But most importantly, true forgiveness opens up a huge amount of your life and energy that were closed off by those negative emotions.  It makes it FAR easier to be happy and at peace.  Those things you aren’t fogiving are anchors holding you back from the happiness, the joy, the life that you could be experiencing.

Get rid of your anchors.  Forgive someone today!