Forgiveness – A Key to Prosperingtimes

“1 Be Proactive, 2 Begin with the end in mind…” -Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of High Effective People

It sounds reasonable that at the beginning, one should conjure images of one’s desired result. If you agree that this is a reasonable step 1, allow me to propose a step 0, begin beginning by being Response-Able, i.e. being able to respond to any circumstance or stimulus while maintaining your integrity with your highest principles. This is often described as taking responsibility for you responses in the form of thoughts, words, actions and ultimately for the circumstances of your life.

This is particularly important when attempting to forgive another person or yourself. Let’s examine this idea in the context of Stephen Covey’s 1st Habit of highly successful people, “Be Proactive”. Engage your initiative, explore the stimulus-response cycle that prevails in your forgiveness issue. What is triggering old behavior patterns? Often someone will do something and you immediately get angry; when you feel the anger, what do you do next? Do you lash out verbally? Do you react violently? Do you stop to think before speaking or acting? Your ability to insert time between a stimulus and your response, mental, emotional and behavioral, indicates your capacity for being proactive, the ability to respond versus a conditioned reflex to automatically react. As you take on forgiving someone, separate the stimulus of their words or actions from the emotions you create as a result of your reaction to their actions. You can take responsibility for your feelings without condoning another’s actions. In so doing, you are acting on your right to respond in the most appropriate and empowering manner. This is an excellent place to begin your forgiveness process just by assuming that you have the ability to forgive. Affirm, “I am responsible, I can forgive”.

Today I start my day with Love. Through love I compassionately align myself with the power of Divine Law, the process by which God manifests. Charles Fillmore, the co-founder of Unity taught that the inner spirit of the law is the spiritual way of life that Jesus lived and taught. My intention for this day is to experience the spiritual essence of Jesus’ way of living. The inner stirring of Divine Law is the mental and emotional energy that gives voice to what we call conscience, our sense of right and wrong. I use the prompting of my conscience to help me align myself with the unstoppable and uplifting power of the law today. God’s wisdom, present within me, guides my use of love and forgiveness to assess myself and others. I now forgive all the sin or mistakes I find in my thoughts and feelings about myself and other people. God guides me in this forgiveness process allowing me to intuitively know that the law can not uplift me in the absence of love. Without love the law occurs as a stern, if not cruel teacher. However, through the power of Love drawn from God within me, I repent by acknowledging my errors and asking for forgiveness. And likewise I bestow the blessing of forgiveness upon those who would otherwise remain trespassers in my mind and in my heart.

Thank You God for this day, begun in love and sustained with prayer! Today I give up my harsh thoughts and judgments of myself and others. I am experiencing a miraculous day of healing, harmony and transformation. With a forgiving heart and mind, I am aware of God’s continuing presence and activity in my life and I experience myself as a blessing to everyone and in every circumstance within my field of influence today. Thank You God for lifting me up into Your spiritual realm of transcendent Love!

I am complete!
Selah!

“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. – Ephesians 1:2
… in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace,” – Ephesians 1:7

by Charles W Thomas, Jr.

Who Says I Must Forgive? There are compelling reasons to let go of the past. Sacred and psychological texts are filled with reasons to do so. However, the most convincing reason is your own instinctual realization that you will feel better when you do something about your negative feelings toward yourself or someone else.

Your First Step Is to Choose: The primary obstacle is unwillingness. How willing are you to free another person from the prison of your condemnation and harsh judgment? Are you able to see a connection between your discomfort or emotional turmoil and the ill-will you bear for someone else? Your willingness to free the other person will free you at the same time. Those who understand the verse in the Lord’s Prayer, Matthew 6:12 “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”, understand this point. Even if you can not imagine how you would do it are you willing to change? When you become willing, you then begin your journey to healing.

You Made Your Choice, What’s Next? If your spiritual path is that of a Christian, I recommend that you begin by reading Rev. Gary Inrig’s book, Forgiveness. He discusses the subject from a Christian perspective and demonstrates how seeking, practicing, and granting forgiveness, glorifies God and reveals His character. If you feel drawn to what some call universal spirituality, Colin Tipping’s book Radical Forgiveness offers spiritual exercises and processes which I have found very effective. Tipping states that one does not have to believe all of his book’s assumptions for the processes he shares to make a big difference in one’s life.

Practice, Practice, Practice: Assuming that you have made your choice to practice spiritual forgiveness, your next step is to follow through by reminding yourself of your willingness to practice every time you find yourself slipping into resentment or hostility. Connect with others who are committed to healing their past and releasing harsh judgments. Engage in conversations that encourage, harmony, reconciliation, peace and mercy. Study, pray and meditate on Love, peace and harmony. The more you do so, the more you will experience peace and love. When it is all said and done, most of the experts tend to agree that both the forgiver and the forgiven are profoundly blessed. Yet, the most compelling reason to begin this practice is that it brings more love into the world and helps to demonstrate the possibility that we humans can live and work together for our mutual benefit without destroying ourselves or the planet we share with all of God’s earthly creation.

Relationships – Teachers from the Past
You know, it’s perfectly normal to feel upset or sad after a breakup. You may even spend time licking emotional wounds. However, getting stuck in the memories of failed relationships is an unhealthy way to live your life. Ask yourself what is the positive lesson I learned from this relationship. What could I have done differently? In what way did I contribute to the breakup? After asking these or similar questions, wait for answers, write them down and focus on how you will approach future relationships armed with the wisdom of your answers.
If you felt deeply hurt during the breakup, spend some time writing out a list of the positive qualities of the other person. Can you see that those same positive qualities are within you? If not you would not be able to recognize them in someone else. Feel your feelings and look for the ways you either grew in the relationship or how you have grown since the end of the relationship. If you don’t feel that you have grown at all, imagine a future in which you recognize the positive lesson you learned from the relationship. Each romantic relationship, has something valuable you can take from it. Allow yourself to learn the lessons that the relationship teaches and then give yourself permission to move on.

Affirm, “I release memories that allowed belief in helplessness and hopelessness.” Jeanie Marshall – The Daily Affirm

By Mary Zemites

When we suffer the death of someone we love, we experience mental, emotional and physical distress. In this fragile state, it is likely that we will feel resentment, indignation or anger. Sometimes these feelings may be the result of a perceived offense or difference with someone we know. They might be directed at a person we hold responsible for the death or even, perhaps, with our deceased loved one.

During the final stages of my husband’s illness and after his death, I remember being surprised at the support and kindness of many people. Some, I hardly knew. I was also surprised by the absence of support and/or inappropriate remarks made by family and friends. One family member told me with great urgency that my children didn’t stand a chance. Her claim was that children of single parents are “always problems and in trouble.” Other comments, such as “It’s a blessing that his suffering is over” seemed flippant. Didn’t they know that any young father would gladly suffer in order to watch his children grow up! Everyone who suffers a loss experiences similar situations.

When we think of forgiving others, it may seem an impossible task in our distressed state of mind. We think, “I’m angry. I’m hurt. I’m offended. Why should I have to forgive? I’m the injured party!” It takes great effort and strength to forgive. We are tired and emotionally spent. It is easier to push grudges out of our consciousness or to nurture them into anger in order to focus our emotional energy. The problem with avoiding forgiveness is that it is detrimental to our healing

It has been my life experience that what goes around, comes around. I know I have made countless blunders in my life-conscious and unconscious-and I always have the expectation of being forgiven. So it is only right that I should forgive others. But that doesn’t make the task any easier.

It may be surprising to learn that we can benefit greatly from forgiving others. In fact, we benefit far more than those we forgive. Studies show that people who forgive are happier and healthier than those who hold resentments. This information is not new. The ancient Buddhist religion views forgiveness as a practice to prevent harmful thoughts from causing havoc on one’s mental well-being. Buddhism recognizes that feelings of ill-will leave a lasting effect on our mind “karma.” And Judeo-Christian philosophy places great importance on forgiveness as a path to redemption.

Forgiveness is a vital step in the healing we need to recover from the loss of someone we love. Lewis B. Smedes writes, “If you’ve been hurt, do you deserve to go on hurting? Or do you deserve to be healed?” So, the question of forgiveness is whether we and our future are worth it. I think we are. And this makes forgiving easier.

The bereavement support group I attended after my husband died was led by a woman whose daughter had been murdered. One night she talked about forgiving the murderer of her child. After a couple of years, she had been able to forgive him and even request that his death sentence be changed to a life sentence. At the time I couldn’t understand why she felt the need to forgive him, much less how she could manage to forgive him. In time, when I understood that forgiving others is a vital key to our own healing, it became clear that this was the reason she had forgiven her daughter’s murderer. She could never truly heal until she forgave this man.

As we begin the process of forgiveness, we should be conscious of these common misconceptions:

* Forgiveness will make us feel better right away. (In reality, making the decision to forgive will be only the beginning of a slow, but ultimately satisfying process.)
* Forgiveness will only make the other person feel better. (The forgiven person often doesn’t even feel the need to be forgiven or know they have hurt you.)
* In order to forgive, we must tell the other person. (As above, the forgiven person often doesn’t know or care to be forgiven.)
* To forgive means to forget. (We may never forget the actions that we have forgiven.)

A clergyman once spoke about the difficulty of forgiveness by citing a personal example. After being grievously wronged, he felt the urge to run his car over the perpetrator. As he worked to find forgiveness, he imagined lightly braking, then braking completely and even stopping and waving. As he reached true forgiveness, he could imagine stopping and even offering the person a ride.

While this example might be comical, it illustrates how we must work on the process of letting go of our anger. Forgiveness is a process. It does not happen instantaneously. It is a journey of the heart.

We must internalize these truths as we deal with forgiveness:

* Forgiveness involves the mind, emotion and will.
* Forgiveness requires a conscious conviction of need to forgive for our own benefit.
* Forgiveness attempts to understand the other person.
* We must desire to forgive.
* We must choose to forgive.

If we keep in mind that it is ourselves who will reap the greatest rewards of forgiveness, we can find the strength to take these steps. And these steps will move us forward on our journey of healing.

About the Author:

Mary Zemites, widowed in 1992, is a bereavement facilitator and the owner of InTimeOfSorrow.com. Mary invites you to visit her website for bereavement gifts and resources, http://InTimeOfSorrow.com/. To explore the Grief Resources section of the site for links to books and publications, counseling, and workshops beneficial to the grieving process, click: http://InTimeOfSorrow.com/.

(c) Copyright, Mary C. Zemites. All right reserved worldwide.

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The purpose of this blog is to explore forgiveness. I want to look at the forgiveness theories and practices that make a difference in one’s ability to forgive. I appreciate comments and the sharing of references and resources. Let’s explore forgiveness together.

Charles