Taking Steps Toward Forgiveness

So, starting to put all of this together, how can we actually take steps to find forgiveness for someone or something that has wronged us?

Let’s break it down:

The moment we find ourselves in a situation that is posing a challenge, that is causing hurt, the first step is to actually embrace the full story. Not an enlightened version, an actual full-on victim mentality version of that story. 

Own it. Dig into it. 

All the crappy feelings, all the hurt, all the ugly thoughts, just let them flow. You can share it with someone professional, you can share it with a friend that you trust, or you can write it out and only share it with yourself, but fully express it as a victim if that's what you're feeling. 

And secondly, you need to fully feel the feelings. This could be part of the first step, but it's important to really drive the point home that this is not just an intellectual exercise in describing the circumstances and how you're a victim intellectually.

 No, you want to truly feel the anger, the upset, the resentment, all of the pain of it. 

From there we can get a bit more nuanced, and we start to take that story and see if we can separate it out. 

And what are we separating out? What are we trying to tease out? Well, there's this idea of the forgiveness centrifuge: like a centrifuge spins liquid to separate out its ingredients, we're going to do the same with the actual story of what happened. 

Stories usually contain two collapsed, merged ingredients to them. The first is the actual facts of what happened, and the second is, of course, the interpretation of what happened. 

For most people, those two will live as one. But they are actually two distinct things. 

And until the muscle of awareness is developed to tease out what happened from the interpretation, then we'll remain in the victim mindset. But once we can tease it out, then we can look at the interpretation and understand what thoughts and beliefs have led to that interpretation. 

From there, we can reframe the story. Once you can do that, forgiveness is a simple act away. Because most of what you think you can't forgive, dissolves away. 

It’s been manufactured by your own belief system and it may not be present at all. 

Really going through and getting to that point about a certain situation, about a certain person, is pretty intense. 

Which is why we want to complete this whole process with some integration and really let it absorb somatically, embodying this newfound discovery and realization. 

Because where do emotions live? In the body, not the brain. So you want to use modalities like breath and music, like we do in our work here at MindTravel. And in this way, forgiveness can take that hate and anger – that we were so sure we were justified in feeling – and transmute it into compassion. 

To really heal, we must first forgive. And to forgive we must feel. 

This is the calculus of healing and forgiveness, and it can be very confronting for most people! But it’s necessary to move through these difficult situations. 

There's no shame in feeling hurt. It's just about how efficiently we process these feelings, moving through them and not denying them. 

The quality of our future and our interactions and our relationships will hinge on this ability, this muscle of forgiveness. And it is a muscle; you get better at it the more you do it, no question.