I’ve always found it hard to forgive others. That has only gotten harder with decades of emotional suppression, one bad happening after another, and so many folks who’ve hurt me in a myriad of ways throughout my life. Recently, I’ve revisited an idea that seems more promising than most other attempts at forgiveness I’ve tried. Here’s what that entails.
One of my past blog posts contained this line: “Dismantling a big emotional wall by removing one brick at a time has always worked better for me than trying to tear the whole thing down in one fell swoop.” I can’t take credit for that idea as I first got exposed to it through Letting Go by David Hawkins. In addition to describing how a big event with lots of different emotions around it can be divided up into individual emotions that can then be surrendered individually, he goes so far as to say that, eventually, one can even surrender the idea of forgiveness itself as a certain level of consciousness makes it clear that nothing needs forgiving. That’s the entire idea behind my current approach to forgiveness
It’s almost impossible for me to forgive someone while there is still a lot of pain and strong emotions around what they did to me. Thus, rather than try to forgive someone directly, I’ve been working on getting to forgiveness indirectly by releasing all the emotions around that situation. The idea is that forgiveness would then happen naturally once there is no more pain, grudge, negativity, or expectations of someone who hurt me. That’s the idea, so how does it work in reality?
Due to a lot of unexpected days off of work over the last few months, I’ve had way more free time than I usually would. I’ve used a lot of that time to let go. Here’s how that typically goes. The first few sessions tend to be fairly light and help me ease into the practice, especially if it’s been a while since I’ve done it. After that, there’s less fear and more courage, making it easier to get back into my recent focus on releasing guilt, shame, and the like. The more negativity that gets released, the better I’m able to get in touch with and release anger, which is normally my most difficult emotion to surrender. Each release of any kind of negativity brings me more peace, courage, and lightheartedness, all of which makes me more willing to forgive.
Letting go of negativity makes the positivity take care of itself. Courage is easier when there’s less fear. Peace is easier when there’s less stress. Love is easier when there’s less hate. Forgiveness is easier when there’s less pain. All the recent letting go I’ve done of early life pain has gotten me closer to easy forgiveness than I’ve been in years. Getting here required working through lots of pain around my dog Sawyer’s death for several years before I could even think about working through much of any other kind of pain, let alone actually do it. Now that I’ve mostly healed from his death, I can focus on deeper, harder issues.
I haven’t yet reached the level where nothing needs to be forgiven, though I have come close a few times and can envision myself getting there someday. At this point, I still have made lots of progress with releasing past pain and inching closer toward easily forgiving others. Now that I have a solid plan in place, I’ll keep working toward forgiveness with each bit of anger, resentment, pain, hurt, and negativity I surrender.