How to Forgive

Forgiveness is a complicated thing...................................................................... 1
But is that a healthy way of being?....................................................................... 1
we each choose for ourselves.............................................................................. 2
Tools and beliefs that might help.......................................................................... 3
I like this model:.................................................................................................... 3
Think of this: If you had no expectations, what would you need to forgive?......... 3
Religion................................................................................................................. 4
The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz............................................................ 4
Two of the agreements are about our own behaviour:.......................................... 4
Two of the agreements are about our expectations of others:.............................. 4
Detachment........................................................................................................... 4
And then – the best thing of all. We forget............................................................ 5

Forgiveness is a complicated thing.

Is it possible to forgive? Is it even right to forgive? You may have heard many people or stories that espouse the virtues of holding a grudge, even over generations.

Many of our mainstream Western social ideas are not structured for forgiveness. Instead, our history has been built upon expectations of others, and, often, revenge, or “justice,” when others fail to meet our expectations.

So what we have is a society full of people who understand the mechanisms of justice, but not the mechanisms of forgiveness. We are taught to feel that we know what society owes us, and what we can “get from” the government and its organizations. People encourage us to take disputes to court, bother shopkeepers incessantly, or to get our “just desserts” in any way possible.

But is that a healthy way of being?

Is it good to base generations of lives on revenge against neighbours? (It’s never the distant people we hate, is it? Rarely, if ever. It’s the people next door.)

If you grew up surrounded by a family or community of people who believed in love above justice, you might have learned how to detach from people and situations that “did you wrong.”

North American television and news media, of course, have not emphasized this at all. News media, and kings and popes through history, have taught battle and hate. Keeping the grudge alive makes money, so societies have been built that way. Convincing the peons to hate and fear can motivate them to act in the rulers’ best interests.

Is it in your own best interests to hate, fear, dislike, and distrust those around you? You have been taught that, but can you unlearn it? Can you hear those messages in society, and develop a little, “no, I don’t actually believe that” filter?
The bottom line is that once we mature and move away from our parents’ influences,

we each choose for ourselves.

• You choose to blindly follow what your society taught you, or think past that.
• You choose whether you expose yourself to other cultures and their ideas. Buddhism and yoga philosophy are readily available on the internet to everyone now (if you want a good starter page, yogajournal.com offers a lot of great philosophical ideas without needing much new-age vocabulary).
• You choose whether you want health and peace, or to build the energy in your life on conflict. After all, many hundreds of generations of human beings in some cultures have “survived” on daily conflict and constant war.

However, these days we are well enough off to think of our individual health, and what people have learned is that conflict creates disease. From autoimmune diseases to cancer, it’s well known that daily meditation on conflict and hate does not a healthy human being make.
Forgiveness is healthier for you than justice.
Forgiveness is healthier than justice, for everyone.
Forgiveness feels good. Really good.
It frees you up and makes you lighter and happier.
You can choose to access forgiveness yourself, all within the little bubble of your own being. It is an expectation you can require of yourself, and work on in your spare time.
You can not always access justice yourself.
You often need others to help you “get” justice.
You need a law machine.
You need people who agree to punish the wrongdoer. In fact, you need people to agree in the first place that wrong has been done – and just the effort of convincing others of your own righteousness and the other’s wrong may eat your soul, even kill you.
Forgiveness is free. It is not always easy, but it’s worth the effort, and it gets easier with practice.

Tools and beliefs that might help

So what tools and beliefs might we learn from other cultures, or even from historical parts of our own culture, that might help us to deal more flexibly and healthily with conflict?

In my experience, our social training, especially as women, has been to “imagine how the other person feels.” Well, that’s good – to an extent. But it is not good when we put the other people who have hurt us ahead of our own good.

I like this model:

I’m a good person, and I’m strong and happy, and I have also made mistakes. So I understand that you made a mistake, and I am going to do what I can to make my life the best in can be whether you made a mistake or not.

Whether I actually forgive the person or not probably depends on whether they actually feel remorse for what they did, and how likely they are to re-offend, and of course, on how intimately entangled I want our relationship to be in the future. The closer the relationship, the more we tend to want others to conform to the actions we want them to do, and the more hurt we feel when we are betrayed.

But these days, I wonder, does it even matter if we forgive? After all, what is forgiveness but a judgment of another’s actions? It only matters if you feel you need to judge the other person to love them. What if you just radiate love anyway. What if you just love?

Do I need to judge their actions, beyond judging what my own response and actions need to be in the aftermath of the situation? Quite often I do not need to make a judgment. Are they remorseful? Who cares. Will they do it again? What are the consequences if they do? Obviously, if that person failing me has a serious consequence, I might not give them a chance to do it again.

And that’s that. It’s simple, and it does not take up any extra rental space in my head.

Think of this: If you had no expectations, what would you need to forgive?

If you come from a spiritual belief that others are free to act on their own path, and especially if you believe that you can choose to diverge your path from theirs when you choose to, then you need not hold any grudges. Anger has no place.

Anger comes from situations where we feel unable to walk away. Sometimes you can forgive, but it would be, in survival terms, unwise to forget. Sometimes you need to remember what happened last time and be prepared for it.

And unfortunately, due to our society’s “justice” system, and ideas about “things and people you have to put up with,” you may inadvertently and unjustly end up in situations where you may have to deal with people doing bad things that they have no remorse for, over, and over, and over.

So you might as well give up judging whether you’re going to forgive them or not. Just live your own life. Stop thinking about what their point of view is. Stop trying to be the bigger person. Stop trying to contort your thinking to somehow make their evil actions more benign. Just mitigate the damage as best you can and create the best living situation available within your abilities.

Religion

True deep faith in a higher power can help many people to forgive. The essence of faith is the idea that someone else is in charge. Believing that humans are not in control of everything, and that you can hand decisions and fate over to a higher power, is very comforting.

The notion that we are completely in control of everything that happens to us is stressful and painful for many, causing people to add onto their armour to cope.

Believing that a higher power is in charge, or that your Fate or Destiny is being written without your control, can allow some people to open up and accept what happens to them with more grace.

The Four Agreements by don Miguel Ruiz

If you haven’t heard of this book yet, look it up. It has been a great help to many people seeking greater inner peace.

Two of the agreements are about our own behaviour:

Basically, clean up your act! They are both worded as “do” statements.

• Be true to your word, and keep your words clean, positive, powerful. Do not speak against others. Do not speak against yourself.
• Do your best. Do what you can do, every day. Help others, do what you can for yourself. Do not give into laziness.

Two of the agreements are about our expectations of others:

Interestingly, they both warn us against what not to do.

• Do not take things personally. Other people act the way they do because of their own dramas, not because of anything about you.
• Do not make assumptions. Learn to communicate well, and do that. Ask questions to clarify. On the flip side, take care to make sure that you are understood well by others – don’t assume that they will understand you easily.

Detachment

We can’t always forgive. We can’t always see something from another’s point of view and decide that they “did their best” in the situation. Sometimes, they did not.

But we can decide that we do not want to be sick about it. We can decide to take back the lease on the space in our heads. Our thoughts and our emotions are too valuable to squander on garbage people or situations who have not earned them.

So when we realize what’s happening, those same unhappy, unhealthy thoughts whirling around in our heads, we can choose to detach from the situation and buy our own power back by deciding to be loyal to ourselves first.

And then – the best thing of all. We forget.

We fill ourselves up with good new people and great new situations. We go forth in the world and do exactly what we want, and we get so happy that when we encounter that so-and-so again, and maybe they even apologize to us, we say, “what? Oh, I forgot about that ages ago.”