Whom can you forgive today?

Stuck energy, as in the kinds of resentments that we hold on to long after the damage was done, keeps you from getting what you want.

Forgiveness does not mean allowing the same behavior to happen again, nor does it mean to trust that other has changed. What it does mean is to release your  anger and shame and guilt and desire for revenge. Forgiveness lets the energy flow away from that sore place and to heal, much in the same way that a scratch on your arm will heal a lot faster if you don’t pick at it.

In Yesterday, I Cried, Iyanla Vanzant tells the story of how she came to forgive  man who molested her when she was very young.  It was not an easy process, but she eventually came to see what happened through his eyes, through his intent, which was blurred by the fact that he was drinking. She did not excuse the drinking nor his actions, but pardoned his sin against her.  She forgave him for the hurt he had caused her some twenty years before, freeing her own energy to move past the event, and to be in the present as she made her choices for the future.

She even has a diet book, the Forgiveness Diet, based on the idea that we protect ourselves from hurt by being fat. If we can release the stuck energy of anger at the person, shame from the experience, guilt of being unable to stop it from happening and resentment of reliving the event over and over, then we can move on with our lives, and leave the fat behind as well.

Whom should you forgive first?

You.

None of us is happy about every choice we have made, and none of us thinks we are perfect. There is always some action or thought that we feel we must hide. But you can forgive yourself. One way is to tap the first joint of your index finger (an energy meridian) and say simply “I forgive myself.” As your thoughts stray to things you feel shame or guilt about, add that to the phrase: “I forgive myself for eating two slices of pie after lunch.”

Patricia Carrington, a practitioner of the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) has many protocols for tapping on several meridian points on your face and hands to work through the release of these stuck energies. Her process focuses first on the resistance and the event and then on the affirmation to release the energy.   Beginning with your feelings towards the person, you tap around the various meridian points to see what other thoughts and feelings come up. As you work through them, your energy shifts–sometimes in as few as five minutes, if you are willing to let it go.

Abraham says to write a list of positive aspects about the person, or about what surviving the experience make it possible for you to do. No person is completely bad, and if you can find some kind of gift in the experience, then you can heal it.  What you may have to give up is self-righteous indignation and ego-tripping poor-me stories. Alberto Villoldo tells of the stuck story of Victim, Perpetrator and Rescuer. If you play any one of those roles, you will be sucked into the others, perhaps perpetrating on others, making them victims as you try to rescue them. This is what is meant by “getting the board out of your own eye before you get the speck of dust out of your brother’s eye.”

Another way is to write it down, over and over. Jesus says that any person,  including you, deserves to be forgiven 70 x 7. One way to do that is to get a college-rule notebook, and each morning and evening for a week, write “I forgive you, Your Name.”  If you write two lines in the top margin and one on the margin below the last line, you can write 35 lines, which twice a day makes 70, and a week makes 70 x 7.  Then start on the next person on your list for the next week.

Writing takes a lot of focused brain power: seeing, thinking, saying the words to your self and hearing them,  even if not out loud, making them physical with the many movements of your fingers on the pen over the paper.  Writing the same thing over and over can even put you in a light trance, which makes the information of forgiveness part of your subconscious mind.

Make a list of people you can forgive, and maybe a list of those whom you can’t forgive.  Work the first list first, and then start on the second.

As you work on forgiveness, remember that you are forgiven. You are worthy.  You deserve whatever you want. Move yourself in the direction of what you want by leaving the past behind. Whom can you forgive today?