Breathing and Trusting You Have Everything to Gain

"Forgiving isn't something you do for someone else; it's something you do for yourself.

It's saying 'you don't get to turn me into a victim. You are not important enough to me to be the object of my hate.' Once you do that, your enemy stays chained to his past history. But you, you're free."

~Jodi Picoult in The Storyteller

Wow! Those are such powerful words! The act of forgiving is a very difficult task to take on. But I've found it is so very important. If we just try to cover old resentments and hurts up and ignore them or try to forget them, they come back to us quadrupled in the form of stress oozing out of us, physically, mentally and emotionally. But it's quite a spiritual act, the trusting that forgiving is really good for you and nothing will happen to the person who wronged you either way, whether you continue to hold on to what they did with your teeth or packed up in your chest, not allowing your light to come out, or by letting it go. I feel that our creativity is also stunted if we don't make a conscious effort to forgive. When I'm most creative and open and loving, I've finally let go of the grip I had on things that weren't fair or hurt me deeply. That grip paralyzes our ability to brainstorm new ideas and solutions and create new realities for ourselves. We get stuck thinking about what happened if we keep holding on to it, or squirreling it away, as Jodi Piccoult wrote in The Storyteller.

It's almost like we hang on to these painful memories because if we don't, we think we're not giving our feelings enough importance. "What do you mean I have to let go of what so-and-so did to me?" We tell ourselves that it's not fair, but the irony is that what's not fair is really what we are doing to ourselves by holding tight to these indiscretions. 

But how, you might ask, do we let go of what someone did to us? I still struggle with this, even after reading article upon article about the topic. But what seems to work every time is breathing--and that's a very important piece to remember, it's not that once you say "ok, I forgive you," that it'll be all healed up in your heart and it won't bother you anymore. It's really something you have to work on regularly, at least at first. But if you're like me, and are prone to remembering how much so-and-so hurt you over and over again, it'll take time. It'll require creating a habit of breathing into the hurt or angry feelings and consciously letting the grip in your chest unwind, metaphorically unbinding that past pain from your core and releasing it into the ground or air or wherever you'd like to send it--as long as it's not inside you anymore--with your out breath. Isn't the image of breathing in fresh, calming, peaceful, loving air into your core and then breathing out all the negative, painful emotional gunk you've been keeping in there such a relieving, hope-filled thought? 

Practice. Practice. Practice. That's what it'll take. Trusting. Trusting. Trusting. Trusting that YOU will really be the one who has everything to gain from forgiving, and knowing that it no longer has ANYTHING to do with the other person. What a relief!