We all long for happiness.
The question is not, “What do we have to do in order to be happy?” The question is, “Who do we have to be in order to be happy?” How do we have to think?
Forgiveness is an essential key to happiness. Sometimes the challenge is to forgive others, and sometimes the challenge is to forgive ourselves. But suffering remains until we forgive.
Often we consider someone guilty, and then try to forgive them as an act of superiority. Obviously this is not really forgiveness as much as judgment posing as something else. True forgiveness is releasing our focus on someone’s guilt and instead embracing their inherent innocence and goodness. This mental shift in perception is so powerful.
We forgive not as a way to deny what has been done to us, but as a way to transform our experience of what was done to us. It allows us to move beyond our attachment to the thought of someone’s guilt.
Forgiveness is a selective remembering of what someone did right, at a time when the mind is screaming about what someone did wrong. We always have a choice about where to focus. Your mind has an ulterior motive: in seeking to attack someone else, it is secretly seeking to attack you. Whatever I think about you, I am thinking about myself. In forgiving you, I am forgiving myself.
Few things are more emotionally painful than unwarranted distance between ourselves and others. We create the distance through judgment and attack.
Every moment can be a new beginning. The future is programmed in the present. If we enter the present carrying thoughts of the past, we program the future to be just like the past. It can be a vicious circle. Forgiveness is what happens when we choose to see someone not as they were before this moment, but as who they are right now. When we free our focus away from what happened in the past, we free a relationship to begin again. I give you a break, increasing the probability that you’ll give me one too.
Forgiveness is not an act of sacrifice, but an act of self-interest. That I forgive you doesn’t make me a doormat nor does it mean that I can’t leave unhealthy situations. When you lift yourself out of the emotional turmoil created by hurtful events, your ability to wisely navigate is improved.
Being able to nonreactively and simply leave a situation is far more powerful than stomping my feet and screaming, “No one is going to treat me this way.” The last option makes it inevitable that someone will treat you that way. Who we have not forgiven remains in our head.
Forgiveness is a process, and it doesn’t mean the person we forgive will necessarily be our friend afterwards. It means merely that there’s a way for us to find peace, regardless of someone else’s behavior.
Tremendous weight is lifted from our shoulders when we forgive and let it go.
Forgiveness doesn’t mean to pour a sugar coating over something terrible and pretend it didn’t happen. We can recognize that something bad happened but still see the uselessness of rage, and the self-indulgence of out of control anger.
Do you prefer to be right or to be happy? We forgive the past in order to be free of it.
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