Believe in forgiveness

Learning and understanding forgiveness as a healing tool for life is incredibly difficult. To me, I often ponder why the art of letting go through forgiveness is indeed so challenging. Maybe like me, you hold onto negative thoughts about yourself or other people who you feel have harmed you or wronged you in some way. As always with my thinking, I look back on my school days and I find little training in educational terms to support me here. Unlike algebra, which is also incredibly hard in my view, it appears that learning forgiveness is too onerous to be learnt in the educational system and so most children grow up not understanding this skill at all. This is my question about forgiveness – why do we need to learn forgiveness in day-to-day life and how do we forgive?

Forgiveness as a noble art form goes back a long way. You only need to look at the Bible and the Christian teachings about forgiving. I am not religious, but I know enough about the message of Christ to know that being kind, helping others and forgiving your enemies is paramount to being Christian. For me, it is about being a good person. Learning to forgive may seem passive to some, an acceptance of wrongs done to them – forgetting rather than forgiving. But if we look at scientific studies, there is much evidence to prove that even just thinking about the idea of forgiving yourself or someone else can have a neurological effect on the brain. When something happens to upset us, the amygdala stores the memory, and the mind replays the sting again and again so our thoughts can spiral out of control, and it may feel like you can’t stop thinking about the incident. But by exercising the forgiveness muscle, we produce dopamine, the chemical associated with positive moods. This in turn can help reduce anxiety, depression, and even improve physical health. Essentially, we let go of all that doesn’t serve us well, and we can live more peacefully and happily. This research paints a persuasive argument for why we need to learn forgiveness.

But how do we forgive? I am no expert, so these thoughts are purely my own, as I have discovered them on my journey of life. By simply bringing more awareness to forgiveness – by thinking or imagining and knowing its importance as a positive tool for living, this could kick start your own journey. Awareness is consciousness and when we bring consciousness to anything, we can start shifting our habitual patterns. Through this awareness, we can discover there is choice in these situations. When someone has wronged us in some way, by knowing you have a choice to let your mind fester on what happened and replaying the situation again and again, remember, you can make a choice in those moments. For me, the first step is noticing what is happening. Then, I breathe and bring my attention to the present moment rather than living in my head. This is followed with an active choice to let go and sending positive, healing thoughts out to the person or problem to enable the process of letting go. Learning to let go is all part of forgiveness but it is not passiveness or acceptance. Addressing the problem in a calm, neutral manner or by asking someone simply to listen and not isolating yourself with the problem can help you assess how important the problem is. Is it worth all your time and energy? If not, let it go and move on in the present moment. If you have been greatly harmed, recognise how, spend time understanding how this has shaped you today, know yourself and know there is nothing you can do to change the past, but you can shape the future through this knowledge and understanding. Empathise with yourself and others – it is the choice between sending love out in the world or sending out hate. The more we send out love to the world, the more love we receive in the long term I believe.

Learning to forgive is a lifelong journey. But without forgiveness, we are in danger of storing negative and toxic thoughts and feelings in our minds and bodies, which ultimately can manifest physically or affect our happiness and mental health in the long term. We are naturally entitled as a species and can feel the whole world is against us at times. We think the world revolves around us, and our problems can weigh us down exponentially. Forgiveness, in my view, can lift us from our own negative self-absorption and take us to heights where compassion, peace and awareness rule. It is difficult to remain there but with practise, you can visit more and more.