There is so much pain around forgiveness and the exact reason why it is so difficult and, in many cases, feels impossible to do.  We may not realize how much of our energy is being vested in the past actions of others and that energy is no longer available to us.  Our soul seeks freedom; not forgiving others imprisons not only the other’s but our own soul.

The action that brought you pain can be small or unfathomable, when we repeat it in our own minds over and over again, even the smallest act can become a really big deal.  We believe that if we could understand how someone can do such a thing, our pain will go away. This is exactly where we get stuck as no explanation or justification soothes our pain; we hold on to the pain and bow to never forgive them.

Our experience of pain and others action are two separate things; although most will argue that their pain is a direct result of another’s doing.  This way of thinking will keep us stuck in the perpetual cycle of pain and this is exactly where we need a course correction.

Let’s explore the following 5 shifts that can help us to not only forgive with ease but to heal us from the pain we believe they have caused us.

1. Focus on Your Experience

What do you feel?  Name the emotion; is it betrayal, abandonment or exclusion?  Are you feeling victimized, insulted, attacked, violated?  You get the point.  All of these emotions are felt by your physical body; you may feel it in your chest, arms, head, belly, knees or perhaps all over your body.  Where do you feel it?  You may feel the urge to call someone, shout or anything that will move this painful energy in the body.  You may feel bouts of intense anger and feel the need to put them in their place.  This is where I suggest you take a pause to get a deeper understanding of your experience.

Take the time to feel what you feel; feel the anger, the resentment or whatever it may be for you. I feel the need to walk, write, meditate or talk to myself which allows the deep emotions to surface; crying helps me release the pain and anger, throwing punches in the air, making up cuss words or breaking old dishes also works for my clients. Feel the pain without distracting yourself or talking yourself out of it.  Trust what you feel, your energy never lies. Many times, I am not sure what I feel, mostly feeling out of sorts; I continue to do what I need to do with this confusion and questioning going on in the background. Be gentle and patient with yourself.

When you feel deeply, you are healing.  Healing is going to help you de-intensify your feelings and now you can think clearly. You will feel this shift in your body and will be able to relax.

This whole process can take days or longer and it is exhausting.  Take some time for self-care so your nervous system can re-calibrate. It’s at this point you may decide to talk to the other person without the emotional charge.  The best time to talk to them is when you no longer have the urgency to do so.

To shift the focus on your experiences rather than their actions is pivotal to forgiveness and will set you on the path to healing.

In my second book, Wake Up and Heal: 6 Steps to Emotional Freedom, I detail a very effective technique that has worked for my clients and can work for you as well.  It’s this technique that I teach inside my membership program.

2. Take Responsibility for Your Experiences

This is a bitter pill to swallow; according to Ayurveda, a little bitter taste is medicine to heal you.

Just like you are not responsible for anyone’s actions, no one is responsible for your reaction. Each one of us will react somewhat differently to the same situation because of our own unique past experiences, beliefs and unhealed traumas. How quickly one can rise above the hurtful actions of others is dependent upon the deeper healing work one has done. The unhealed trauma is what’s triggering our reaction; how long we stay in that mode is directly proportional to how much trauma have we endured and not healed.

Ask yourself if you have had this experience before?  When and where?  There is never just one standalone experience as there is a pattern to these energies.  Energies continue to circulate subjecting us to the same old experiences.  Taking radical responsibility for your energy pattern will free these energies so you no longer become a target for others to hurt you.  This is a lifetime work as we continue to accumulate experiences without taking the time to process them, but with this deeper understanding, we are likely to navigate through these challenges with greater ease in shorter amounts of time and we have less and less that we need to forgive.

We have all heard that “no one can hurt you without your permission”; it’s not just a cliché’ – what it means is that our reaction is our alone and holds the clues as to what is within us that needs healing. Ultimately, it’s about taking radical energetic responsibility for everything we experience. If we experience something, we have in some way, shape or form have invited it to us.  The point is to become aware of it.  We go backwards to understand and use that learning to live forward.

The energy of everything you experience has been inside of you way before, the action of others that has hurt you has simply pulled that energy to the surface.  It’s our choice to do the deeper work to heal it.

3. Take the Time to Process

As I mentioned in the first point, to feel what you feel can take days or longer. This is an organic process, not to be rushed. The time we take to process many layers of pain is crucial in forgiving others. The process is everything. Although painful and difficult, this time taken will save you the time later to keep reliving these experiences. Most of us can’t forgive that quickly unless we have a technique that we can use and become better at it over time. The process I teach is the 6A process that I have mentioned above in my book, Wake Up and Heal: 6 Steps to Emotional Freedom and the same process is the foundations of my teachings inside my membership program.

This process gives us the needed time to help our nervous system recalibrate so it can hold the higher consciousness that now we are at.

As long as the pain is there, forgiveness does not happen. The process is necessary for us to feel our pain, anger, contempt, resentment for as long as we need to.  It's only when we process these intense painful emotions, that we are able to think clearly about how we have contributed to what we experienced.

Trust what you feel.  Allow yourself to feel what you feel.  Feel what you feel deeply.  Take the time you need. This will speed up the process.  It's only when you have healed the pain within you that eases the process of forgiving another. Don’t underestimate the process, it is everything.

To go through the process is no picnic. It’s no wonder that we sometimes tend to forgive too quickly as we just can’t be bothered to move through the pain of it.  Forgiving too quickly also comes from a place of fear and wanting to be in the good books of another; in other words, we fall into the trap of people pleasing and disregard our experiences and needs prioritizing the needs of others hoping that they won’t withhold their love from us.   Seeking safety from outside of ourselves keeps us disconnected from ourselves open to victimization again.

People pleasing is not forgiveness – staying true to what you experience can stop you from falling into this trap.

Forgiving intellectually is also not a complete process; you can feel the difference in your body when you are hurting as opposed to when you have truly forgiven.  We can’t think our way out of feeling what we feel.

4. Forgiving Others isn’t Your Job; Healing Yourself Is

The above 3 steps for forgiveness will set you on the path of healing and connecting to your heart. You begin to experience the warmth and the fullness of your own heart that leads you to soften your reactions to what others did.  You are no longer separate from love; you trust that each experience however painful is meant to bring you closer to the love that you are.  You may even become grateful for the painful experience and those who caused it.  With the heart full of love, you simply wish the same for others and see others with the eyes of your heart and pray that they may feel the same peace that you feel.  You leave them to their actions and their soul journey and wish them the best.  You let go of understanding their actions or behaviors and simply focus on being the best version of who you are.  In this way, it is not about forgiving others, it is about healing yourself.

You realize that what you do is between you and your Higher Self and what others do is also between them and their Higher Self.  Forgiving others isn’t your job.  Your job is to heal yourself and when you feel healed, you simply lose interest in judging others. No one knows the internal battles of others; hurt people hurt people and we are neither the judge nor jury of others.   It’s our pain that makes us blame the other, the task is to heal our own pain, not to judge what someone did.  Forgiving others is a task only the Higher Power can undertake.  Let go and let God.

Law of karma states that to every action there is a reaction and this law applies to everyone. While not forgiving others may give you the temporary relief and a sense of control over your circumstances, in the long run the only person it hurts is you.  Notice how your pain can lead to hurt others just like you got hurt from someone else’s pain; you can stop that cycle by healing yourself instead.

5. Forgive Yourself

The above four steps of forgiveness will lead you to this final shift – of forgiving yourself.  In the end, it's all about Self-Forgiveness.  How so? Let me explain.

The Ho'oponopono Meditation, “I am sorry, please forgive me, I love you, thank you” can help us understand this. Naturally, those who we believe have hurt us come to mind and it becomes confusing as to why are we seeking forgiveness from those who have hurt us.  Why do we say “Please forgive me” instead of “I forgive you”?

How is it that we ask for forgiveness from the ones who we believe should seek our forgiveness?

When we examine our thoughts, our opinions of “those” people, we may come to realize how we have contributed to “them” hurting us via our own thoughts about them. What did we really feel or think about them?

When we ask ourselves this, our true feelings about “them” will surface as they have always been there, and we may even have acted them out towards them. We rarely examine the subtleties of our own behavior and it’s exactly what draws the hurtful experiences from others to us.

None of us wants to admit this and are so quick to blame others totally absolving ourselves from it.  Others only provide a mirror to us making us see what we refuse to see otherwise in ourselves.  Most of us can’t see our own reflection in other’s behavior and naively thinking it is all the other person’s fault.    It’s up to us to examine what we see.

At the level of the soul of every being, there is pure innocence, wholeness and Love. Any thought, speech or action that undermines that innocence and wholeness is an assault against our own soul.  We don’t cause pain to others without causing pain to ourselves at the soul level. In our defense, we quickly move to reason, explanation and blame ignoring the deep guilt that we experience for having gone against our own soul. When we ask for forgiveness, we are asking for forgiveness from our own soul to having thought, said or done to bring pain to others and then in turn to ourselves.

When we release the guilt, we experience Love. Love is the ultimate shift and the path to forgiveness.

If you are struggling with forgiveness and would finally like to heal and move on with your precious life, I invite you to schedule a Healing Breakthrough Session with me.  In this session, we will dive deep into your biggest challenge and how to overcome it.