By William Cooper
These comments are derived from a Truthseekers activity. To forgive is to give up anger and resentment regarding an offense. Forgiveness is more certain to benefit the forgiver than the forgiven. Consequently, it is worth some effort to forgive. Forgiveness is dealt with in more detail in Bill’s Book of Values pp. 30-34.
There are a number of things you can do to be intentional about forgiving.
- Go to your heart. Going to your heart means seeking calm and access to your inner wisdom. A way to seek inner calmness is to breathe a little slower and a little deeper and feel agitation and tenseness dissolve. The place you have prepared for yourself in your heart is a place of refuge and peacefulness that you can retreat to whenever you need to. No one else even needs to know you are there. It is also a place where you have instant access to your values. In your heart, you can tap into strength, courage, tolerance, forgiveness, peacemaking, patience, respect or any other value you recognize. All you have to do is ask and trust that the next step for the revelation of what you need will be revealed to you. In that way your heart is a place for the beginnings of miraculous transformations.
- Gently restrain your wilder emotions. You are unlikely to be your best person when you are under the power of anger, dread, fear, guilt, etc. In your heart, you have available resources to quiet these screeming emotions. They have their purposes but our lives should be under the control of our higher values, not our basic survival emotions. Going to your heart is a great intervention tool to avoid confrontation and to prevent it from escallating into violence.
- While soaking in the calm and wisdom of your heart you can consider the event you need to forgive. In this circumstance, many offenses don’t seem big or important and they can be dismissed as just stuff that happens as imperfect people interact with one another. Everybody is a jerk sometimes and that just has to be tolerated with minimal consequences. When you have reached that point, you have forgiven the offense.
- If the short cut to forgiveness doesn’t resolve your feelings of hurt or anger, you need to respect your feelings and explore their causes. I said respect your feelings, not trust them or be controlled by them.
- Seeing with new eyes involves going to your heart and considering with charity and good will what alternative and justifiable assumptions might have caused the offense. When you access the situation more charitably, it is easier to let go of anger and hurt.
- You may need first to act to right an injustice to yourself or another.
- You may need to act to control the damage or end the threat.
- You may need to talk through the offense with the offender.
- Whatever action you decide to take, be sure to stay connected to your heart and treat the other person with respect and caring. Whenever memory of the offense arises, remind yourself of your decision or desire to forgive.