Life Coach in Your Pocket

  The 5 myths holding you back from forgiveness

Forgiveness Myth 1: The other person gets a free pass

Forgiveness is about releasing the energy or emotion that ties you to a situation and makes you think about and experience strong emotions around it.

On the karmic level, forgiveness releases you: the other party still has to forgive themselves so that they do not have to live out the karmic retribution for the action or incident.

So yes, maybe you won’t see the karma play out this lifetime, but if you’ve forgiven the situation, it won’t really matter to you anymore either. What you’re doing is releasing yourself.

Forgiveness Myth 2: What they did is okay

For many people, they have the idea that forgiving the other party makes what they did okay. It doesn’t. The forgiveness is only about releasing the energetic charge that resides in you.

When you carry an energetic charge around something, you often judge that aspect, fear it, hold it in awe or carry a fear that something won’t happen for you; these are energetic charges, one of the mirrors of relationship.

While you carry that energetic charge, you will keep attracting the same kinds of people and situations into your life, until that charge has been released. Forgiveness is a way to get yourself out of that nonstop pattern you seem to be stuck in.

Forgiveness Myth 3: You have to let the person back into your life

Forgiveness is a sign of strength, not weakness: it takes a lot of courage and internal strength to offer your forgiveness to another soul – especially when you are caught up in the responses of the world and your physical experience.

Every time you forgive your capacity for love will grow, as will your conscious awareness and internal resolve.

Some things that people have done in this world are almost unforgivable, and releasing yourself from the energetic pain of the trauma they caused does not mean you have to let them back in to do those things again. In fact, you can now choose to rather fill the space with new experiences and new love.

Essentially what happens when you release a big issue with forgiveness is that you aren’t aware of how much energy and space it was taking up inside you. So when that energy is released you feel a little lost and bereft sometimes. This also happens because forgiveness breaks negative bonds that exist between people, and you can feel the removal of the cord that was connecting you to that person.

If you do forgive someone and you find yourself wanting to be in touch with them afterwards, or find that they contact you, understand it’s just a normal part of the process. You don’t have to take the call, and if you wait a day or two, you’ll find the urge passes. If it’s still there however, you might want to have a conversation with the person, as there may be an even greater miracle at play than a one-sided forgiveness.

If the idea of talking with them alone scares you, then call in a coach or practitioner to facilitate, mediate and hold your hand. Just because you have to face something scary, it doesn’t mean that you have to do it alone.

Forgiveness Myth 4: You’ll want the person around

As you further your forgiveness practice what you’ll find is that forgiveness doesn’t only release the attachment to the issue – it often releases the attachment to the person as well.

Actually, it’s pretty sad if you think about it: what you’re going to discover is how many of your relationships are only held together by issues and mirrors.

Fear and excitement are emotions that lie so close to each other that you don’t always see the difference between them – loving people can be similar at times. If we’ve only been loved in one way, we often think that’s the only way that there is to be loved; life must be the same for everyone around us. That is until we go out into the world and discover there are hundreds of different ways to do everything and begin comparing that knowledge to our own experience.

Many of the longer term relationships in our lives are not relationships that we chose, they were family relationships that were forced onto us. We accepted the ‘love’ of these people because society told us that families are love. We just took what we saw happening to be the love that was spoken of.

When you begin releasing stuff using forgiveness, often the need to have the person in your life will fall away completely when you’ve released the blocks and issues. Far from wanting people around when you’ve forgiven them, you may actually discover that you cut a significant amount of people off because all that existed between you was lack of forgiveness.

Forgiveness Myth 5: You won’t remember what they did & it will happen again

I never, if I can help it, use the statement forgive and forget. I always just say forgive.

When you experience a true forgiveness release, the energetic charge that keeps you emotionally connected to that memory and experience dissipates, so that the memory is no longer front and center in your conscious mind. If you had to picture this, it’s like taking a huge movie screen and pushing it backwards so that it becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, until you see a wall of pictures behind it, and the picture you’re pushing shrinks and becomes a part of the wall of pictures.

Once you’ve forgiven, you won’t remember the issue all the time anymore, but it will still be available to you be called on when you need it, like when you’re faced with a similar situation that could cause a similar kind of pain.

No one can take your memories away from you, and forgiveness won’t either. You’ll just be able to look back on that memory without fear, anger, guilt, shock, pain, anxiety, vulnerability and embarrassment coursing through you.

In fact, get it perfectly right and you’ll be able to look back on that memory and feel joy and peace that you actually made it, and one day maybe you’ll even be able to thank the soul that brought you that lesson.