forgiveness

An ongoing personal exploration of Divine Guidance and distinguishing between the voice of fear and the voice of love reflecting on the article, How to Distinguish Between Divine Guidance and Fear/Ego/Imagination, on Sir Froggie’s PositiveNews Network .

Today’s pairing is:

Divine Guidance embraces forgiveness and truth.
Ego wants to be right, convinces you you’re justified in toxic anger, negativity or non-forgiveness.

I guess I was jumping the gun in yesterday’s post when I wrote about forgiveness.

In November of last year, I went on a power journey to Oaxaca and Teotihuacan with my spiritual community. During one of our day trips, I received a message about forgiveness. My first thought was that I already was forgiving. I didn’t have anything “big” left to forgive. I’d done the work. Only now, several months later, am I beginning to see that forgiveness has many layers.

When we recall the stories in which we’ve been wronged and know we must do something to alleviate our suffering, we decide to forgive. It is a choice and not necessarily a feeling. This is the first step. We have to want to forgive. The decision generally comes from an awareness that holding onto the grudge, no matter the “crime”, only hurts ourselves in the long run.

Then, we go through a process of reframing the story. We bring compassion to it for ourselves and the other parties involved. We do not excuse, but we attempt to understand. We do not forget, but we no longer suffer the past. That’s a really big piece, but even this isn’t completion.

Sometimes, we through forgiveness into forgetting. This may seem hard to believe in some cases, but I can say from experience, it an happen. We’ve forgiven, reframed, and now see just how silly our story was in the first place, even the most cruel of acts we see through different eyes. Whether we reach this or not doesn’t really matter. But it’s certainly a nice surprise to realize you no longer think about a story that may have at one time defined you. The charge is gone.

While we start with the mental decision to forgive, that may or may not work its way into the emotional layers, but of course, the more it does, the more complete. It was at this juncture that I believed I’d done the work…with a mixture of mental and emotional healing. But it wasn’t enough. That was the message.

The body, physical and energetic, must also forgive. The muscles, bones, every cell of the body must also relinquish resentments and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others. Forgiveness must ultimately become a spontaneous outflow for it to be complete. It must come from a place of not even taking objection in the first place, not because we don’t care or notice if someone does something to hurt us, but because we know they simply cannot help themselves and that in truth, it has little to do with us.  We don’t just take the action to forgive; we realize that we are a very channel for the constant flow of this energy. And as we become that, there is actually less and less to forgive.

From this place we transform the energy of “wrong” altogether. We know there is only love. Am I there yet? Hardly. But at least I no longer operate under the illusion that I’m done forgiving.