Forgiveness

Interview with Mirabai Devi 
March 2018

What is forgiveness?

Forgiveness is a process of releasing or letting go of a person or situation that we are holding responsible for any of our own feelings of anger, resentment or hurt. 

Forgiveness is a process where we recognize the painful experience that  we had with the person or situation, and we recognize it as a lesson that helps us to grow and learn more about ourselves including loving ourselves, having greater compassion for ourselves, empowering ourselves, and learning to stand up for ourselves. 

These are some of the lessons we learn through forgiveness. Forgiveness opens the doorway of our heart for healing to occur.  

When we judge someone’s behavior as wrong or right, whether rightly or wrongly, we are karmically held in a negative energy spiral with  that person. That spiral is a pattern that we can play out with a person or  persons over time causing a tremendous amount of hurt and negativity to  keep on occurring and reoccurring between both parties. 

When you forgive  the person who has wronged you, you free yourself from the negative energy attachment to that person and to their actions or words.  

Humans are under the illusion that they have to be tough or thick-skinned,  but in reality it’s only Love and Forgiveness that sets us free and brings us  peace.  

We are told that Forgiveness heals physical, emotional and mental  illnesses? How is that possible? Our physical body is affected directly by our emotions. Each and everything  that we think, say and do affects us physically, emotionally and mentally.

How we react and how we respond in any given situation affects our  biochemistry as it is reflected by our emotions and mental state, whether  it’s reacting out of negativity or responding from a peaceful state. The corresponding biochemical reaction leaves us feeling good or bad, well or unwell. Feeling emotionally and mentally unwell, holding negative energy in the body, leads to illness. Feeling upset, hurt, and anger for long periods of time suppresses our feel-good hormones, ramps up our stress hormones, and makes us physically sick.  

The illnesses come from different causes: one is the biochemistry of  unresolved negative emotions, one is the karma of our family and lineage,  and one is the karma of our individual life and lifetimes. 

The anger, upset, hurt and resentfulness turns to dis-ease. There is a  spiritual and emotional cause, actually multiple causes to every dis-ease.  Once you understand that, you can use forgiveness as a tool. 

Forgiveness releases the spiritual, emotional and mental problems and  issues that cause the dis-eases. When we practice forgiveness every day, we start to reverse the cause  of the dis-ease. Reversing the cause is what reverses the symptom. It’s all energy, and even the disease can be reversed through addressing the imbalances. Once you forgive, you no longer continue to expose yourself to that behavior. 

That is why we practice forgiveness but not forgetting. Not forgetting allows us to not make the same mistakes with the same people or not play out the same patterns again with new people (you would think we would learn ☺). 

Not forgetting protects us from getting burned again because we’ve felt the pain of the burn. Sometimes we need to feel the pain to learn and grow, and if we’re not willing to change we will keep feeling the pain. The idea is to learn from the pain, release through forgiveness, and do differently next  time.  Not forgetting helps us to do it differently and make different choices next time.  So we forgive, and don’t forget. 

Forgiveness also applies to the self. Self-forgiveness is the starting place for working through the complexities and release that comes with deep, heart-felt forgiveness. Forgiving oneself is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s one step at a time. It releases ourselves from our own feelings of guilt, regret, shame, anger, disappointment with ourselves, and coming back into a place of  harmony, balance and peace, with all aspects of ourselves.  

We forgive ourselves through prayer, through surrendering to the Divine,  through letting go, through acceptance, through compassion and loving  kindness towards ourselves. 

There is so much to learn and understand about Forgiveness. What if you don’t want to forgive someone?  What if you feel forgiveness is a weakness? Some people don’t like to apologize or to forgive.  How do you deal with that?