Forgiveness is not a magnanimous act--it is something you do for you. The refusal to forgive is simply a refusal to empower yourself!
Forgiveness is a self-empowering act of the highest order. It is not something you do to let someone else “off the hook,” but a decision you make to free up your own energy. You may be amazed at just how much more energy you’ll have when you forgive. There’s a saying which goes, “If you want to get out of debt, forgive.”
This is not just true of monetary debt, but any kind of energy debt. If you are physically ill, or simply chronically tired, you will want to search your soul to see who it is that you need to forgive. The energy tied up in maintaining a grudge is greater than you may realize.
When you harbor anger toward another person, (or people, or situation, or even yourself) you maintain a set of invisible lines over which your energy continues to travel, whether or not you are consciously aware of it. These lines stay linked to the part of the person from which the original disharmony arose, and to the part of you that experienced pain because of it. Over these lines, energies from the both of you continue to be exchanged unconsciously, not only feeding and perpetuating the disharmony within you, but sapping your energy. Forgiveness allows you to disconnect that link so that you can stop “leaking” energy and empowering the very thing that caused you pain. Deciding not to forgive keeps both parties prisoners, no matter the circumstances around the original wounding.
Before you can achieve forgiveness, it is necessary for you to accept what happened and move out of judgment about it. Judgment is your ego’s way of withholding Love. Since Love is the only transformational force in the universe, releasing your judgment is necessary to heal and transform that which caused the hurt. Now don’t get me wrong—you do not have to like the person, and you do not have to like what happened between you, and you certainly do not have to approve of what happened—but in order to release yourself from the ongoing drain of unforgiveness, you must rise above the level of personality and let go of judgment so that Love can flow to do its healing work.
This Love is not love with a lowercase ‘l’—love with conditions—but Love with a capital ‘L’, the unconditional, totally impersonal, pure emanations of Life Force from your heart center. This Love, which originates in the Heart of God and comes to you through your willingness to receive it and pass it on, transforms whatever It touches. By letting go of judgment and radiating Love over the lines of connection between you and the one you are seeking to forgive, you not only neutralize the inharmonious energies and disconnect yourself from their origins, but your own heart receives the healing power of this Love first, increasing the Love and harmony within you. Doing this also serves to increase the Love and harmony within the other person—something which they surely need as much as you do. Remember—you do not need to love them, or their personality—you merely need to love God and the divine in them will be increased, just as will the divine within you.
