Forgiveness as Detachment
Posted on September 14, 2012 by A G, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
Do you have trouble forgiving yourself or others? Learn to release your judgments and detach yourself from the past. Forgiveness is then effortless.
Forgiving someone else isn’t always easy. Even harder is to forgive ourselves.
What does it really mean to forgive? Is it reluctantly accepting the perceived wrong as somehow okay? Certainly not, that’s just denying what we feel.
In my experience, when it’s hard to forgive myself or someone else, it means I’ve been resisting the MOVEMENT of the emotions that arise in me whenever I think of what happened.
For example, instead of allowing anger to move and change into peace, I used to dwell on the anger. Being angry makes you feel significant when you’re afraid that accepting whatever happened will threaten your sense of identity. This does not mean accepting what happened as right or wrong, it only means accepting that it did happen and that you did react to it.
Shame may also be present. Instead of accepting it and letting it transform into love for yourself, you hold onto the feeling of shame because you’re still attached to an old identity that is no longer real. You may also be holding onto a judgment that needs release. This can be a judgment against a certain behavior, a person, or some part of yourself you don’t like.
In any case, the issue is being attached to something that is outside of love and outside of the present moment. That may be attachment to the past (or an imagined future), attachment to your egoic sense of self, or attachment to a judgment. It may also be an unconscious attachment, which is another way of saying you’re in denial of some aspect of whatever happened.
If you want to experience forgiveness, simply find the strings that are plucking at your heart and cut them. You will lose nothing except your illusions.
