How many of us spend our precious time and energy fuming over what others may have done to us? Unseen in the steam of our heated emotions and churning thoughts is the one inescapable fact that we are the secret prisoner of anyone we wish to punish. And the more we would punish this person, the less freedom we have to be at peace with ourselves.

We can never hope to be free as long as any part of us struggles with, or suffers over what others are doing, have done, or won’t do with their lives. Besides, if we could remain aware of the often-compromised state of our own character, that is, how we still do those things to others that we don’t want to do, this awakened conscience would stir in us a new need. Rather than worrying about whether so-and-so gets his comeuppance for being the kind of person he is, our attention would be elsewhere. It would be focused fully upon being in the Now of our own life wherein we would be actively attending to what we must do to let go of old resentments that won’t let go of us!

Leave these people alone to their own trials and torment, for their negative nature is one and the same as their punishment; and further, whatever weight we would try to add on to their backs only falls onto our own. To act from this higher self-awareness not only helps free us from the initial pain born of a negative reaction to what others have done to us, but it also keeps us from wrongly investing ourselves in trying to correct what is already in the throes of being corrected! And once we stop locking ourselves up with wasted judgments and their attendant, never-ending worries, we find that not only are we free, but that there’s no power in the universe capable of holding us captive again.