Forgiveness: Some Tips for the New Year l How to Forgive l Forgiving People l Let Unforgiveness Go

It's in Your Own Best Interest

Remember that forgiveness is in your own best interest. People often think forgiveness is a favor they’re doing for someone else—usually someone who doesn’t deserve it. This is not the case. Frequently the person you’re mad at isn’t aware of it, or has forgotten. Sometimes you may not have seen him or her in years. As a matter of fact, you forgive for the same reason that you take your garbage out. You have grudges and grievances that are poisoning your mind and ruining your life. You don’t need them. They’re hurting you, and you are best off if you get rid of them as soon as you can. It’s true that there’s a part of the mind that likes to go over past hurts and traumas again and again. It does so unconsciously, and often against your will. If you don’t train it to stop, you are sure to make yourself miserable. Thus the first step in forgiveness is to realize that it’s something that you really want—even if you don’t think it’s possible. In some situations, you might even find the idea of forgiveness too painful to touch. In instances like this, you may want to start with one simple step. Just ask yourself seriously: will I feel better or worse if I forgive? Think carefully about this; it may take a little more time than you might imagine. If you decide that you’ll feel better, you now have a motive for forgiveness—and you can work toward it slowly but persistently.

Just Let Go

Just let go. Sometimes people ask, how do you forgive? Is it a technique, a practice, an act? If you are holding a hammer and I tell you to drop the hammer, you don’t have to ask how. You just drop it. In fact, as you’ll remember, you’ve had to learn how to do lots of different functions in life, but no one ever had to teach you how to drop something. Forgiveness is more like this than you may think. Some people imagine it as an emotionally fraught exchange, full of tears and outbursts. It doesn’t have to be like that at all. In fact—and this is true more often than not—you don’t have to do anything at all to forgive. You simply let your grievances drop. You don’t have to make a process out of it. You don’t even necessarily have to tell the person that he or she is forgiven. You just go on as you did before, as if there had never been anything wrong. Obviously this works better with the little things in life—annoyances at work, petty grudges against family members, and so on. But it can be more helpful even with the big issues in life. And even when it isn’t, it is an invaluable first step. Nevertheless, if you feel somewhere inside that you can’t let go, don’t get into a fight with yourself. Again go back to your own best interests: would you feel better if you let this go, or if you keep hanging on to it?

Forget about Justifications

Forget about justifications. Many people go through an elaborate process of rationalization before they decide to forgive. They need to persuade themselves that the other person didn’t really mean it, had extenuating circumstances, and so on. This approach will not get you far. Sooner or later you will come back to the grievance you started with. You obviously have some reason in your own mind for holding it, so in all likelihood you’re going to go back to that and try to prove to yourself that you were right after all. One part of your mind, which feels it has some reason for being upset, is at war with another part, which recognizes, however dimly, that holding the grudge will do you more harm than good. Chances are that you will never come to forgiveness through this process. You will just be cycling toward it and then cycling back away from it again. If this happens, you may find it helpful to step back and realize that you probably don’t understand the whole situation. You don’t really know the other person’s deepest motives. Nor, usually, can you even see your own part in the situation with any amount of clarity. Thus you may very well be upset with someone for the wrong reason, or for no reason at all. The French have a saying: Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner: “To understand all is to forgive all.”

Make Forgiveness a Goal

With big issues, start by setting forgiveness as a goal. It may be easy to set aside the little slights and indignities of life. But you may also have some very big issues that need forgiving, such as betrayal, violence, and abuse. Those who have a background of abuse in childhood may find it especially hard to move toward forgiveness. After all, you have literally been the victim of a crime. This crime may have gone completely unnoticed and unpunished at the time, so you have a thirst for justice. Sometimes in these situations it’s still possible simply to let your grievances go—but this is comparatively rare. There may be levels of trauma and pain that your conscious mind doesn’t even have access to. In cases like this, forgiveness can even become a form of denial. Thus frequently with the big issues you may have to go through a longer procedure of getting in touch with your own feelings, sometimes even recalling and reexperiencing past hurts, before you can let them go. You may need some kind of professional help or counseling to help you move through the process. In such situations, you can at least start by setting yourself a simpler, more achievable goal. You may not want to say, “I want to forgive this person for what he has done,” but rather simply, “I want to be rid of my grievances toward this person so I can get on with my life.”

Forgiving isn’t Condoning

Forgiving isn’t condoning. One of the greatest obstacles to forgiveness is the fear that it will hurt you. The reasoning goes like this: If I forgive this person for hurting me, I’m giving her permission to hurt me again. This is not true at all. There is no good reason for condoning mistreatment or putting up with a person who is harming you. If you are in a situation like this, the first thing is to put a stop to it. You may even need to get away from the person. At the very least, you need to let her know that this is causing you pain and that you aren’t going to take it anymore. Once you are out of the situation, you’ll be able to see it in better perspective and can then work toward forgiving.

Injustices

Don’t get wrapped up in the world’s injustices. Some people find it fairly easy to forgive personal hurts. But they feel tremendous outrage by the injustices and crimes of the world. People become submerged in grievances of this kind partly because they think these grievances make them good people. They may even fear that they would be bad people if they didn’t feel this way. Certainly there are terrible injustices in the world. “Someone should do something about this!” we think. But we ourselves are probably not going to do anything. In fact there are so many of these situations in the world that it’s impossible for any one person to deal with them all. Deep down inside, we know this, and we feel guilty about it. We often deal with this guilt by turning it into outrage—which proves to ourselves, in a roundabout way, that we are good and caring people and that we will not let these injustices pass unnoticed. This outrage does no earthly good for anyone, but it seems (falsely) to soothe our discontent.

Much of the media’s coverage of wars and disasters plays into this dynamic. I’ve come to call it “the entertainment of conscience.” We are provided with news and images of horrors, we feel outraged, and thus we reassure ourselves of our own decency. But watching wars and disasters and crimes on TV will not make you a good person, no matter how much grief and compassion you may sincerely feel. Nor will these emotions make life the slightest bit better for those who are suffering. Actually their suffering is often made worse by our need for this entertainment. When a woman has had her child shot or seen her house float away, it can’t be pleasant to have a reporter shove a microphone in her face and ask her to talk about her suffering for the amusement of the home audience. If I stopped here, it might well seem that I’m arguing for laziness and apathy. I’m not. I’m arguing against useless emotions. There are positive ways of acting in the world. Many of them involve simple, everyday decency and compassion in daily life: this makes more of a difference than you might imagine. At other times you may feel that you have a special task to fulfill in a given situation—say by helping victims of a natural disaster. In that case, you should certainly act on your convictions. But don’t delude yourself either. After all, if you were dropped in the middle of most of the world’s trouble spots, you would probably just be in the way.

Be Honest with Yourself

Be honest with yourself. It’s valuable and important and powerful to forgive. But it’s still more important to be honest with yourself. You will not be doing anyone any good if you’re in denial about your own anger and pain. It’s better to face the pain directly and stay with what you’re actually feeling. It’s true: forgiveness sometimes seems like a distant goal. But if you look deeply enough into your mind, you will probably be able to find a little willingness to forgive in there. It’s like a small spark that has to be nurtured and protected so that it can turn into a real fire. Of course, in such situations you should also remember to be gentle with yourself.

Self-forgiveness is a major part of the process too. In fact you’re probably not going to be able to forgive others fully until you start by forgiving yourself. Richard Smoley has over thirty-five years’ experience studying and practicing mystical spirituality. His newest book, The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness, will be published in January 2015. His other works include Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity; and The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. Richard is also editor of Quest magazine and Quest Books, both published by the Theosophical Society in America.