Is Forgiving Difficult for You? Try These 3 Tools
Forgiveness is never easy to do, whether it’s forgiving someone or yourself. This burden brings about negative emotions and makes you hang onto the past, not allowing you to move forward and find peace. If being unforgiving is weighing you down, here are three tools to help you find forgiveness in your heart.
1. Square All With Love
Lester Levenson is the creator of the “Square All With Love” technique. It’s about changing your non-love feelings to love. Levenson invites you to tap into your true loving nature, which is often obscured by your non-love feelings. With this technique, Levenson aims to help you return to your awareness.
“Letting go is always merely a choice, and if you allow yourself to make this choice, the non-loving feeling that is appearing on the surface will dissolve, revealing the love that is always right in the background waiting to be uncovered. It is an invitation for love to dissolve whatever other feeling is on the surface.”
So, how does it work?
Simple.
Whenever you have non-loving feelings that you want to express, pause and ask yourself if you can change that non-loving feeling to a loving one. If you answer yes, that non-loving feeling goes away instantly!
Of course, just like any other technique, this one takes practice. By releasing the non-loving feelings, finding forgiveness may be more possible now
2. Forgiveness Meditations
Meditation can help you release negative energy so you can focus on yourself more. To make forgiveness meditation effective, follow these steps:
Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and breathe naturally
Relax the body and mind while breathing gently from the heart
Feel the barriers and negative emotions you have because of not forgiving yourself or someone
Feel the pain and burden with your heart closed
Start breathing softly and recite the meditation
‘Forgiveness of Others’ Meditation from Jack Kornfield:
There are many ways that I have hurt and harmed others, have betrayed or abandoned them, caused them suffering, knowingly or unknowingly, out of my pain, fear, anger and confusion. Let yourself remember and visualize the ways you have hurt others. See and feel the pain you have caused out of your own fear and confusion. Feel your own sorrow and regret. Sense that finally you can release this burden and ask for forgiveness. Picture each memory that still burdens your heart. And then to each person in your mind repeat: I ask for your forgiveness, I ask for your forgiveness.
For the meditation on forgiving yourself and those who have hurt you, go here.
3. Ho’oponopono
Spiritual expert Ihaleakala Hew Len practices the ritual of Ho’oponopono. He’s known to have practiced it while working at a Hawaiian state mental hospital. Ho’oponopono consists of a mantra that he kept chanting over each patient, while looking at their files. He didn’t ask the patients themselves to chant the mantra; rather, he believed that since humans share energy, his chanting will give off positive energy to the patients. The result? Patients who were once shackled roamed freely, patients were taken off medications, and later, all patients were released from the hospital.
Curious as to what the mantra is?
It’s I love you. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.
Give this mantra a try.
These three tools can be very helpful to anyone who desires to but faces challenges to forgive. Forgiveness is not “just something you need to do”. It’s a gift you give yourself because you deserve peace.