Forgiveness leads to clearing of negative emotions

Forgiveness and the clearing of negative emotions is a linchpin of my therapeutic and behavior modification work. Thus whether I work on weight management, smoking cessation, pain management, exam anxiety or performance enhancement for sales and management I always include a section on clearing negative feelings and forgiveness.

One of the largest impediments to the good life is keeping negative feelings after they are no longer needed. Remember I am not suggesting that you should not have negative feelings. Feeling are not the problem. Someone pulls out in front of you on the freeway and scares you to death and you get angry. Fair enough, problems arise if that anger lasts more than a few seconds or minutes at most. Each type of event has a natural time span. Holding onto negative feelings for a long time can harm you physically as well as psychologically.

A couple of weeks ago one of our cats died after a bout of cancer. I was more or less paralyzed the two weeks before as I was watching our companion animal going downhill. And then the next two weeks I have been grieving. I am still grieving but it is time to write again. Any negative feeling has a natural time for release. Keeping the feelings and giving them power over you for longer holds you back and are like chains anchoring you to the source of negativity.

Resentment and hatred are basically the same feeling and are the worst negative feelings. A Zen master once said that holding hatred and resentment is like drinking poison and expecting your enemy to die. After all the only person who would suffer is yourself. Another of my master’s told me to kill my enemies. I knew that is not what he really meant. So I asked, “Master what do you mean by that?” My master said, “Kill you enemies by making them your friends.”

One way to get rid of resentments is to understand that deep down we are all the same. According to mystical systems of philosophy the ultimate reality is that there is only one entity in the universe. That entity has been called God, Tao, The One, The Beautiful, YHVH (I am becoming that which I am becoming or simply I am) and multitude of different names. According to these systems we are all parts of The One. So at least in your imagination pretend that you are basically the same as someone you dislike. This helps you forgive any imagined harm. Often when I am driving on the freeway I bless everyone who overtakes me. Thus if someone pulls out in front of me it is easier for me to forgive him. In fact it is very good to bless everyone and everything in your life. It is specially important to bless people and things which bother you. When you bless people and things which bother you, you will discover that you are bothered less.

The other side of the coin from hatred is unconditional love. Again understanding that we are all children of the same Infinite Intelligence helps us give each other total unconditional love. It is important to understand that we are part of the all. We need to give ourselves total unconditional love and forgiveness as well as others. After all Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This presupposes that you love yourself. It is interesting that people with low self esteem cannot love others while people with high self esteem are humble and find it easy to love others. Now when I write love yourself I do not mean selfish egotistic love which is in reality no love at all but covering up lack of self esteem but a universal forgiving love of a kind parent. After all that is the way that the Source love you.

One way to love all unconditionally and forgive everyone including yourself is to understand that we all do the best we can at any time given the resources we have. By resources I mean psychological power available to you. Notice that when everything is your life is fantastic nothing will bother you. For example many years ago I fell in love for the first time in my life. On the first day that I spent with my new love, I lost my wallet. This did not bother me the least. It is interesting that on this occasion when I was not bothered a kind person returned my wallet. Now imagine I had lost my wallet on the day that my love and I broke up.

Another way to forgive is to use the following affirmation which I first learned from Catherin Ponder, “The Christ in me forgives the Christ in <XXXX>.” Where you replace <XXXX> with the name of the person you want to forgive. You can replace Christ with some other term from your tradition which would make the affirmation work for you. Many years ago I was going through a very bad time. My partner had embezzled most of my capital and I was paralyzed with resentment. At the deepest despair I was lucky to find the above affirmation. I used the above affirmation over and over again. I really did not believe it. In fact at first my self talk was. “The Christ in me forgives the Christ in Bob. No I don’t” Eventually the “No I don’t” disappeared and I did forgive Bob and life turned from bleak to magnificent as I met and married my wonderful wife….

Now an important aspect of forgiveness is that we forgive for our own sake and not for the sake of the other person. In fact we may see the person forgiven or never again have anything to do with the person. In fact even though I send love and best wishes to Bob, I have no wish to ever see him again. At the same time there many who I have forgiven I am very good friends with and I do see.

One way to think about negative emotions of any kind is to examine the way we learn to avoid hot objects. Suppose when we are children we touch a hot stove we learn that touching hot objects hurts. We do not end up resenting the stove we just learn and move on. So the thing to do to free ourselves from negative emotions are to store the learnings and let go of the negative emotion. We do this in time line therapy and hypnosis.

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