Let’s Talk About Forgiveness

Gratitude

Gratitude creates a solid foundation for any mental, emotional, or spiritual healing journey.

Remember a little while back when everyone was talking about gratitude? Social media was filled with posts about being grateful and how gratitude can change your life. It got to the point where a lot of us felt like it was being overused - like a pop song being overplayed on the radio. Over and over again. Be grateful for this. Gratitude that.

It took me a while to shift my perspective from thinking, “Yes, I get it! Enough already!” to “Oh...I get it. I still need to be reminded of this and some people are hearing it for the first time.”

Even now there are people who are just starting to embark on their journey of connecting with themselves and with the universe. And gratitude is one of the major building blocks of any healthy mental, emotional, or spiritual foundation. So it makes sense that we kept seeing it everywhere. The more people who tuned in and started manifesting gratitude, the more gratitude was manifested so it could reach more people.

But this post isn’t about gratitude. It’s about forgiveness. The next step in the growth of the collective unconscious.

The Trend of Forgiveness

Through listening to clients, paying attention to social media, and being aware of my own progress and growth, I’m starting to see a trend. Forgiveness is making its way into the collective unconscious. We’re starting to shift from building our foundation of gratitude to applying the next layer.

Let’s be honest. Forgiveness is difficult. Just as being grateful was difficult at first, forgiveness is going to be a tough one to learn and invoke. And it feels more difficult than gratitude, doesn’t it? That’s because it should. If we’re to continue growing, we need to rise up to the challenges. Push ourselves out of our comfort zones a little. Experience new things. Shift our perspectives.

Forgive the past.

Forgiveness Starts Within

Forgiveness starts with extending compassion and empathy.

When it comes to forgiveness, a lot of people are unsure of where to start. Especially when it comes to forgiving ourselves.

Like with most things, forgiveness starts within us. Nothing can make us forgive ourselves or someone else except for us. We’re the only ones who have that power. Just like we can’t make anyone else forgive us. It’s usually much easier to forgive someone else than it is to forgive ourselves, but that’s why forgiveness is blooming in the collective unconscious right now. We need to learn how to forgive ourselves.

“Forgive yourself. The supreme act of forgiveness is when you can forgive yourself for all the wounds you’ve created in your own life. Forgiveness is an act of self-love. When you forgive yourself, self-acceptance begins and self-love grows.” - Miguel Ángel Ruiz Macías

It makes sense to me that forgiveness - especially self-forgiveness - should follow gratitude on the path of growth, self-acceptance, and self-love. Gratitude helps us open our hearts and minds. It helps us shift our perspectives. It’s still the first thing I recommend to my clients who are going through difficult times. Gratitude helps ground us and see things differently.

And more clearly.

With that newfound clarity, we often start to see parts of our past that we regret or wish had been different. Perhaps we can now see how we hurt someone else or how we hurt ourselves. Perhaps we can see how we took someone for granted. Or took ourselves for granted.

This is where forgiveness comes in.

A lot of people seem to think that forgiving yourself means letting yourself off the hook for something you’ve done. But that’s not the case at all. Sincere forgiveness is the exact opposite. It’s about recognizing what has happened and accepting that you can’t change the past, but you can learn from it in order to change the future. Self-forgiveness means taking responsibility for the things you’ve done that have hurt you and other people and taking the steps necessary to change that behavior. It means empathizing with the people you hurt and seeing your actions and behaviors through the lens of their perspectives and feelings.

It’s an incredibly difficult task. We often make excuses for things we’ve done or make excuses for the things people have done to us. We deny, we rationalize, and we justify our actions so we don’t have to feel guilty. But that’s not forgiveness. We must accept what we’ve done and break free from those behavioral cycles and patterns.

How Do We Actually Forgive?

Over a year ago, I hurt a lot of people I care about. I made mistakes and those mistakes cost me a lot of really good friendships. I tortured myself every night trying to figure out how to make things right or why I acted the way I did or how I could have done things differently. I was lost and had no idea what to do.

I don’t know exactly when, but at some point I realized I had to stop living in the past and focus on the things I could do in order to continue moving forward. So I started from the beginning. I went back to my foundation of gratitude. It was a positive comfort zone at this point. Something that grounded me and kept me connected. I reminded myself that I was grateful for the people still in my life. I reminded myself that I was grateful for the growth I had gone through. I was grateful for the experiences I had and the lessons I learned.

That space of gratitude helped ground me. It helped me to start looking at the situation from a perspective of “What did this teach me?” rather than “Why did I do that?”

I started to see lesson after lesson shine through. I started to see what I needed to work on in hopes that I would never do something like that again. I started to realize where I needed healing and how I needed to grow from the experience.

I started seeing repressed behaviors and traumas. Unhealthy coping mechanisms. Trust issues. Things I thought I had worked through. Only then did I realize I had only worked through the top few layers of them. And there were deeper layers beneath that needed to be healed and worked through.

It was not easy. It’s never easy to look at yourself and your actions objectively or from a neutral perspective. It’s not easy to put yourself in the shoes of someone you’ve hurt.

At first I made excuses:

They didn’t understand me. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. If they would have listened, they’d understand. I was having a breakdown. I needed help.

Then I started seeing myself as a monster:

How could I have hurt them? They were my friends. Why did I do that? I’m a terrible person. I can’t believe I did that.

Finally I started to see things from different perspectives:

I hurt them. I was hurt by them. I made mistakes and I need to forgive myself for them, even if they don’t forgive me. I recognize what I did and take full responsibility for my actions. I am sincerely sorry for hurting them. I don’t want to do that to someone else. They responded based on their traumas and I responded based on mine. It was a clash of pain from wounds reopening. There are many lessons I learned from this experience. And now is the time for compassion and empathy rather than hurt and anger.

Simply getting to the point of being able to see the situation from their perspective took a long time. I was too full of anger and pain in the beginning to even consider forgiving them. Then I was numb. Then I was sad and never thought I could forgive myself. And now I’m working on forgiveness - towards myself and towards them.

It’s a process, just like any other healing journey.

Have Compassion

Forgiveness isn’t easy. But it is so worth it. Forgiving yourself means owning up to your mistakes, sincerely learning from them, and changing yourself. It’s growth. It’s healing. It’s extending compassion and empathy to yourself and to others.

And the world needs a lot of compassion and forgiveness right now. We’re in the process of a major shift. An Awakening as some call it. And right now we need to generate as much compassion, empathy, love, and forgiveness as possible if we want to continue to move forward.