How To Forgive the Unforgivable

How to Forgive the Unforgivable

One of the most important keys to finding happiness is in learning the secret of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the art of letting your mind rest around issues that are troubling to you. When the mind is engaged with the tension about wrongs and hurts you have suffered in the past, your mind is in torment. And thus the ability to rest your thoughts about past hurts gives you inner peace and mental rest.

However, this begs the question, how do you learn to forgive? How do you bring your mind to rest about the past? How do you stop fearing the future? When in the past you have hurt another person, feeling guilt is the predominant emotion. When you believe others have hurt or wounded you, anger is the usual response. Either way, your mind is unsettled, and troubled. Forgiveness rests the mind and settles the past, allowing you to live in the present moment without the pain and the torment of those past hurts, and without fear of the future.

Many people successful use rituals to learn how to forgive. Some seek the use of confession. Others talk in therapy. Some write letters to people who have hurt them in the past, expressing all their feelings, and then never send the letter. This way, they can unburden their feelings about the past without involving all the people who have made up that past. Other rituals might be to dig a hole in the earth and shout your hurts into that hole, at the same time releasing the pain of that hurt. Then you can cover the hole, and send the hurt away. Such rituals are physical tasks to help you grasp the emotional aspect within the act of forgiveness. Forgiveness is the mind letting go of the emotional turmoil you are holding onto.

But the real key to understanding forgiveness is to recognize that you as a human have no ability to forgive anyone but yourself. Only God can forgive people. You are not righteous enough, to forgive. As all religions express, we are human, sinners, and live in glass houses, thereby making us incapable of the divine capacity to forgive other humans. Your forgiving another is not about them at all, it is entirely about you and your mental process. You let go of the tension you hold in your mind about that person. You let go the inner turmoil you feel, and thus you allow yourself to experience emotional rest and mental peace. You don’t even need them to ask forgiveness, or to apologize.

This is so hard to grasp, because we have been taught that when another wrongs us, we have the power to forgive them. Not so. Only they can forgive themselves, as only you can forgive yourself. On a spiritual level, only God can forgive human’s of transgression. Not that we should not have the courtesy of a social interactions that when wronged, we ask another to apologize. Not that another cannot ask you to forgive them, or excuse them for a transgression they have made. It is just that forgiveness on the divine level is not within the capability of humans to do. And the miracle of this is that we do not need another to repent of their sins to forgive. For forgiveness is merely empting our minds of the obsessive thinking we run though our brain when angry and upset at others.



To forgive is to bless yourself. To forgive is to grant yourself freedom. To forgive is to give yourself the gift of happiness, because when you release the inner tension, you release your mind from the torment you have been carrying by not forgiving yourself or another. To forgive another does not require that they apologize, or repent. To forgive is to release the inner tension you carry when you hold hatred within your heart for those who have wronged you.

Forgiveness is letting go. Forgiveness is moving on. Letting go of the mental torment you have because you are unforgiving. The key to learning how to forgive is to learn how to let go of the anger and hurt, revenge and disgust you feel towards others. When your mind comes to this peace, you have learnt how to forgive, and you can then live in peace. At this point forgiveness is simply releasing your own inner torment you experience towards another you believe has wronged you.