Limiting Belief – To forgive is to leave myself

Pathway Description:

To the ego it may well seem that lack of forgiveness keeps you safer, more alert. However, it actually keeps you trapped in a repetition of the experience you don’t want. Something along the lines of the old saying, “A coward dies a thousand deaths and a brave man dies but once.”

I open to release my fear that if I forgive I will be vulnerable to the same thing happening again. I’m willing to look at the situation differently. To withhold forgiveness is to block my own entry into the light. It has been said that one cannot enter the Sacred Space until one gives up the “rights and privileges” of being a victim. So, to withhold forgiveness is to withhold my own peace; to cut myself off from my own sacredness; to condemn myself to ongoing suffering. Only forgiveness can bring real peace and happiness, because peace and happiness come from an inner sense of connection, of contact to Source or God. Judgment and condemnation which are the basis of lack of forgiveness create the experience of separation. Separation will always – whether you are conscious of it or not – produce the feelings of fear and pain.

It is entirely possible that whatever trauma or pain you experienced in the past is over; done; not to happen again. This experience can be seen from the perspective of karma.

The karmic perspective can be seen as a teaching tool. If we are, as the great beings tell us, all connected, all One, then if I hurt what appears to be you, because you and I are in truth connected, I also hurt me. In the world of time in which we apparently live, it takes time for the hurt to come back to me. This hurting is not for punishment but for learning. I am to learn that I do not wish to hurt you and I do not wish to be hurt; I am to learn that we are one.

Clearing Steps:

Take a moment and examine something that has happened to you, something that you may find difficult to forgive from this perspective:

• Imagine the essence of the person as the lightbulb and the personality and behavior as the lampshade. Focus on the lightbulb.
• Or, imagine that the personality and behavior was a dream experience and that the dreamer was not what was seen in the dream.
• Or, imagine that spiritual evolution requires everyone to move through all experiences (murderer, thief, liar, rapist, etc.) to learn that we don’t want any part of those experiences. You are simply a few classes ahead, but you too have learned through experience.
• Or, look beyond the egoic veneer of the “bad” person and find the hurt, scared child behind the mask.

If you can break free from judging and find love and compassion, you will probably experience an excitement, a liveliness, an expansion, a happiness for no reason – the feeling that comes with Whole-minded love.

Which would you rather have? Anger and resentment, or peace, love and joy?

If you can do this with a movie character, see if you can do this with someone who has “seemingly” harmed you.

It might help to say, “What if I needed this experience as part of my education. What if I had been a harmer in the past and needed to experience harm in order to be able to say, ‘I never wish to harm or be harmed again.'”

The profound nature of this clearing comes when you can compare the experience of feeling superior or better than someone you judge and find that degree of experience insignificant when compared to a Whole Minded experience of love. In truth, you cannot have both. You will have to choose one over the other.