Forgiveness

 

“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.” ~ Bryant H. McGill

If we truly seek to live with our hearts wide open then we must learn to forgive. Truly forgive. Forgive until not even a smidgen is left in the makeup of your cellular body.  Forgive so that you need not face the same experience again and again to erase any tiny held fragments.

In this life count on being wounded, and know that it is merely the sword upon which you will sharpen your soul.  Many will inflict pain upon your heart, and when they do you will have a choice.  Forgive or place blame.  If you choose forgiveness your journey out and away from the pain will be much less than if you choose blame.

Blame will lead you down the dark path of anger and hate and all the negativity that dwells there.

Forgiveness is really our only option if we hope to hold love in our hearts.  Offer forgiveness, do it for your offender, and do it for you.  For a heart that holds a grudge will carry a festering wound and that wound will have to be nursed for as long as you allow it to exist.  And it will require more than just daily attending, it will need walls erected to protect it, and maintaining that fortress will exhaust your energy until one day it becomes all consuming and your focus is solely on protecting your wound and the force that caused it, until the very thing you hoped to never happen again is all you can see, and your world becomes a defensive one, and all things you experience are colored and marked by the pain you are holding on to and you will be fortifying the pain.

Sometimes the pain you will suffer will cloud all the blessings in front of you, creating for yourself a skewed perspective on the world in front of you, and making your journey away from the experience that started it all a much harder trek.  You will have to climb hard and long to free yourself of the hold pain can bring, but when you climb long enough you will begin to see that the suffering you are enduring is actually self-inflicted.

Someone once said, pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.

The first thing we humans do when encountering pain is look to who we think caused it, and then we begin to place blame, and then comes judgement, followed by shaming, leading to the horrific forces of hate and anger.

When you find yourself wallowing in all this negativity you will not have to look far to see where it is coming from. Your struggle with pain eventually becomes your own doing, and in time, your undoing.  You supposed perpetrator has moved on long ago.

We can trace all suffering back to our inability to let something go, our inability to accept what is and hold fast to our high and mighty stance of what we think is justice.  But this kind of thinking will only breed more suffering and bury you in a world of negativity, until your climb out is much farther than it was before.

Lighten your load and forgive, free both yourself and the inflicting party of the past to realize what your future can hold.

Seek not to justify your pain and/or your revenge.  I understand greatly now the passage, “let vengeance be mine.”  It is a means to freedom and living with your heart wide open, allowing it to be full of understanding and compassion.

Choose forgiveness without having to be dragged to your knees, for it surely will.  Harboring blame or ill will towards any who hurt you will direct the point of the arrow back to you again and again.

If you want to stop the pain, let go of the past and free yourself of the very wound where it exists.

There have been times in my life when I felt death would be a much easier option than living, because of the pain I held in my heart.

I knew not nor understood how to relieve myself of this pain until I sat with it so long that it nearly broke me.

I have wallowed in it, taken it to bed, woken up with it, and even tried wearing it as a shield, yet still the pain stayed and invited with it its friends anger, hate, jealousy, blame, shame, and eventually guilt.

It was only with much deep reflection that I realized I held the salve all along.  It took years for me to understand that I, and only I, held the one thing that would stop the pain and heal the wound, and that one thing is forgiveness.

In order to take the dagger out of my own heart, I had to first take the dagger out of the one I held it in, the one I believed had wronged me.

Forgiveness is such a simple thing to do, but far from easy.  Mahatma Gandhi so brilliantly and compassionately shared with us, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

We will be tried a thousand times over in this lifetime before we master forgiveness.

We will meet experience after experience until we can offer up forgiveness with no resistance.  And when that time comes our walk here on this earth will be much easier and we will change our future terrain.

Copyright 2017 Melody White. All Rights Reserved.

Advertisement

Forgiveness

“There is no love without forgiveness, and there is no forgiveness without love.” ~ Bryant H. McGill

If we truly seek to live with our hearts wide open then we must learn to forgive. Truly forgive. Forgive until not even a smidgen is left in the makeup of your cellular body.  Forgive so that you need not face the same experience again and again to erase any tiny held fragments.

In this life count on being wounded, and know that it is merely the sword upon which you will sharpen your soul.  Many will inflict pain upon your heart, and when they do you will have a choice.  Forgive or place blame.  If you choose forgiveness your journey out and away from the pain will be much less than if you choose blame.

Blame will lead you down the dark path of anger and hate and all the negativity that dwells there.

Forgiveness is really our only option if we hope to hold love in our hearts.  Offer forgiveness, do it for your offender, and do it for you.  For a heart that holds a grudge will carry a festering wound and that wound will have to be nursed for as long as you allow it to exist.  And it will require more than just daily attending, it will need walls erected to protect it, and maintaining that fortress will exhaust your energy until one day it becomes all-consuming and your focus is solely on protecting your wound and the force that caused it, until the very thing you hoped to never happen again is all you can see, and your world becomes a defensive one, and all things you experience are colored and marked by the pain you are holding onto and you will be fortifying the pain.

Sometimes the pain you will suffer will cloud all the blessings in front of you, creating for yourself a skewed perspective on the world in front of you, and making your journey away from the experience that started it all a much harder trek.  You will have to climb hard and long to free yourself of the hold pain can bring, but when you climb long enough you will begin to see that the suffering you are enduring is actually self-inflicted.

Someone once said, “pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

The first thing we humans do when encountering pain is look to who we think caused it, and then we begin to place blame, and then comes judgement, followed by shaming, leading to the horrific forces of hate and anger.

When you find yourself wallowing in all this negativity you will not have to look far to see where it is coming from. Your struggle with pain eventually becomes you own doing, and in time, your undoing.  You supposed perpetrator has moved on long ago.

We can trace all suffering back to our inability to let something go, our inability to accept what is and hold fast to our high and mighty stance of what we think is justice.  But this kind of thinking will only breed more suffering and bury you in a world of negativity, until your climb out is much farther than it was before.

Lighten your load and forgive, free both yourself and the inflicting party of the past to realize what your future can hold.

Seek not to justify your pain and/or your revenge.  I understand greatly now the passage, “let vengeance be mine.”  It is a means to freedom and living with your heart wide open, allowing it to be full of understanding and compassion.

Choose forgiveness without having to be dragged to your knees, for it surely will.  Harboring blame or ill will towards any who hurt you will direct the point of the arrow back to you again and again.

If you want to stop the pain, let go of the past and free yourself of the very wound where it exists.

There have been times in my life when I felt death would be a much easier option than living, because of the pain I held in my heart.

I knew not nor understood how to relieve myself of this pain until I sat with it so long that it nearly broke me.

I have wallowed in it, taken it to bed, woken up with it, and even tried wearing it as a shield, yet still the pain stayed and invited with it its friends anger, hate, jealousy, blame, shame, and eventually guilt.

It was only with much deep reflection that I realized I held the salve all along.  It took years for me to understand that I, and only I, held the one thing that would stop the pain and heal the wound, and that one thing is forgiveness.

In order to take the dagger out of my own heart, I had to first take the dagger out of the one I held it in, the one I believed had wronged me.

Forgiveness is such a simple thing to do, but far from easy.  Mahatma Ghandhi so brilliantly and compassionately shared with us, “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”

We will be tried a thousand times over in this lifetime before we master forgiveness.

We will meet experience after experience until we can offer up forgiveness with no resistance.  And when that time comes our walk here on this earth will be much easier and we will change our future terrain.

Copyright 2017 Melody White. All Rights Reserved.

Love vs Fear

Knocking Down the Fort

The Heart is the most resilient of all things on earth.  It can be broken a million times over and repair itself a million times over, because it houses the most powerful energy in all the world – love.

When hurt and wounded, the owner of the heart ultimately has only one choice, but may take many lifetimes to surrender to that fact.  More often than not, when wounded the owner of the heart seals off the broken piece and allows the wound to fester and infect the whole being.

This, in turn, switches the chief operating force of love off and switches on the operating force of fear, and there lies the birthplace of the many afflictions of the world – hate, anger, jealousy, and the most callous enemy of all, indifference.

The carrier of such a heart then repeats the same experiences that caused the switch to flip in the first place, seeking to set itself right. It, the heart, will endure all that is necessary to change this and reestablish love as its director.

Pain is a hard thing to sit with, and pain of the heart, the most brutal. We humans will do just about anything to avoid the afflictions, and run hard to outpace the pain.

We work hard building a fortress to protect the heart from what initially gave the first hit, thereby placing in motion the energy field that will continue to bring about experiences that will try and knock the fort down and allow the wound to heal.

For many of us, we are unaware that we have done all this construction, as the very humanness of us causes us to do so.

We build the fort and are on the lookout for any incoming attempt for such a pain to dare come again, never realizing the very act of erecting such a thing literally invites similar experiences back, and hoping that this time, the human will choose differently and allow the heart to remain open to the pain so that it can heal.

To stay open to pain requires a mighty warrior, one who will allow love to stay in place and not close off any pieces in order to protect the heart.

Now that I have come through over a half a century of living, I understand more fully what it means to live with your Heart Wide Open.  I am far from being fully there, but I can at least appreciate and be grateful for the awareness to try and do so.

Copyright 2017 Melody White. All Rights Reserved.