Forgiveness renews connection, enhances our compassion, and allows us to create a clean slate so we can begin anew. It allows us to remain engaged in positive interactions with others even when there has been an emotional injury. Practicing forgiveness consistently sustains unconditional love and connectedness with others. Such positive interactions support positive health benefits and loving connected relationships.
Forgiveness also promotes well-being because it helps up you regulate and release your negative emotions. Through forgiveness, you can clear any negative emotions that block trust and intimacy in your relationships. It assists you in digging deep into your insecurity and addresses the source of these negative emotions, not just the symptoms. Mostly, the more you forgive yourself, the more you will find it easier to forgive others. It frees you from the past and opens the energetic space for you to create a better future.
In repeatedly avoiding pain—especially pain associated with your past—you forfeit opportunities to heal yourself and thereby transform your future. Sadly, many people wait until a crisis or even the approach of death before forgiving themselves and others for events that are years, decades, or even half a century old. Too often, end-of-life professionals such as hospice workers, priests, and ministers witness individuals’ grievances and regrets about the past when the time to create change has run out. Harboring anger, grievances, or regrets only binds you to your past and fosters more negativity.
The greatest gift you can give yourself—at this very moment—is forgiveness, for it transforms judgment into acceptance and makes the past powerless over you. To heal your pain, you must find the courage to forgive yourself and others, the strength to suspend judgment, and the compassion to release your suffering.
Here is my tried and true forgiveness practice that I use for forgiving small, daily grievances to deep hurts and disappointments:
When you think of a person in your life who may have hurt or harmed you, practice opening your heart, visualizing them as spiritual beings, and forgiving their human frailties. Use the mantra “Bless and Release,” and compassionately bless their spiritual beings in white light and release their dysfunctional patterns and choices in pink light.
Use this spiritual practice when you want to disconnect the physical energy from impacting you negatively. Specifically, the vibration of pink light energy governs the physical universe so it short circuits the negativity, isolates it, and cuts the energy on it. In these moments, reflect on the connection between your heart and the other person’s. Then bless the individual. This tool can be used to release blame or judgment and to more quickly forgive yourself or others. The practice of forgiveness creates new space for positive energy to return to you, and opens more space in your heart for you to love yourself.
Forgiveness as a spiritual practice is an act of love in which you focus energy through your heart center, and bless and release anything that does not align with who you truly are. The heart becomes an energetic clearinghouse that transforms grievance and resentment into love and compassion, and dissolves any emotional injury attached to the person or situation. By forgiving, and truly letting go, you make the past powerless over your life.
