Forgiveness is the key to a good life and therefore I would like to share an excerpt from a chapter in my book, “Take Charge of Your Life – Before Someone Else Does” (at present being translated to English)
Are we walking around “like a ticking bomb”?
Forgiveness is most important for finding inner peace. We all, at a conscious or subconscious level, go around with feelings that arouse hate, resentment and bitterness. Just think how these feelings lie there and build up inside us until, in some way or some form, we explode. Sometimes we use the expression: “like a ticking bomb.” Forgiveness is an element that can set the pent-up feelings free so that we can feel better.
Forgiveness also calls forth the most resistance within us, partly because we’ve learned that some things are unforgivable. We just don’t understand why we should forgive someone who has done us wrong.
Hate and grudges must be eliminated
Hate and love cannot exist in a person at the same time, and if we want access to the resources that are related to unconditional love and all that is good, we must eliminate hate, resentment and evil. A good way to do that is to forgive.
While searching to regain the feeling I had when near death, I quickly understood that I needed to use my mental techniques for forgiveness, among other things. I had stored a lot of hate and hurt feelings during my life that I realized were eating me up from the inside. However, forgiving someone who had caused me pain was a very high threshold for me to climb over, very high indeed. To be honest, I became provoked when anyone talked about the subject. I needed to really understand and use thoughts about wholeness in order to overcome the feeling of being provoked.
As a young girl I had been abused by a doctor for a length of time. I don’t see any need to go further into detail about that. Everyone can understand that assaults like that leave many and painful wounds. A couple of years before that I had been raped by an adult man who also had misused his position to take advantage of me.
It’s not about guilt
Many of the feelings that haunted me were guilt feelings and enormous self-hate that are quite common after that type of experience. All kinds of thoughts come up: “If I hadn’t worn a skirt, it wouldn’t have happened,” or “if I hadn’t developed at such an early age, it wouldn’t have happened,” and the criticism is usually directed towards all that we should not have done. I had in fact been a child, and now I’m to forgive the rapists? A child is not at fault in cases like this, but this is not about someone being at fault.
What it is about is that I had experienced it, and in order for me to free myself from these thoughts they needed to be processed. I can scream and cry and say that I won’t forgive, or I can say: OK, this has ruined my life for 25 years. Do I want to allow it to continue to ruin my life? For that is what I do when I let thoughts about it steer me.
Must I forgive?
“Must I forgive?” some people say. “I don’t want to forgive my ex, because he/she does not deserve it!” Oh yes, I say, everyone deserves to be forgiven. If we cannot forgive others then we will not be able to forgive ourselves either, and our world will never be a peaceful place.
PS: Unfortunately, many people misunderstand forgiveness. It is basically about freeing oneself from self-destruction, so that we can live on with inner peace within ourselves.
It is possible when we learn how to do it.
Deborah Borgen
Founder
