Being able to find freedom through forgiveness sounds impossible when you are holding onto so much anger and resentment from whatever betrayal you feel has been perpetrated against you, but I’m asking you, for your own sake, please don’t take it with you into the next year.
As it happens, every single moment of every single day is an opportunity to begin again with a clean slate, but for some reason, we as a species have agreed upon the arbitrary date of January 1st to be the beginning of a new cycle (personally, I see the Solstice as being a more natural point but it matters not). This New Year then can be heavily symbolic of all our hopes and dreams for a fresh start.
The single biggest threat to your new beginning though, is your inability to let go of the past and to carry it and all its associated judgements with your into the next cycle.
I cannot imagine holding onto the pain of past disappointments and wearing them like a badge of honour as what I had to endure… who would that make me? Unforgiveness is a mark of victimhood long after the incident is long since gone. It is the repeat pattern of self-imposed torture and the reinvigorating of the painful emotions associated with what is no longer current… worse still, it is your complicity in continuing to wield the weapon that was originally used to harm you… you therefore repeatedly energetically self-harm on the behalf of your abuser who has nothing to do other than to sit back and enjoy your suffering if they are so inclined.
Forgiveness is a lesson not in divinity but in humanity. To be human is hard, its also terrifying at times because where once you, as a soul, were invincible and eternal, you have now been thrust into a fragile, vulnerable outer shell that appears to have a finite existence and no recollection of the truth of who you are or why you came. The separateness from those around you has you seeking to connect but scrambling to remain apart for fear that some of your finite resources might be usurped even if those resources are your energy and your reputation (and your pride and your false sense of the definition you have givien to yourself). You’ve lost perspective because you forgot that what hurts you hurts the whole and what hurts the whole ultimately hurts you and so you endeavour to perpetuate the bile of anger and spew it at those who hurt you… becoming a mirror of their actions instead of a transmuter of all lower vibrations… a light guiding others back to wholeness.
You didn’t come to carry pain, you came to expand through the experience of it and every other sensation, seemingly good or bad. You came to be a good student and a co-creative bridge-builder between heaven and earth… but you cannot build bridges whist you are burning them down and closing your heart to all experiences that might be reminiscent of something that turned sour once upon a time. Please don’t take it with you.
You do not have to invite the individual that caused you harm into your orbit again, you do not have to formally say the words “I forgive you” to them at all. Forgiveness is a deeply personal act of recognising the fallibility, frailty and vulnerability in another human being that caused them, always through fear, to act out, and then remembering the power within you to let go of what doesn’t serve your highest good and allow light back in to heal the space where the darkness was once poisoning you from the inside out.
How to find freedom through forgiveness will be the subject of one of the workshops I will be running in early 2020. If you haven’t managed to leave it behind in 2019 then I would be honoured to guide you through the healing process. Look out for details soon.
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Love Jo x
Ps… Did you catch the Dragons this week? Click here to go to the free reading on YouTube
