Closure and resolution are powerful medications. No war, fight, or abuse of power has ever come from love and forgiveness. Our free will is our true power. It is the seed of our divinity. The process of death, the pain we’ve endured, the life we live can be forever changed in one single choice. Did we choose to forgive? Did we choose to let the pain end with us?
Choosing to take responsibility for our life is a journey back to self over and over. Those who carry love and forgiveness in their hearts every day are those who have found this path. It is easy to say that you are…It is challenging to be. Allowing forgiveness to guide your heart means sacrificing your pain. It means surrendering your judgment. Carrying the pain of the world can seem a noble cause. Forgiving is difficult; carrying compassion for that pain and not being consumed is the purest means. It alleviates the weight of judgment and guilt.
Discernment is more than the ability to judge well. It is seeing the truth within and casting that truth forward. It is the responsibility to self that creates accountability toward our personal judgments. The ability to forgive allows the closure that hangs over the pain. When pain enters our life from an outside source, our immediate response is to judge it. Labeling of it as bad for us stokes a rage of indignation. We become the judge, the jury, and the executioner. In our perception of self, we do not see the pain of the other. We wish to harm and carry that perception forward. It is true that bad things happen to good people. It is carrying the duality of good or bad; it is in asking why me, where the disconnect from the whole is, and in the voice of the ego, we perceive our pain as greater than any others. It closes the mind and heart to compassion. It locks us into the pain.
Starting to be compassionate to self is the first step to freeing ourselves from the pain that is innate to our very life. Recognizing the inner critic and the lack of perfection allows forgiveness to open the door to freedom. Compassion for self means allowing the voices in our heads to be recognized for what they are. They are the echoes of the unresolved past. It is the perception of others bouncing off the walls of our minds. Ask those voices who they are to judge. You can only compare your uniqueness to your own. Your individuality and purity are your guides to being the perfection of you. No other can be you, and you can be no other. When you recognize the darkness in all of us and understand we each have the capacity to be the shadow, it is easier to forgive the darkness of others.
As the veil grows ever thinner, we are able to glimpse our eternity. We can see the beautiful depths of what is beyond ourselves and what is within. Great change happens one small step at a time. If we can begin to forgive ourselves, we will have more space to forgive others.