Читать книгу The Woman's Book of Spirit - Sue Patton Thoele - Страница 17

FORGIVENESS IS NOT OPTIONAL IF YOU WISH to walk a spiritual path. Practicing the art of forgiveness is essential for keeping our spirits green and gloriously alive. Not being able or willing to forgive those who have hurt us blocks God's love from entering our hearts and dams the flow of love going from us toward others.

Not forgiving binds us to our tormentor and to the original injury, keeping it fresh and current even if it is actually old and stale. Definitely a losing proposition! In reality, we don't forgive someone because it is good for the other person; we forgive in order to free our own hearts and souls and return ourselves to a state of love.

Tiffany was finding it very difficult to forgive her mother who drank herself to death when Tiffany was a teenager. The years preceding her mother's death were filled with neglect and embarrassment that had left deep scars. Grieving the fact that she had never really had a mother and venting her anger about her loss was important in Tiffany's healing. But eventually she realized that she didn't want to carry the ghost of her mother on her back for the rest of her life, and so she made a commitment to forgiving her.

Tiffany found it very helpful to picture her mother and then imagine that she could look through the drinker's facade and see the wounded, scared, and ignorant part of her mother who needed to disrupt everyone's lives. It was much easier to forgive the little girl inside her mother, who had also had a difficult childhood, than it was to forgive the woman who had made Tiffany's miserable.

In any forgiveness practice, it's important to remember that we can't see the whole spiritual picture. We don't know precisely what lessons our souls have signed up for in their evolutionary process. What we do know is that being able to forgive ourselves and others opens our hearts to the flow of divine energy.

I am willing to forgive _____.

I forgive _____.