Forgiveness
Have you ever held a grudge? Isn’t that exhausting? When we don’t let go of that memory; we’re just angry, with hard feelings. Someone told me that holding a grudge is like trying to hold on to molasses. It’s exhausting, and it just doesn’t work out.
I had a coach that would say resentment is like drinking poison and hoping that it hurts your enemy. It is better for your health to be forgiving. Forgiving means to give as before. Ask yourself: am I going to hold on to this till the end of my life? Is it worth carrying around? Is it worth the knots in my liver that it’s going to create, this tightness and this hardness in my heart and small intestine? If you’re going to let go of it eventually… try to let go of it sooner, rather than later.
Willie Nelson said, “forgiving is easy, but forgetting seems to takes the longest time.” It’s not exactly true forgiveness if you don’t forget also; you just let it go. My friend, Randy says that true forgiveness is when the thought of the person can pass through your mind and your heart without any kind of ill feeling.
So, practice forgiving, if not for them, practice it for yourself. Classical Chinese Medicine relates emotions and virtues to the organs of the body. For instance, anger can relate to the liver. Therefore, holding on to resentments can affect your liver and then you have to do something to relieve that tension. If you don’t practice forgiveness, it’s usually whiskey or something that’s not very sustainable to relive the tension. If whiskey is your practice for dealing with your anger, then you have two problems. You have the anger you started with and the whiskey and the problems caused by the whiskey.
The Taoists have practices for dealing with negative emotions and recycling that energy into positive emotions and vitality. The Six Healing Sounds release negative energy. Emotional Alchemy: The Fusion of the Five Elements transforms negative emotion into positive emotion. The Inner Smile builds gratitude and appreciate as the default pattern. One can learn more about these and other practices in The Alchemist’s Tao Te Ching: Transforming Your Lead Into Gold