How to Forgive Someone Who Has Hurt You - 15 Steps

Ignite Your Inner Magic on Grow your Soul Radio With Jane Matanga 

EPISODE: 8

DESCRIPTION: FORGIVING OTHERS, YOUR NEW AGREEMENT, LEARN TO LET GO, TAKING RESPONSIBILITY, LET GO OF RESENTMENT, BE KIND, PRACTICE GIVING, STOP LOOKING FOR OCCASIONS TO BE OFFENDED, DON’T LIVE IN THE PAST, REFRAIN FROM JUDGEMENT, EMBRACE YOUR DARK TIMES, SEND LOVE.

SEGMENT 1: FORGIVING OTHERS

Forgiving others is essential for spiritual growth.  Your experience of someone who has hurt you, while painful, is now nothing more than a thought or feeling that you carry around.  These thoughts of resentment, anger, or hatred represent slowly debilitating energies that will disempower you, if you continue to let these thoughts occupy space in your head.  If you could release them, you would know more peace and happiness.

Below I am sharing how to forgive someone who has hurt you in 15 steps.

 STEP 1: MOVE ON TO YOUR NEXT ACT

Your past history and all your hurt are no longer here in your physical reality.  Don’t allow them to be here in your mind, muddying your present moments.  Your life is like a play with many acts.  Some of the characters enter have short roles to play, others much larger.  Some are villains and others are good guys.  But all of them are necessary; otherwise they wouldn’t be in the play.  Embrace them all, and move on to the next act.

STEP 2: RECONNECT TO YOUR SPIRIT

Make a new agreement with yourself to always stay connected to your spirit even when it seems to be the most difficult thing to do.  If you do this, you will allow whatever degree of perfect harmony that your body was designed, to expand.  Turn your hurts over to your higher self and allow this spirit to flow through you.

Your new agreement with reality, in which you’ve blended your physical self and your personality with your spiritual-God connected self, will begin to radiate a higher energy of love and light. 

 STEP 3: DON’T GO TO SLEEP ANGRY

Don’t use your time to review anything that you do not want, reinforced in the hours of being immersed in your subconscious mind.  Choose to be in alignment with your true nature.  Choose to think positive and loving thoughts.  “ I am peaceful, I am content, I am love and I attract only to myself, those thoughts that are in alignment with my higher ideals of myself.”

“In sleep man impresses the subconscious.”

-Neville Goddard

STEP 4: SWITCH THE FOCUS FROM BLAMING OTHERS TO UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF.

Whenever you’re upset over the conduct of others, take the focus off those you’re holding responsible for your inner conflict.  Shift your mental energy to allowing yourself to be with whatever you’re feeling~ Let the experience be as it may, without blaming others for your feelings.  Don’t blame yourself either!  Just allow the experience to unfold and tell yourself that, no one has the power to make you uneasy without your consent and that you’re unwilling to grant that power to this person right now.  Tell yourself that you are willing to freely experience your emotions, without calling them “wrong” or needing to chase them away.  In this way, you’ve made a shift to self-mastery.  It’s important to bypass blame and to even bypass your desire to understand the other person, instead, focus on understanding yourself.  By taking responsibility for how you choose to respond to anything, or anyone, you’re aligning yourself with the “beautiful dance of life.” 

By changing the way you choose to perceive the power that others have over you, you will see a bright new world of unlimited potential for yourself and you will instantly know how to forgive and let go of anything.

SEGMENT 2: LEARNING TO LET GO

STEP 5: AVOID TELLING PEOPLE WHAT TO DO

Avoid thoughts and activities that involve telling people what to do.  In your family and elsewhere, remember that you do not own anyone.  The poet Kahill Gibran reminds us:b “ Your children are not your children.  They are sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.  They come through you but not from you” . . .

This is always true.  In fact, disregard any inclination to dominate in all of your relationships.  Listen rather than expound.  Pay attention to yourself when you’re having judgmental opinions and see where self- attention takes you.  When you replace ownership mentally, with one of allowing, you’ll begin to see the true unfolding of the universes flows in yourself and experience more peace.  From that moment on, you will be free of frustration with those who don’t behave according to your expectations.

STEP 6: LEARN TO LET GO

Rather than attempting to dominate with your forcefulness, be like water: flow everywhere there’s an opening.  Soften your hard edges by being more tolerant of contrary opinions.  Interfere less, and substitute listening for directing and telling.  When someone offers you his or her viewpoint, try responding with. “I’ve never considered that before, thank you.  I’ll give it some thought”.  Flow softly into the lives of those with whom you feel conflicted.  

Allow yourself to see what they are experiencing and watch how your relationships change.

STEP 7: TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR PART

Removing blame means never assigning responsibility to anyone else for what you’re experiencing.  It means that you’re willing to say, “ I may not understand why I feel this way, why I have this illness, why I’ve been victimized, or why I had this accident, but I’m willing to say without any guilt, or resentment that I own it.   I live with and I am responsible for having it in my life.  If you take responsibility for having the experience then, at least you have a chance to also take responsibility for removing it or learning from it.   Then you can go to work to remove it or discover what its message is for you. 

On the other hand, if in your mind someone or something else is responsible, then you’ll have to wait until they change for you to get better.  This is unlikely to occur,  so you are left with nothing, when peace is really on the other side. 

SEGMENT 3: CREATING A HAPPIER LIFE

STEP 8: LET GO OF RESENTMENTS

What causes annoyance and anger after a dispute?  The general response would be a laundry list detailing why the other person was wrong and how logically and unreasonably they behaved, concluding with something like.  “I have a right to be upset when ------------- whomever you’re thinking of speaks to me that way.”  But if you’re interested in having a happy life, it’s important that you reverse this kind of thinking.  Resentment doesn’t come from the conduct of the other party in an altercation.  No, they survive and thrive because you are unwilling to end that altercation with an offering of kindness, love and forgiveness.

Remember that no storm lasts forever and that hidden within any storm are always seeds of opportunity.

STEP 9: BE KIND INSTEAD OF RIGHT

The world is just the way it is.  The people who are behaving “badly” in the world are doing what they’re supposed to be doing.  You can process it any way that you choose.  If you’re filled with anger about all of those “problems”, you are one more person who contributes to the others wrong.  Instead, remember that you have no need to make others wrong or retaliate when you’ve been wronged. 

Learn to depersonalize what you’ve heard and respond with kindness.

STEP 10: PRACTICE GIVING

In the midst of arguments or disagreements, practice giving rather than taking before you leave the argument. Giving involves leaving your ego behind.  While your ego wants to win and show it’s superiority, your true nature wants to be at peace and live in harmony.  You can reduce your quarreling time to almost zero, if you practice this step.

Be a giver of forgiveness.  Bring love to hate, light to darkness, and pardon to injury.

STEP 11: STOP LOOKING FOR OCCASIONS TO BE OFFENDED

Often we spend a great deal of time and energy finding opportunities to be offended.  Become a person who refuses to be offended by anyone, anything, or any set of circumstances.  Not being offended is a way of saying, “ I have control over how I’m going to feel and I choose to feel peaceful regardless of what I observe going on.  When you feel offended, you’re practicing judgment.  You judge someone else and then you find yourself upset and offended by his or her conduct.  

What you may not realize is that when you judge another person, you do not define them, you define yourself as someone who needs to judge others. 

SEGMENT 4: BE PRESENT

STEP 12: DON’T LIVE IN THE PAST~ BE PRESENT

When we find it difficult to forgive, often it is because we are not living in the present.  Instead, we assign more importance to the past.  When we assign a good portion of our energy and attention to complaining and talking about the good old days that are gone, we can’t be happy and fulfilled today. 

“Everything has changed.”  This is assigning responsibility to the past for why you can’t be happy today.   We can learn much about enjoying the present moment rather than using it up consumed with anger over the past or worry about the future.  Practice living in the moment, by appreciating the beauty around you now.

STEP 13: EMBRACE YOUR CHALLENGING TIMES

We live in a universe that’s an intelligent system with a divine creative force supporting it.    As tough as it is to acknowledge, you had to go through what you went through in order to get where you are today and the evidence is that you did.  Every spiritual advance that you will make in your life will very likely be preceded by some kind of fall or seeming disaster.  Those dark times, accidents, tough episodes, breakups, periods of impoverishment, illness, abuses, and broken dreams were all meant for your spiritual growth.  They happened, so you can assume they had to and you can’t undo them. 

Once you can embrace them from that viewpoint, understand them, accept them, honor them, and then you will finally be able to transform them.

STEP 14: REFRAIN FROM JUDGEMENT

When you stop judging and simply become an observer, you will know inner peace.  You’ll find yourself happier and free of the negative energy of resentment.  If you are able to be a being of love, living from your highest self, then that means that “love is who you are.”

If someone you love chooses to be something other than what your ego would prefer, you must send him or her, the essence of your highest self, which is love.

STEP 15: SEND LOVE

We do occasionally slip and retreat from our highest self into judgment and criticism, but this is not the rationale for choosing to practice that kind of interaction and lifestyle.  Send love in place of those judgments and criticisms to others when you feel they impact your joy and happiness.  Hold them in a place of love.  Notice that if you stay steadfast, as Dr. Wayne Dyer reminds us, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”  Rather than reacting with old patterns of anger, revenge, hurt; visualize offering kindness, love and forgiveness. 

Make this your standard response to any future altercations.  End on love no matter what!  Whatever the problem, love is the answer.

“THE BEST AND MOST BEAUTIFUL THINGS IN THE WORLD CANNOT BE SEEN OR EVEN TOUCHED~THEY MUST BE FELT WITH THE HEART.” ~Hellen Keller