Forgiveness is important — forgiving others and also forgiving ourselves. All forgiveness means is I am going to stop being angry about it. We see that anger is making us suffer. Somebody may have done something horrible to us, something painful and harmful, but forgiveness means that I am not going to be angry about it. When we are holding that anger as a grudge and we want to retaliate, or when we are turning the anger inwards on ourselves and we are feeling guilty, that anger is keeping us in prison. We do not need external walls in our prison, our thoughts can do it.

We can look at a mistake or a mistaken action and call it for what it is without being angry. This is something many people do not realise. They think as soon as there is something that they do not like or as soon as there is something that they think is unfair, the only way they can respond is to be angry about it. But that is not true. We can respond in many different ways.

What happened in the past is not happening now. They did it once, but every day when we go through it again, our thought is doing it to us again. When we say, “No this happened in the past. It is not happening now. I need to make peace with the past. I need to forgive what people did in the past. Have some compassion for them for what they did. They were wanting to be happy and they were so confused that they thought harming other living beings was going to make them happy.” Isn’t that a situation for compassion for the total confusion in somebody else’s mind? It really is. All that person was trying to do was to be happy. But wow! They were in so much confusion and so much internal pain. They thought they were going to bring happiness to themselves, but instead they brought about the exact opposite and harmed me and other people in the process.

“365 Gems of Wisdom” e-book is out now!