How do you feel about forgiveness? Are there still people and situations that you are holding to resentment about? How do you feel about forgiving yourself?

The path of consciously creating a life of full of freedom and love is a continuous process of manifesting and clearing: manifesting is reaching into the future, into your vortex, to summon your desires into your reality and clearing is removing the blocks and behaviours that are keeping you stuck. Forgiveness is a clearing practice, and not necessarily an easy one.

Can you imagine that your body and your mind can hold a limited number of ideas, memories and feelings, that your body and mind are split up into different compartments containing all these experiences, and how you feel about them. Now let’s think of a happy, positive time – how does it feel in your body? To me it feels light and bright like a bunch of fairies dancing about on a breeze. Now bring to mind a bad or sad experience – how does that feel? To me it feels like a brick, weighted down with a barbell tied up with a massive anchor – heavy right? Past resentments and feelings of guilt are just that, they are heavy and weigh us down.

We can release much of that weight by letting go of the resentment, we let go of the resentment through forgiveness. Allow me to add that forgiving someone doesn’t condone their behaviour, it doesn’t mean you have to like them or have anything to do with them, it’s actually not about them at all. It’s about you.

For me the biggest challenge in the practice of forgiveness is to forgive myself. I can quite easily see how others have caused me hurt and suffering as a result of their own pain and destructive tendencies. But shouldn’t I have known better? How did I let that happen? Often I need to forgive things I have done, or decisions I have made, which have only really hurt myself.

So how do we actually forgive others and ourselves? I suggest writing a list of people, situations and/ or organisations who you still feel hurt by or resentment towards, this is usually quite an easy list to make as these experiences stay relatively fresh in our minds (taking up valuable space that we want to fill with beautiful thoughts and dreams and images of unicorns :-)). Going over the list though may not be so easy, it may bring up some of those old feelings and stir up emotions you have buried. Give yourself some space and lots of love during this process.

You can take one thing from your list each day and sit with it, feel the emotions, perhaps you run through the series of events in your head. Now can you start to look beyond the impact it had on you for a moment and question what was toxic, what was in pain and what was suffering in that person (or yourself) at that time? Can you start to eek out a little compassion for what pain in the other (or yourself) precipitated the pain you then experienced as a result? As I said you don’t need to condone it, you don’t need to make it OK, you can forgive things that are absolutely not OK.

You can repeat to yourself: ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you’. This process may take time and some resentments and past hurts will probably take numerous intentions to forgive before you are able to fully let go. Know that each step you take on this journey to forgiveness is clearing out heavy, negative compartments from your body, and from your energetic field, in order to make space for the good, happy and delightful to come in. It is not easy, but it is 100% worth it.