Colin Tipping, author of Radical Forgiveness, theorizes that before we incarnated,we made agreements with certain souls to come here together with the explicit intention to help each other learn our life lessons. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I do find that there are a handful of people that repeatedly give me my daily forgiveness lessons.
Although some of life's lessons happen with people we only know for a short period of time, most of our biggest lessons come as we learn to accept and forgive the people we deal with on a daily basis. Our families, our co-workers, our friends...we love 'em...and sometimes we hate 'em! After all, whose flaws do we experience the most, red and raw and right in our faces?
As I work to forgive the same small handful of people again and again, I begin to feel a great gratitude for each one of them. It is their presence in my life that is helping me to know myself and to release and forgive what needs to go from my own mind.
When we feel annoyed with others, we are actually annoyed with a certain aspect of ourselves. I had great resistance for this concept at first, but as I have worked with it over time, coming eventually to accept it, I now know that it is truth. More importantly, I repeatedly see the evidence of it in my own life.
At first it seemed impossible that I was actually seeing my own negative traits in others and reacting to them. It was so much easier to project the things that were wrong with my life outward, to blame them on others. "They" were the wrong ones. "They" were bad. "They" were faulty, imperfect and flawed. "They" were the ones requiring forgiveness.
For example, it used to upset me to be around people who expressed anger and short tempered-ness. What was wrong with them? Why couldn't they just get on with life without tantruming about everything? It was all so hugely unpleasant.
However, when I finally worked up the courage to look deeply into my own psyche around this issue, I saw that there was suppressed anger lurking in the depths. I grew up in a family where it was not okay to express anger. We were always "nice" people. However, I see now that I actually have a great deal of anger that I have been suppressing, hiding it from the world, and in the process, hiding it from myself, too. Now that I know it's there, I can work to forgive and release it.
Since we are here to learn love and acceptance, it stands to reason that we will draw into our lives people who will help us do this. We will attract people that will sometimes annoy and even hurt us because they are here to show us what we need to accept and forgive, both within ourselves and in others.
The irony of all this is that when we finally deeply forgive and completely accept the people we love (and "hate") in our daily lives, we are not going to need these particular lessons anymore. When this happens, the people we love will become more lovable to us. We will feel less annoyed with them, or they will simply cease to be annoying. Sometimes we mutually release each other and someone will move on. Most people will stay, but under happier circumstances. Whatever happens, with forgiveness, we can know that it will all be for the betterment of everyone involved. That's because forgiveness leads to happiness.
Available at:
barnesandnoble.com
amazon.com
balboapress.com
No comments:
Post a Comment