"Holding on to anger, resentment and hurt only gives you tense muscles, a headache, and a sore jaw from clenching your teeth. Forgiveness gives you back the laughter and the lightness in your life."
- Joan Lunden
It's true. The more we forgive, the more peaceful we feel. And the more we forgive (which heals our minds), the more we actually heal our physical bodies, too.
Our bodies are repositories for past pain and hurt. Unfortunately, if we hang onto these old harmful memories, we are also holding onto the pain and, over time, that pain is likely to transform into disease.
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Using forgiveness, we can clear our bodies of the physical symptoms that are left over from old emotional hurts.
There are several ways to remove old deposited pain from our bodies. For serious past wounds, I find it helpful to use several forgiveness processes.
First, if I can pinpoint an event in my life that caused the wound, I'll forgive all the people involved. It only takes me a few minutes to do this and I always use the same words and thoughts. They are simple to learn. Most importantly, time and time again, they have helped me to switch my mind over from fear (hurt and anger) to love. If you're not sure how to forgive people that have caused you injury, you might want to download an audio recording I've made to guide you though this process. Once you listen to it a few times, you'll be able to forgive anyone easily, too. This process helps you forgive individual people on a mental level.
Download and transfer to your iphone. Cost: $2.99
Next, I'll tackle the physical component of forgiveness. I'll go to work on the places in my body those old painful memories are stored. I do this by remembering carefully all the details of the past event. I try to put myself back in that moment of hurt and anger and I try to jack up my memories and corresponding emotions as much as possible.
As I re-experience this old wound, I observe my body, noticing any stress symptoms that might show up. Sometimes this is a racing heartbeat, a tightening of the chest, a feeling of warmth rising in my head or a stabbing pain in my stomach. The physical symptoms are different for different past hurts.
Now I just sit and observe, amplifying the emotions and memories as much as I can. Sometimes the pain moves around and changes. Other times, memories from similar events that occurred in other times and places come to mind. I allow this all to flow through my mind and my body, simply observing and feeling whatever feelings come up. It's important to let this process run its course thoroughly so that the memories will dissipate and lift from the body.
There is a more detailed description of this in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness". I've also created another guided audio meditation for this process. It's easy to download to your computer. You can then upload it to your phone so you can use it with your headphones whenever you have a quiet moment to yourself. I like to do a lot of my forgiveness work in bed at night before sleep but you can do this anywhere you can find the quiet you need to concentrate.
Easy to use, guided meditation to forgive and release physical symptoms from past hurts. $2.99
EFT, or emotional freedom technique is a process where you speak words that describe painful memories and feelings while tapping on acupressure points. This tapping somehow disconnects and clears through the pain stored in the body from the memory. It seems odd, but surprisingly, it works. EFT has become a widely respected technique used by therapists around the world. To learn more, watch this quickie video with Jessica Ortner.
EFT is an effective technique for clearing stored and painful memories from the body and I do feel that this is a form of forgiveness. However, the most healing work is mental. It is important to combine EFT with some prior deep mental work such as the two guided processes above. In this way, we are forgiving and clearing first in the mind and then following up with a clearance and healing in physical form.
Of course, if we heal the mental, eventually the body will follow. With EFT, we are just speeding up the process.
