The Past is Over

These days, Robert Holden is my favorite author.  In December I read "Loveability". I was so impressed with it that I immediately bought a stack of copies and gave it to everyone I know for Christmas gifts.  My friends and family are just as impressed as I was.  

The day I turned the last page, I closed the book, set it aside for a month, opened it back up and started reading and studying it all over again.  I am now reading "Shift Happens!:  How to Live an Inspired Life" and I love it, too.  Robert Holden has been A Course in Miracles student and teacher for many years, but his explanations and point of view are very easy to understand and he relates so well to anyone's everyday experiences.  

Here's a little bit from a short section in Shift Happens about forgiving the past:

Forgiveness releases you from the past.  When you meditate on forgiveness, you learn that, in fact, there is no past in the MIND of God.  In other words, your past is never held against you unless you make it so.  Guilt is a choice and so is forgiveness.  When you choose guilt, you bury your gifts, you live in fear, and everyone misses what you could offer.  When you choose forgiveness, everyone can win.  

How do you know if you are holding on to your past?  You are unhappy!  When you are struggling, ask yourself, What am I holding on to from the past?  What old thought, old block, or old fear are you still clinging to?   

Holden encourages us to ask ourselves these important questions:

I am afraid of _______because in the past I _____________.

I have given up on ___________because in the past I ____________.

I am depressed now because in the past I ______________.

What are some of the areas in your life where you feel unhappy or unproductive, stymied, thwarted, victimized or stuck in lack?   Spend some time pondering those areas with these questions in mind.  Watch what comes up.  Then let it go.  It's the past.  It has nothing to do with the you of today.  It's holding you back in unhappiness.  It's nothing you need.  Guilt is nothing you need.  Rejection is nothing you need.  Lack is nothing you need.  Let it go.   Know it, feel it, love it and gently let it go.

One way to let these things go is to imagine that the Holy Spirit (your soul, your higher self) has given you a beautiful white light altar and it is right in front of you. This gorgeous marble light altar transforms everything upon it into pure love.  It's the love altar.

When these memories and emotions from the past come up, spend a few moments with them, intensify them and experiencing them all over again.  Then gently and lovingly ask them to place themselves on the altar.  Let them be released, transformed and swept away out of your life forever.  Let go.  Forgiving is the act of letting love replace fear.  It is that point when the miracle appears.

Holden suggests that we can then affirm "The past is over" and "Now is new".  He says, "The moment you let go of your past, you stop projecting it on to the present.

His final paragraph in the section is this:

To let go of your past, do these three things.  First, be willing to forgive yourself for every mistake you think you ever made.  Affirm "The past is over," and let forgiveness wipe away all tears.  Second, if you want to be free of your past mistakes, free everyone from theirs.  In other words, forgive everyone.  Third, pray, "Dear God, I'm back!"  Now let yourself be innocent again, free again, and ready again to say "Yes" to new healing, new happiness and a new futures.

 

 

 

What is Unforgiven is Reposited in Our Bodies

"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.  

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. 

Let It Go

Here is the plain and simple truth...you can never be happy if you are judging and holding a grudge against someone else.  That is how this world works.  It's a universal law.  It just is.  

And yes, I know that it can seem scary to forgive.  It is the unknown pathway.  And we grasp on to our grudges and betrayals.  We cherish them...and nurture them...and our lives become all about them.  I know, I know.  I've been there.

The thing is, here's the truth.  Judgment and grudge-holding are the source of guilt in your life.  And guilt leads to separation from your Source.  

This is not happiness, this is life at it's smallest, most restricted and contracted.  It's not really what you want.  It's only what you think you want.  You simply don't know how to be otherwise.  No one has shown you a better way and a reason to follow it.  

But here it is, right now, right here...  

If you let your judgments and grudges go, you will be happier.  That's it.  So very simple and yet so very big.  You can be a happier person.  Your life can be easier for you.  You can feel safe and cherished in this world.  You can feel trust that you are protected and loved.  You can experience inner peace.  It's all there for you and you just have to do one simple thing...

Let it go.  

Repeating again from yesterday's post, because it bears repeating:

All this is so much bigger than holding onto that miserable pain-inducing, tight-fisted, life-long grudge against that most annoying someone in your life.  This is huge.  This is everything.  Do you see that?  Let it go.  Let it go.  LET IT GO.  Choose to live a happy life.  Choose to know your real truth.  Choose to be so much more than the smallness you are living now.  Forgive and be happy.

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Happiness is Something You Decide On

"The 92-year old, petite, well-poised and proud lady, who is fully dressed each morning by eight o'clock, with her hair done and makeup applied, even though she is legally blind, moved to a nursing home today. Her husband of 70 years recently passed away, making the move necessary.

After many hours of waiting patiently in the lobby of the nursing home, she smiled sweetly when told her room was ready. As she maneuvered her walker to the elevator, I provided a visual description of her tiny room, including the eyelet sheets that had been hung on her window. “I love it,” she stated with the enthusiasm of an eight-year-old having just been presented with a new puppy. 

“Mrs. Jones, you haven’t seen the room ...” 

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she replied. “Happiness is something you decide on ahead of time. Whether I like my room or not doesn’t depend on how the furniture is arranged, it’s how I arrange my mind. I already decided to love it."  --The above story came from Chapter Two Blog .   

Mrs. Jones knows something big.  And this is something that most of us go our entire lives without learning.  Mrs. Jones knows that our thoughts are the one thing in life that we have complete and utter control over.  How we chose to look at the world is the one choice that is ours to make.  Mrs. Jones knows that each of us has the wherewithal to choose to allow only thoughts that ultimately contribute to our happiness to fill our minds.   

Choosing to be happy means that we choose to accept everything that occurs in our lives, even blindness. 

Choosing to be happy means that we learn to trust that whatever occurs is ultimately for our greater good, if we will only let it unfold, watching it with love and acceptance.

Choosing to be happy means that we let go of our habit of judging.  We stop judging the people we encounter, we stop judging the events that occur in our life and we stop judging the world and its conditions.

Choosing to be happy means that we commit to work to forgive the source of our disappointments, pains, losses, lack, discomfort, unhappiness, sadness, frustrations and fear, whatever it may be.  

Choosing to be happy means that it is okay for us to experience and feel real pain and hurt when it shows up in our lives.  It's okay to grieve.  It's okay to gnash ones teeth.  It's okay to howl with frustration.  But then, we release it and move on.  we don't fixate and get stuck in victim-hood.  We forgive.   

Choosing to be happy means that we develop a forgiveness lifestyle, that we practice forgiving whatever pushes our buttons each day in our present, that we forgive the painful events from our past and that we work to uncover the "false beliefs" that we have created as the result of these past events that are creating upsetting, confusing and painful patterns in our present.

And finally. choosing to be happy means that we flip the switch in our mind whenever the ego rears it's ugly head.  We flip the switch from fear to love.  We choose to think with Spirit in our minds.  Whenever we notice that the ego has returned with its thoughts of fear and worry, sadness and disappointment, frustration and anger, hurt and despair...we process, we inquire, we dig deep into our pasts to find the source of these thoughts, we examine, we feel and we release.  And then we kick the ego to the curb and get on with our happy lives.  

Ways the Ego Sets Us Up

The ego loves to set us up in situations that create chaos in our lives.  The ego loves problems.  After all, while we are busy searching around in our earthly lives for the solutions to problems, we are distracted from our true purpose here, which is love.

Earlier this week I wrote about a classic ego set-up that a lot of us experience.  This is something I call "The rug gets pulled out from underneath me".  See here.  This almost always happens when we are the most elated about our lives.  Just when everything is going great, it all changes in an instant and everything goes horribly bad.

Another common ego set-up is "I can't win no matter what I do".  In this set-up, we have people in our life who are going to be very upset with us if we handle things one way and other people (just as important to us) who are going to be upset if we handle things the other way.  There are no alternative choices that will satisfy everyone.

I have a friend that is in this conundrum right now.  She and her sister receive a modest yearly stipend from her mother's trust.  There seems to be a problem with it.  Her sister has hired an expensive lawyer to fix it and expects my friend to share in the costs. My friend's husband believes that by the time the lawyer fixes the problem, his fees will eat up the stipend.  Her sister is angry at her because her husband is involved.  Her husband is angry because her sister is handling it badly, in his opinion.  If my friend let's her sister handle it, her husband will be hurt and angry with her.  If she gets her husband involved, her sister will be hurt and angry with her.  She can't win.

We all have themes we're working on in life.  I see this same friend in similar situations where she can't win occasionally.  This is her theme.

When you find yourself in ego set-ups, the only thing you can do is turn the whole mess over to Spirit.  You can do this two ways.  The first choice...you can just use words and make a statement something like this, "Holy Spirit, I am giving this whole situation regarding (X) over to you.  I know that you will know what to do with it and I trust you to find a solution that is in everyone's best interest."

Alternatively, if you visualize easily, you can create a big beautiful white marble altar in your mind.  Light it up with divine love.  Make it gorgeous, glowing and brilliant.  Just place your problem on the altar and watch it be consumed with heavenly white flames.

After you turn your problem over, what do you do?  Why, nothing, of course.  Spirit's got your back!  If Spirit decides there is some additional action for you to take, you will be informed.  Until that time, just rest in trust and enjoy the peace of knowing that it is not your problem any longer.   Let it go.  Release and forgive.

Turning your problems over is most definitely a form of forgiveness, but there's more forgiveness work we can do here.  When we find a pattern of ego set-ups in our lives, we need to do some soul searching to figure out why they're happening.  What events occurred early in our lives that caused us to create an unconscious false belief that we can't win?  Until we go back and really look at this false belief, we will continue to experience "can't win" ego set ups on a regular basis.  This will take some deep probing and thought.  However, if we ask Spirit for direction and knowing, we will receive the answers we search for.

Then how do we forgive whatever we find in our past?  For something like this, I like to use the "Feel the Feelings" process in Chapter Three of "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".   An easy to use download of this process in the form of a guided meditation is available, Forgive Your Past NOW.  For just $2.99 you will be shown a process that you can use over and over to forgive all kinds of wounds and hurts from your past.  These old injuries are wreaking havoc in your present. Why not do a little forgiveness work on your past and make your life work better for you today?

"The Rug Got Pulled Out From Underneath Me"

I spent today leading a forgiveness workshop and afterward one of the participants asked if I might spend a few minutes helping her understand something about an event from her past.

While doing one of the forgiveness meditations, she became aware that there were various elements associated with a particular event and wanted to know why that was.  I let her know that, yes, our bigger forgiveness lessons often have many aspects associated with them.  Big painful events are often complicated and the emotion we feel about them tends to make then seem even more complicated in our minds.

When she began to speak about what happened, her face took on a confused clouded expression and she had a difficult time grasping what we were discussing, even though it was all easily clear and obvious to me. As we were making a list of the aspects of this event that she needed to forgive, she kept asking me to repeat each one over and over so she could write it down.  She would write down a word or two of my sentence and get completely lost and ask me to repeat it again. Now, this is a very smart woman, but her painful memories were creating emotional blocks that were keeping her from thinking in her normal clear head.

Here are the simple facts about the event that transpired in her past.  She was a young girl and she was given her first bicycle.  She was so excited that she could ride it that she wanted to share her joy and rode down the block to show her best friend.  She felt elated that she could ride, proud of her new bike and excited to share with her friend.  When she rode back home, her father greeted her standing on the corner with a willow switch in his hand which he then beat her with it.

Today in the workshop she was able to see for the first time that his response came from his own fear.  After all, she had ridden off without telling him where she was.  She asked me if her understanding of this now was forgiveness.  My answer is that yes, it is, but only partially.

Anytime you flip the switch from fear thinking to love thinking you are forgiving.  In this case, her willingness to put herself in her father's shoes is an offering of love to him.  This is definitely the start of the forgiveness for her.  

However, there's a lot more under the surface.  I said to her, "Let's talk about the fact that here was this incredibly big moment in your life.  Getting a bicycle is a giant step in the progression to becoming BIG, so important to us when we are children.  This was one of the most important, happiest and proudest moments in your childhood.   Here you are absolutely celebrating this big moment and then suddenly it all turned horrible...the rug got pulled out from underneath you."

When I said the words, "the rug got pulled out from underneath you", she looked stunned.  "Oh, my God", she said.  "That is the repeating theme in my life.  Just when things seem to be going their very best, the rug gets pulled out from underneath me."

Of course they do!  When we have an experience this big and emotional in our childhood, it creates subconscious beliefs that color our world throughout our lifetime. In Science of Mind studies, we call these false beliefs.  My friend's belief is that whenever things are going really good, there is going to be a nasty and painful surprise.  The rug will be pulled out from underneath her.

The only way for her to stop reliving this moment in her life is for her to forgive it.  When she accomplishes the forgiveness, the horrible repeating pattern will stop and she will be able to accept happiness knowing that it will not be shockingly, abruptly and painfully taken from her.

Here are some other aspects of this experience which may have created additional false beliefs she can be working to forgive:

I get punished whenever I feel big and free and I fly.
People I love can harm me.
Love has strings attached. Other people love me conditionally.
I am a helpless victim.
I get in trouble even though I do nothing wrong.
I can't trust life.
This is not a safe world.

True forgiveness takes some deep thinking and self discovery.  That's why I like to call it a forgiveness lifestyle.  It sometimes takes months and even years to unravel the emotions, fears and blockages we have created in our minds because of the events in our past.  However, if we ask Spirit to help us receive understanding about our pasts, it will be given to us.  It often comes in fits and starts over a series of weeks and months, but maybe that's because we need the time to process what we are discovering.

Filmed at Lake Tahoe (where I live). 

It's true that forgiveness is a commitment.  However, the process can be fascinating (after all, what's more interesting than ourselves?)  It's also easier than you may think.  Now that my friend has begun to forgive this important event from her past, she'll be given more information and greater understanding about it.  It will become easier and easier for her to forgive each aspect of it.  Pretty soon, she will have released the whole thing.  The emotion of it will leave her body and she will be at peace whenever she remembers it.  This will allow her to open herself up to new possibilities in her life.  Perhaps she will decide to trust the world a little more and open up to new experiences and relationships in a larger way than she has in the past.

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We're the Ones That Feel Bad

When we don't forgive, we're only creating more suffering for ourselves.  Leaving negative emotions unresolved eats away at us.  It damages out bodies physically and it damages our minds.  When we allow grievances to accumulate in our mind, they block any chance we have of accessing our natural inner peace.

Do the words natural inner peace surprise you?  Yes, our natural state is inner peace.  However, from our earliest years, we start to harbor psychic wounds.  We allow the hurts to accumulate and clump together in our subconscious.  We start to believe ideas like these:

I am a bad person.
I am not smart.
I am not worthy.
Nobody likes me.
I am not love-able.
Life is unfair.
The world is cruel.
Bad things happen.

When we allow these ideas to take over, we suffer.

And the more we think thoughts like these, the more we draw events toward us that re-enforce these very ideas.  We work a theme.  Perhaps it's a belief in abandonment.  Maybe there was an incident as a very small child where we felt abandoned.  We may find that throughout our lifetime we re-experience those same feelings.  On a regular basis, events transpire in which we are "abandoned" yet one more time.

The only way to stop the cycle of hurt is to forgive and release the grievances.  We can start by working on the most recent experience of abandonment.  We can forgive the event and anyone involved in it.  That will go along way toward resolving this issue.  However, it is best to root it out fully.  We do this by searching our memories for the earliest time when we felt this emotion.  We sit with these feelings and experience them fully until they move through us.  We remember, contemplate, feel the feelings and release.

This takes time and it takes a commitment to look deep, be open to epiphanies, to keep studying ourselves, week after week and month after month.  Things will be revealed.  Aha moments will happen.  And as we understand more about what occurred in our past, as we forgive and release, we will begin the process of restoring that natural inner peace.  

We all have a choice.  We can continue to let fear run our daily lives, or we can do the work and forgive our world.  It takes a lot of inner work to create a forgiveness lifestyle and it unfolds slowly over the course of several years, if one is fully committed.  However, once we do this work, we live largely in peace.  Happiness is once again our ordinary state.

Ask yourself, are you really truly happy?  Or are you substituting a nice car, a good job, busy children and a comfortable house for true happiness.  Are you just telling yourself that this is what happiness is?  Because happiness is so much more than a busy comfortable life.  True happiness comes from a deep inner peace that only forgiveness can bring.

Forgiveness is a lot easier than you may think.  If you would like to forgive, but don't know how to start, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness" outlines many easy processes to help you learn to forgive.  Amazingly, forgiveness actually becomes pleasurable and something you will look forward to.  

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Don't Change the Subject

Unpleasant memories come upon us.  Sometimes it happens in our dreams.  We wake feeling troubled with past pain.  And sometimes something in our waking hours triggers a troubling thought and suddenly we're flooded with that same old aching wound. We've been here before...thousands of times.

The next time this happens, don't change the subject. These memories are returning to us over and over again because we are being given a chance to absolve them for once and for all.

Burn baby Burn. You can quickly burn through these memories and old hurts and once you do so, their pain will leave your mind permanently. They'll never again trigger intense emotional aching.

It's very simple to do.  Rather than chasing the painful thoughts from your mind, invite them in.  Let them become larger.  Intensify them.  Now move them into your heart area and ask for the heat.  Just watch now.  You'll actually start to feel the heat as the flames of your heart burn these memories to oblivion.  It doesn't take long, maybe ten or fifteen minutes.  Just keep digging up the memories and piling them onto the flames. Visualize the event in your past.  Remember as many details as you can.  Let yourself feel the pain you felt then, but feel it in your heart and let it burn up and leave you.  Find other similar memories if you have them and add them, too.  Get rid of the whole subject category in your mind!

Releasing old pain and forgiving the past is the pathway to happiness.  There are many forgiveness processes in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  Some are simple like this one and some go deep into our minds to help us identify, understand and work through complicated or intense emotional wounds.  One of the processes will work on whatever is troubling you.

Yes, forgiveness takes a little effort, but the rewards are boundless.  Happiness?  Inner peace?  Yes, please!

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Are you an eternal victim?

A friend sent an email this morning saying she had found this statement thought-provoking: 

"When you forgive someone, you make a promise to not hold the unchangeable past against your present self. 

Free yourself of the burden of being an eternal victim."

These are quoted from an article called, "10 Painfully Obvious Truths Everyone Forgets Too Soon." http://livelearnevolve.com/10-painfully-obvious-truths-everyone-forgets-too-soon/

When we are wrapped up in thoughts of victim-hood, reviewing over and over in our minds how we have been wronged and put upon, we are stuck.  We are stuck in fear, negative emotion, anger and hurt.  We are contracting.  There is just no way to go truly, happily and creatively forward when victim-hood is the pattern of our reality. 

As the quote above says, the past is unchangeable.  Why are we allowing it to rule our lives today?  What insanity possesses us to allow events that happened twenty years ago to create our worlds today?  

Forgive and release the past.  Let it go.  Flip the switch from fear to love and watch your life change.  All things are possible but only when we are expanding.  In contraction we cannot create anything of true value.  But, when we are in a state of love and acceptance,  we create happiness and inner peace in our world.  It's just that simple!

If you want to start forgiving your past but are not quite sure how to start, there are many easy forgiveness processes outlined in "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  

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Get started right now!  If you want to to try a simple 20 minute forgiveness process today, download "Forgive Your Past Now".  It's a guided audio that will allow you to forgive and release a painful memory from your past today.  It's easy and it works.  Why not start creating happiness in your life today?

Forgiveness Life Lessons

Each of us is working on certain assignments in this lifetime. You will probably find that your most painful past memories will be oriented toward certain themes.

As an example of how this works, let’s suppose you father died in a car crash during your childhood. If something like this has happened to you, then abandonment could be one of your big issues. Look at your lifetime and see how many times abandonment has been a major theme. 

If you believe that your father abandoned you, then your first wife may also abandon you. Later, your best friend may abandon you in some way. This theme could be repeating itself over and over throughout your life. 

The only way to end it is to deal with it for once and for all. Go deep and strike it out at the root with your forgiveness. Once you do that, you probably won’t have to deal with it again. If you find that you do, it means that your forgiveness hasn’t really gone deep enough. Keep probing to find what is buried down there that needs to see the light of your forgiveness.

Forgiving and clearing through big life themes like this is the way to take large strides toward creating inner peace. Of course every day forgiveness of daily events is important, too.  Forgiveness IS a lifestyle.  But probing deep into your past to discover the important life lessons that have become themes in your mind is essential work.  As you uncover and release these, you will begin to discover true happiness. 

Forgiveness is a lot easier than you may think. If you're not sure how to forgive, there are many easy processes explained in depth in my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness":  

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Painful Memories from the Past

Do you sometimes find your mind running through important moments from your past?  Do the same old unresolved issues pop up in your mind repeatedly?

When these memories come, give yourself a little emotional check-up.  Are you feeling calm and comfortable with what you're remembering or is there a tightness in your chest, an upset feeling in your stomach, an elevated heart rate or a shallowness of breath?

If you feel any physical symptoms associated with these memories, then it's probably time to forgive and release them.   After all, they are returning to you over and over again for just that purpose.  You're getting another chance to do your forgiveness work.  Perhaps you were too young the first time around and couldn't really process what was happening.  Perhaps you didn't know how to forgive then.  That's all perfectly okay, because you can take up now what you left off with then.

There is no time and space.  (This is not just a "spiritual" belief.  It is now scientifically proven thanks to Einstein's theory of relativity.)  What it means for your spiritual life, however, is that you can forgive anybody any time and any place and make things right.  You can forgive something from your past today.  It doesn't matter where the other person is now and it's perfectly fine if they are not even living.

You don't need to be with someone to forgive them.  In fact, it's not necessary that you even see them ever again.  Forgiveness is something that happens in the mind.    It is a mental shift in your thinking.  Because all minds are joined, when you shift your thinking now, you are offering healing to any other minds involved wherever and whenever they are (and you are allowing your own mind to begin its healing process, too.)  You don't have to apologize, take them to lunch, write them a letter or wash their feet.  You do, however, have to look at people and events from your past differently.  You have to flip the switch.  When we flip the switch we go from fear to love.

It's important to watch what the mind is bringing to our awareness.  Unresolved issues will be presented over and over again.  Sometimes they come as actual remembrances of the past.  However, when issues are left unforgiven, unaccepted and unreleased, those same issues will be given to us again as a real-life 3D event.  A similar situation to the original will show up in our lives, giving us one more chance to make a better decision and to forgive.

Just a word of warning here.  It's your choice whether to forgive or not.  But just know that each time you get the same lesson over again, it's probably going to be bigger, more in-your-face, more painful.  Unresolved issues don't go away, they fester in our sub-conscious minds and each time they come back, they are much more obvious.  It's best to face it now.

In fact, why not just feel grateful for the opportunity to clean up your mind on this issue right here and now.  It's a blessing. The memories are coming back to you as a brand new chance for you to get this right, finally.  The universe is offering you what you need most to grow and learn.  In the classroom of life, we are always being offered another chance.

Be vigilant in monitoring your mind, always looking for these gems.  They are the chance to see something from your past differently.  Forgiving, accepting and releasing old wounds from the past leads to inner peace.  It takes constant thoughtfulness.  This is what a forgiveness lifestyle is all about.  We must develop the habit of reviewing our thoughts each day to see what is coming up for healing, but it is so worth the effort.  Isn't inner peace worth it?

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This downloadable guided forgiveness process is a wonderful way to learn how to forgive people and events from your past: