Who Are You Harming?

One who loves himself would never harm another. --Buddha

When we withhold forgiveness, we are harming others.

After all, if we carry grievances, they are based on judgments we make about others.   We are judging others to be "bad", or "mean", or "selfish", or "evil" or "wrong", or something similar.

Judgmental thoughts are attack thoughts.

Of course, we turn our "attacks" around in our heads.  We justify them.  We like to make ourselves out to be "right", "good" or "innocent".  We tell ourselves that we are the victim!  This is how we give ourselves permission to stay in a state of judgement.  "Go ahead and hold that grudge", we tell ourselves.  "We're the innocent victims here.  They are the evil perpetrator."

The issue is not who did what to whom.  It is, "Who are we all really, when we get deep down to the ultimate truth?"  We are all the same.  We are all Sons of God.  Each of us was created in the image of God. We are pure love.  And we are all One in our true home where we reside in the Mind of God.

When we see our very own personal truth, that we are really only love, we can begin to know our true value.  As we learn to value ourselves in our minds, we begin to love ourselves.  And it is only as we learn to love ourselves that we become capable of extending that love to others.  We can finally exchange our habit of judging, attacking and blaming others with the ability to look at everything that occurs with acceptance and love.

It's not that we condone behavior that upsets or wounds us, but we look beyond the earthly actions to the deeper truth.  Our trespasser is really only the same as us.  We are love and he is love, too.  And in this knowing comes acceptance and forgiveness.  When we forgive, we drop our attack thoughts and when we do so we are no longer harming our trespasser by holding them in a low place in our minds.

Importantly, as we release our trespasser we are also releasing ourselves from our own separation from love.  Returning to love is how we create inner peace in our lives.   

How to Forgive a Bully

Last night in my A Course in Miracles study group, a friend mentioned to me that one of her friends is currently reading my book, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  She is only partly though it, but she is coming to understand how important forgiveness is.  However, as many of us do, she has something big in her past that needs to be forgiven, and the idea of letting it go not only confuses but upsets her.  She was raped.  She said to my friend, "Why do I have to forgive someone who RAPED me??!!"

In addition, I've been thinking a lot lately about people around the world who are right now dealing with powerful bullies, dictators and political enemies that need to be forgiven.

I admit that this is a difficult kind of forgiveness.  It takes a little more soul searching and growth to forgive on this level than just forgiving the guy that stole your parking spot at the grocery store.

What's a bully, really?  Bullies are people who experience a great deal more fear than you and I do.  That's why they act out in ways that we would never ever consider.

Remember that everything that any of us do here is either an act of love or it is a call out for love.  That's it.  In every moment, we are either in a state of love or in a state of fear.

Where most of us drift back and forth between love and fear throughout each day, bullies have indulged their fearful sides.  More, or practically all, of their daily thoughts (both consciously and sub-consciously) relate to fear.  As they allow their fear to grow, their behavior becomes more and more aggressive.  The fear is the cause and their aggressive behavior is the effect.

Whenever we act out our fear, we create guilt in our minds (again this can be conscious or sub-conscious).  This means that the more a bully behaves like a bully, the more their guilt increases, which in turn, leads to even more fear.  After all, if we believe we are guilty, we also believe we should be punished.  The increased fear leads to ever more vicious and harmful behavior patterns.

A bully can be someone you know whom is merely unpleasant to be around, but he can also be threatening, combative or violent.  He/she can be a dictator, a rapist, a spouse batterer or even a verbal abuser.

Before you begin to approach forgiving a bully, it helps to do a little self-introspection.  Even though you may spend a great deal more of your time in love thinking than the bully you are forgiving, it's important to remember that we all have many fear thoughts each and every day.  When we judge a bully for indulging in fear, aren't we really judging him for something we often do ourselves?

Think back and review your life.  Haven't there been moments when you yourself behaved as a bully, even just a little tiny bit?  Did you ever bully your little brother or sister?  Were you ever part of a "popular" crowd in school that excluded or made fun of less popular kids?  Have you ever bossed your spouse around?  Your children?  Your employees?  Are you ever just the teensy-est little bit bossy?  Do you like to get your way?  Have you ever behaved selfishly?

The scale of your actions may be much smaller, but again, bully thinking is bully thinking.  When you are thinking and acting as a bully, you are out of alignment with love.

We all have things in our past we're not proud of.  Looking back we might see that at the time that we were behaving badly, we had our rationalizations.  We did what we thought was in our best interest at the time.  Yes, our little mis-behaviors are nothing compared to rape in terms of their effects.  But at the causal level they are the same.  They come from fear based thought.  And all fear based thought is the same.  It is simply non-loving.

One more thing you might try before you attempt to forgive a bully is empathy.  It's actually extremely sad that your bully feels so very alone and afraid that he believes his only option is to behave this way.  What caused all that fear?  What was his childhood like?  He must have experienced terrible rejection.  On a deep down level he must believe in his worthlessness or he wouldn't be so desperately trying to prove his value to himself through abusive acts.  Take a moment and think about his pain.  Think about how he suffers each day from fear, loneliness, guilt and self-hatred.

You certainly don't have to condone his actions, but can you find a little love somewhere in your heart to offer this poor tortured creature?  Just the smallest scrap of sympathy?  This is very important because when you are able to see another side of this situation you are taking your first step toward flipping the switch in your mind from fear to love.  You are releasing your own fear, and as you do this, you release your own guilt and pain.  This is how you find your peace.




If you feel you need help forgiving a bully I have three guided meditations that will teach you a process for forgiveness.  To forgive a bully that is harming you in your present, try Forgive Someone NOW.  To forgive someone from your past try Forgive Your Past NOW.

Sometimes We Dread Forgiving Certain People

Forgiveness is actually very easy, once you get the hang of it.  However, forgiveness does take getting past one hurdle and that is letting go of the pleasure we feel in our victim-hood.  Does that idea surprise you?  Well, it's true that we enjoy being victims and the evidence of that is simply that we choose to be victims.  We stubbornly hang on to our victim-hood.  We love to savor our anger and outrage.  We love to get into our pain and we love to feel put upon and abused.  Our hurt feeds the fire of our indignation.

It can sometimes be a big step to let all that go.

But like any big step, if you want to make progress, you just have to do it.

Remember what it was like, learning to put your head underwater for the first time?  You just held your nose and dunked.  You just did it, even though you may not have known what it would be like.  You just trusted that it would be good.

Sometimes, when we are thinking about forgiving someone that we believe is particularly heinous, the idea of forgiving feels very distasteful.  Now that I am in the habit of forgiving everything, I don't feel that way anymore, but I do clearly remember how unpleasant it once was to offer forgiveness to the few people in my life that I believed were villainous.  I don't know why we sometimes resist forgiving so strongly.  Maybe we just want to hang onto our feelings of superiority.  "He's a horrible person and that makes me a good person."  Perhaps that kind of thinking just makes us feel better.  It's hard to give it up.

My best advice, if you're feeling that way, is to just do it.  Just hold your nose and dive into the forgiveness.  It will be over before you know it and you'll feel totally different about it afterward. You just will.  Forgiveness makes everything better.

In my meditation class today, we did a simple meditation from the book "Aging as a Spiritual Practice" by Lewis Richmond.  I'd like to share it with you, because I think it might be a good little exercise to ease into forgiveness, especially if you have some unpleasant people that you're feeling reluctant to forgive.  Here it is:

Find a quiet place and spend a few minutes calming your mind and listening to your breath.  When you are ready, imagine a small intense orb of white light in your heart center.  "On each in-breath feel the breath coming in from the world and refreshing the sphere of light.  On each out-breath, feel the breath going back out into the world with that light's generous energy."  Continue with this for a minute or two, feeling the flow of white light out into the world around you, healing, cleansing, offering love. 

Now, imagine that there is a mirror image of yourself sitting opposite you.  Let the cleansed out-breaths of white light surround and permeate the image of yourself.  Then as you breathe in, imagine that all the troubles, problems, pains and emotional hurts float out from the image of yourself and into your real self, down into the white light in your heart center where they can be cleansed and consumed in the light.  You are purifying and healing all the troubles away. Then breath pure white loving light out and into the image of yourself.  Let your breath circle generosity to and from yourself.  Continue on with this for a short time until you feel that all the problems and pains have been transformed. 

Next, imagine that there is someone you love sitting opposite you and continue the healing and loving breathing with them until they are cleansed (this should happen in five or six breaths or so).  Then switch to another person you love. Do this for three or four people. 

Now...here comes the good part, and it should be fairly easy to do because you are now in a very loving place.  Switch the person sitting opposite you into someone you need to forgive.  Continue to breathe out the loving white light, flooding their image with kindness and healing.  Then breathe in all their pain and difficulties to your heart center where the white light can transform them into pure loving energy.  Do this until you feel you have cleansed and healed them.   

This is another good example of the action of "flipping the switch" in our minds from fear to love.  At first it can seems almost inconceivable that we could look on someone that we loathe with love.  However, once we teach our minds how to do it, it becomes very easy.  In some ways the mind is very trainable.

So if you're feeling fear, reluctance or righteousness about forgiving someone unpleasant in your life, take the plunge.  Have a forgiveness baptism.  The water's fine!

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How to Handle Big Betrayals

I have a number of people coming to my site from the Ukraine, Romania and Russia in the past few weeks.  I am re-posting this discussion on betrayal for you.....



Once you get a forgiveness lifestyle happening, most of your forgiveness work will be fairly easy.  Lately I've been discussing the concept of "flipping the switch" from judgement to acceptance or fear to love.  This is a fairly easy process and once you understand it and have worked with it for awhile you'll find that you can forgive most of life's little annoyances and wounds in a minute or so of correct thinking.

However, there are other kinds of forgiveness needs in our lives and some are more challenging than this.  One is for big betrayals.  Not all of us have experienced a core-shattering betrayal, but if you have, you'll know how deeply painful this can be.  

My own experience with forgiving big betrayals has shown me that they require a lot of forgiveness work, often over an ongoing period of time.  Also, I've found that some deep betrayals need to be forgiven from a number of different angles and using a number of different processes.

Let's deal with the ongoing aspect of forgiving big betrayals first.  When we are deeply and utterly betrayed to our cores, there is so much hurt that it sometimes releases slowly.  In forgiving big betrayals, I found that I would forgive only to find that just a few days later, painful memories were running through my mind all over again. Much of the hurt, anger and other painful emotions had returned in almost full force.   

When this happens, there is nothing you can do, but forgive the whole mess all over again to the best of your ability.  Sometimes this means that you are forgiving the same event over and over again for weeks, months or even years.  It's important not to feel alarmed or overwhelmed by this.  Settle in to the fact that some of the biggest traumas of our lives take some time and effort to work through.  As we forgive, accept and release the pain, over time we will find that our forgiveness load lightens considerably every time we work with it and that eventually, the traumatic painful emotions lift completely away, never to return.  Have patience and keep chipping away at it.  You will come to the other side of it.

It's complicated!

One thing I've found is that there are often a number of different emotional aspects surrounding a big betrayal.  In other words, it's complicated.  As we forgive one part of it, other aspects come to the surface of our minds.  As each aspect comes into our awareness, we need to forgive that part of the betrayal.  We might find that we are forgiving one big betrayal, but that this event had repercussions that affected a myriad of aspects in our lives.  The trusting way we formerly looked at the world may have changed.  The betrayal may have forced significant changes into our daily lifestyles, perhaps financial, or we may even have had to move houses or change jobs.  If we have children, they may be affected.  Perhaps our betrayer was someone we spent a great deal of time with, and now we are mourning the loss of a best friend or spouse.  Our confidence levels may have changed and our sense of overall fear may be increased.  Perhaps this event tied into earlier memories of betrayal in our past that need to be dug up from the interior of our minds and processed.  

Understanding and forgiving all this needs contemplative time.  Think of this betrayal as a big knotted ball of yarn in our sub-consciousness.  We need to unravel every thread and release it individually until eventually, there is nothing left. 

A great starting place for forgiving a big betrayal is with Colin Tipping's Radical Forgiveness forms. (available for free at www.colintipping.com under "free stuff")  They really force you to do some deep thinking about how the betrayal has affected you.  If you are really deeply hurt, be prepared to do quite a few forms.  Try to tackle a form every day or so for awhile until you feel that the forgiveness is taking effect.  Every time you become aware of a new aspect of the betrayal that needs to be forgiven, write it down on an ongoing forgiveness "to do" list.   This way, you'll know the direction your forgiveness will take each day.  

I also like using a number of other forgiveness processes on something big like this.  There are several great ones outlined in my book "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness", particularly "Feel the Feelings".  Also, my "Forgive Your Past NOW" audio meditation can be of significant help in breaking through a lot of the pain and hurt in one quick blow.  

Just remember that forgiveness is a lifestyle.  It is something we do everyday.  We are all given forgiveness assignments in this lifetime. Everyone of us has bruises, bumps and deep wounds to forgive.  It is as we forgive, accept and release that the true meaning of love begins to flow into our lives.  It starts off slowly at first, but as our forgiveness lifestyle grows, our understanding of the true meaning of love does, too.  And when this happens, we begin to know the deep inner peace that is our divine inheritance.  It's always ours to receive, but forgiveness is the way that we convince ourselves that we are worthy of accepting it.  

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Audio download with the "feel the feelings" forgivness process:

It is Only Our Own Thoughts That Hurt Us

In "Out of Darkness Into the Light", Gerald Jampolsky lists this as one of his favorite principles from A Course in Miracles:

"It is only our own thoughts that hurt us.  It is only our own minds that need to be healed.  We are not victims of the world that we see."

We choose the contents of our minds.  We never HAVE to be a victim.  We can always elect to see the world differently.  We can simmer in anger and hurt or we can let it go and create peace in our minds.  As the Course says, we are always choosing between love and fear.  There is no grey in between.

If you are toying with the idea of letting it go, but like so many of us, simply don't know where to begin, "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness" walks you through beginning forgiveness practices and step by step teaches you how to forgive in every area of your life. It is soooooooooo much easier than you may think!  Why not trade in fear, anger, hurt, rage, sadness and upset for inner peace?  It is absolutely doable.  What in your entire world could possibly be more important than your own happiness?

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Does Victimhood Feel Good?

It must.  After all, we so often choose it.  We choose victimhood over peace and we make that same choice repeatedly throughout our lives.

When events transpire to leave us feeling like victims, we relish and cherish those feelings.  We fan the flames of our emotions, firing up the feelings of betrayal, hurt, and pain.  Our minds run amok with thoughts like "I can't believe he did that to me.  He is such a jerk.  I didn't deserve that!  Why would he do that to me?  I am always so good to him and then he turns around and does this to me!"

Or perhaps we simply run through the moment of betrayal and hurt repeatedly in our minds reliving the hurt.  We indulge in these thoughts.  Each time we experience it again in our minds it gets bigger and bigger, always more horrible, more hurtful, more painful.

Or maybe we harbor fantasies of revenge. Like the day we show up having lost twenty pounds and looking amazing.  That will make him regret what he did.  Or maybe we fantasize about hurting him just as badly as he hurt us and making him pay for what he did.  Or maybe we hatch elaborate plans about how we could take back whatever it is he took from us.

Sometimes we choose to stay in victim thoughts for years at a time.  Most of us have certain events in our past that are still defining us as victims, even though twenty or thirty years may have passed.  We are allowing our belief in victimhood to run our minds.  And when something runs our minds, it runs our lives.

Does this feel good?  In some twisted way, it does.  We cherish these feelings.  If we didn't, we would let them go. Or perhaps we simply don't know that there is another pathway available to us.

The truth is that at any moment in time we can stop being victims.  Our victimhood requires our continued belief that we have been wronged or harmed in some way.  We need to buy into the game in order to be victims. However, if we choose forgiveness, we are no longer victims.  We can be free of  the pain.  We can heal the wounds.  The contents of our mind is something that we have total and utter control of.  We can choose what we allow to exist in our minds.

Perhaps victimhood feels good.  However, wouldn't freedom feel better?  Wouldn't peace feel better?  Wouldn't living in love be vastly better than this experience of fear we are creating in our lives?  After all, choosing to be a victim is to choose fear over love.

Take a few moments and examine where in your mind you are allowing victimhood to rule. Is this really the choice you wish to make?  If not, forgiveness is the pathway to peace in your mind.  If you're not sure how to forgive, there are many easy processes outlined in "Forgiveness is the Key to Happiness".  One of them will be the perfect way for you to let go and release victimhood permanently from your mind.

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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?