If you want to learn how to fly, start flexing your wings…
Spending two months focusing on forgiveness is very instructive. I have learned a lot, especially about myself. In my previous mindset, forgiveness worked like a transaction. You do something, I forgive you; I do something, you forgive me. I realized that such thinking involves giving and getting, and implies that one person is a judge pardoning a wrongdoer. When you think like that, you don’t do much forgiving.
It is a worldview based on reaction to events that have occurred in the past. You must constantly protect yourself from people, places and things that remind you of past pain. You may attempt to shield yourself from pain, but re-experience it when you choose to remember past pain. Unwittingly, you close your heart and miss out on much of the present by focusing on the past. These are little bursts of focused reactions. Forgiveness counteracts this.
Forgiveness is not really a transaction between people. It is an internal process; a conscious letting go of your reactions to past experiences. Forgiveness requires that you shift your focus away from what going on “outside” to the landscape of your feelings “inside.” Do you really want to keep feeling like this? Part of you already knows that the other person, place or thing is not “making” you feel the way you do. So, you can choose to feel differently.
I know it seems almost impossible to accept some feelings and just let go. If you start there, you might get stuck. Start with just acknowledging your feelings and choose to love and accept yourself anyway. Then you can accept that some feelings are uncomfortable and difficult to release, and choose to love and accept yourself anyway. That “love and accept yourself anyway” part is key to accepting responsibility for your life experiences. Responsibility means developing the “ability to respond” to present circumstances rather then react to past pain and future fear. Guilt, on the other hand, is a very potent distraction from the present.
By allowing you to have more awareness and energy in the present moment, forgiveness can be an ongoing process. As you release memorized reactions, you can open up in response to each situation, each moment. You may say “I believe I can fly” but it’s never going to happen if your wings are constantly closed. Only by opening your wings again and again, can you strengthen them. So as experiences arise, you can practice relaxing and opening by exhaling. You may notice that you were previously closing yourself off by inhaling, tightening up your shoulders, your back or even your face. Treat your breath and body like your wings. If you want to learn how to fly, start flexing your wings.
