The Wonderful Blog Which You ve Never Seen

The concept of forgiveness is one that transcends religion. Every culture in the world has words of wisdom concerning the forgiveness of others. One Chinese proverb reads, “A man who seeks revenge should dig two graves.”

I suspect this has to do with the fact that we recognize the important role co-operation with others plays in our survival and how holding a grudge can be detrimental to our quality of life. For example, you are angry with your co-worker and you react by having a soap opera drama face off with them in the employee break room. Not only has your work environment become strained but say that co-worker gets promoted to higher position and becomes your boss. Your anger has just possibly cost you your job.

But forgotten among all the encouragement and admonitions were the instructions on how to forgive someone. It’s like being given the secret code to a vault full of treasure but no clue as to how to input it. I’ve searched far and wide on the webernet to bring you a few possible combinations that may help open the door to a better life:

1. Acknowledge how you feel. We have been raised in a society that wants people, especially men, to repress their pain and anger. This is extremely unhealthy and only makes things worse. Talk to a trained therapist or a trusted friend about how the situation made you feel. Sometimes all we really need is to vent.

2. Realize that the other person is human and subject to making mistakes. No one is perfect. Repeat. No one is perfect. People can only do the best they can given the circumstances they find themselves in. This by no means is an excuse for poor behavior but realizing that sometimes people trip and fall despite their best efforts will go a long way towards helping you forgive them when they do.

3. Understand that a good portion of humans suffer from Cluelessness. Thus they are unaware of what effect their behavior had on you. Your girlfriend may not know that snapping her gum is intensely annoying because no one, including you, has ever told her. Again this is not an excuse but understanding that sometimes people behave poorly simply because they don’t know any better will help you deal with them.

4. Understand that you don’t know the whole story. In ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’, Stephen Covey describes a situation where he was on public transportation and one of the passengers, a man, was letting his children run wild. Finally, Covey spoke up. The man apologized saying that he was a little off center because his wife had just died. Though we like to think we are the center of the universe, people have other things going on in their lives besides their interactions with us and sometimes our negative experiences with someone is just our misfortune of being sucked into the aftermath.

5. Put it in perspective. Sometimes we make a huge deal out of a little thing. Is it really worth it?

6. Become aware of your thoughts and try to neutralize counterproductive ones. Despite understanding the previous tips we still feel anger or have thoughts of revenge. When that happens try to refocus that energy into something else such as a hobby or a random act of kindness to a stranger. What you are trying to do is make something positive come from something negative which in the end will make you feel good.

7. Understand that forgiving someone is a purely selfish act and that if they benefit from your forgiving them at all, it is purely coincidental. You are not giving power to those that hurt you, you are taking it away.

The inability to forgive often stems from a feeling of powerlessness and the need to punish those that have hurt us. The victim sits and stews over the injustice done to them as if that will do anything to affect the perpetrator. In reality, the person who hurt you may have moved on with their life or they may not even know that they hurt you. Which means that the only person you are affecting by not forgiving is yourself.

Forgiving someone is not the same as forgetting what they have done. You need to take from the incident the lessons that need to be learned. If a friend steals from you, you should understand and forgive their weakness, however, you should then learn to keep your valuables in a safe place.

Like all worthwhile things in life, learning to forgive takes awareness, effort and patience. But the more you do it, the easier it becomes and the lighter your burdens will be. See for yourself, forgive someone today.

Indigo Black is the founder of The Towne of Blogilepsy, the community for bloggers where they learn the fine art of caring for a blog and connect with like minded adults. She also the administrator of SmutWriter, the place for erotica authors to go to share, and find markets for, their work.

Come to Towne and pick up your free PageRank Graphic.

Tags: forgiveness, healing, self improvementforgiveness, healing, self improvement

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Having an outstanding memory is generally considered to be a great gift and a talent we should all work hard to develop. Brain researchers believe that we never actually forget anything, and that everything we encounter in our lives is retained, even if it doesn’t register with us consciously. It’s not our memories that are less than perfect, but our ability to recall the stored information.

Some people just seem to be able to recall anything on demand. Other people - me included - sometimes ‘forget’ important things, but seem to be able to recall the most irrelevant facts about TV shows, films, songs, bands, books and other trivia, often dating from childhood, at will.

Unless you are one of those lucky people who never seem to ‘forget’ anything, you would probably like to improve your recall. One of the most simple and effective things you can do is to never say ‘my memory is terrible’ or ‘I can’t remember’ or ‘It’s gone’ because that’s just like telling your subconscious mind not to bother looking for the answer. Instead, try saying ‘it will come to me in a minute’ and if you believe it will and confidently expect it to, it almost certainly will, often when you least expect in and are otherwise occupied. This has probably happened to you before, and with practice, you’ll be amazed at how effective this simple technique can be.

However, this week I’m not actually talking about how to improve your memory, in fact almost the opposite.

There are times that it’s much better to be able to quickly forget.

Do you realise, how good we are at quickly forgetting (or removing thoughts and feelings from our conscious minds) can have a direct impact on our ability to perform at our best? It can also affect our mental and physical health.

I’m not talking about being able to forget things we read, see, learn, or important facts encounter during our business or personal lives. I’m talking about how easily we can recover and forget the negative affects we all inevitably suffer from setbacks, letdowns and disappointments.

Some people can carry negative feelings towards another person because of some incident or other, for incredible lengths of time. Trivial incidents can build to unbelievable proportions. Mountains can certainly be made out of molehills. Close friends and members of the same family can become enemies. There are people who spend so much time thinking about how much they dislike someone that it becomes a major part of their life. They often even forget the original incident but the feelings remain.

The other person may not even be aware of the extreme feeling directed towards them. The sad fact is, in these cases, it’s the person carrying the negative feelings that suffers. They can even make themselves sick in any number of ways, and they’ll probably hold the other person responsible.

I like to think, or at least hope, that these scenarios are the exception rather than the rule. But it’s worth thinking about how quickly we recover from things, and to try to increase these abilities

Are you still upset about a minor incident or disagreement with your partner, a friend or a work colleague, hours, or even days, after the event? Do you replay the incident over and over in your head and can’t forget about it?

Many people are even harsher on themselves. It’s possible to spend so much time mentally beating ourselves up over something, that it totally prevents us from moving forward.

Obviously it depends on how serious the incident is, or how serious we consider it to be. Sometimes we just have to try to be more tolerant and less demanding. But there’s no doubt that replaying and rehashing negative events and feelings is destructive and pointless and will do us no good at all.

Think about it, if you went to a movie and didn’t enjoy it at all, would you keep going back to see it over and over? Yet this is exactly what we can all too easily do in our minds.

Sometimes we may not be able to totally forget, but at the very least we do need to be able to forgive and move on, whether it’s someone else or ourselves. I know this can be easier said than done and that pride and all sorts of other emotions can be involved. Sometimes a frank conversation or complete break may be the only solution.

There are no set rules, except that taking some action is infinitely preferable to just letting things fester and doing nothing! Otherwise we can waste vast amounts of time and energy, or set ourselves up for future regrets.

‘Life’s too short’ may be a tired old clich

Tags: forgiveness, personal development, regrets, self growth, self improvementforgiveness, personal development, regrets, self growth, self improvement

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Many people I work with in therapy or in my writing-as-healing classes discover stories that surprise themstories about the mistakes they felt their parents made, power imbalances in the family, or stories about physical or sexual abuse. The darker stories are often a surprise: when writers sat down to write, those issues were not directly on their minds, but deep, revealing stories erupted from the pen. Though they were unexpected, for some they were a relief. People who have been in therapy have had the same kind of experiencethe subject matter in the forefront of the mind is not the material that “accidentally” arises during the session. The therapy session begins with a particular subject in the presentfor example dissatisfaction at work or trouble in a relationship, but often travels back in time with associations to parents, school, or past relationships.

It has become a clich

Tags: families, forgiveness, healing, life story, memoirs, mother abandonment, self improvementfamilies, forgiveness, healing, life story, memoirs, mother abandonment, self improvement

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