Last night I attended a workshop on forgiveness, both on forgiving others and forgiving oneself. And something that the holder of the circle said really stuck with me, and though I don’t remember it word by word, it went something like this.

“By forgiving someone else, it doesn’t mean that we are accepting the action they did to us, it doesn’t mean that what they did was ok. We forgive others for our own sake, to be able to let go of the anger, frustration, sadness and other feelings that are attached to this situation and person”.

I really resonate with this. I’ve myself before thought about how it works out. If we forgive someone who’s hurt is maybe by lying and spreading lies, just because we forgive this person for doing that, doesn’t mean we all of a sudden accept lying and spreading lies. And this goes for everything I’d say, big and small.

But then I also know that some things are a lot more harder to forgive. And we all have our own ways we have to deal with things, and that’s ok, not all of us have to choose forgiveness as our way to work through things. I wish I could take credit for these words, but they are actually a rephrasing from Thordis Elva, in her insta stores maybe a week ago. She’s a badass woman, author of the book “South of Forgiveness”, so she does have an interesting story herself with forgiveness. (I’ve only made it about 25% through the audio book yet, but I am totally recommending!).

So while forgiveness can be complicated and difficult, it doesn’t have to be. Yesterday’s circle was beautiful. I did come to a place of gratitude and grounded feeling after the guided visualisation. And forgiveness is an ongoing process, something to work with, and I am totally in for working more with this in myself. I’m a person who sometimes holds on to things for a looong time, and that is partly also because and contributing to me being hard on myself. So working especially on self forgiveness will do me good.

When was the last time you forgave yourself/another person? And really forgave and let all the attached emotions go?

-Petra