Forgiveness For Spiritual Growth

What is Forgiveness?

Forgiveness is when we release someone from the hurt and pain, they have caused us.

Look at it this way, you had something happen to you. In that moment you experienced emotions and trauma. Forgiveness is releasing those emotions that you are still holding on to you. Plus the emotions that you hold towards the person who caused the pain – which continues to build each day you don’t forgive.

What Forgiveness is Not

• Because you forgive someone does not mean that you approve or accept what they did as being right or okay. It means you release them from doing something that hurts you. You do not give it a stamp of approval by forgiving someone.
• You do not have to tell a person that you have forgiven them. Heck, many times the other person does not even know how much they have hurt you. Instead remember that forgiveness is about you. You can forgive them, and they don’t have to know. Absolutely no reason to reach out to your ex, if you don’t want to! 😁
• You do not have to keep them in your life. If you forgive them, you don’t have to let them be a part of your life.  Because you forgive them does not mean you go back into the situation. That means you are not learning what you need to! Learn, forgive and move on.

Benefits of Forgiveness

Anger isn’t good for you. It causes physical problems. The increased stress and elevated physical state can trigger many health issues. By forgiving you are improving your health and longevity.

Plus, you will experience many non-physical benefits such as:

Inner Peace & Self-love

Because of the work that forgiveness requires, you move closer to a space where you are more at ease with yourself and others. When you remove the negative emotions and heal what has hurt you, you will have a sense of calm that you can’t otherwise reach.

Personal Growth

Part of forgiveness requires you to understand your part in the situation. This will allow you to understand your own areas that need healed, so it doesn’t happen again. Allowing you to continue to evolve and grow.

For example, one of my biggest issues in relationships was lack of boundaries. Once I was able to identify that as part of the situation, I was then able to work on it. Now in relationships I can make different decisions that won’t trigger the same problems.

Do you always have a role in it? No. Especially if it was a random situation like a car accident. But I would encourage you to dig in and understand your role if it is forgiveness related to a relationship. This will help you move out of victim mentality.

Increased Empathy and Compassion

While you might not condone the situation, the process of forgiveness allows you to have more sympathy and understanding for other people. Especially when you approach forgiveness from a spiritual perspective.

Decreased Victim Mentality

When you forgive someone, you give up the role of being the victim. This allows you to take power back in your life. Life does not happen to you; you lead and learn lessons along the way.

Increased Spirituality

We all come here for different reasons and purposes. As you learn through each life event and open to the idea that you get what you need. It will bring you more spirituality. And it will also bring you closer to your true self. Allowing you to fulfill your purpose here.

Forgiveness Activities for Adults

Everyone’s path to forgiveness will be different. What works for me may not work for you. (This is true in all personal and spiritual growth.) With this in mind, below are some tools and exercises to help you forgive.  Experiment with them to see what is best for you.

I do recommend you also try them in combination together. Often healing comes in looking at things many ways. For example, you might pair journaling with meditation and get more out of it.

If you find none of these are working for you, then start to explore other options. These are simply a starting point. Trust your journey.

Journaling

Journaling is a great tool to help you understand the entire situation. It is my favorite tool for any emotional healing work that I do. Journaling allows you to explore and gain powerful insights about what you are working on.

If you are new to journaling, check out this article on How to Journal for Beginners.

Journal Prompts for Forgiveness

Use the following journal prompts to help you begin to understand what you want to forgive.

• Write out the story of what happened. Be as detailed as possible. If it is made up of many different situations, such as many issues leading to divorce, pick one that is smaller. This way you can work up to healing the big problems.
• List your feelings – start by making a list of everything you feel related to this. If you struggle to name feelings, you can use a feelings wheel to help you get started. If that still doesn’t work, allow yourself to sit and feel the energy in your body. Acknowledging how something makes you physically feel will help this too.
• What was my role in this? Try and be as honest with yourself as possible. Is there a habit or trait you have that needs to be healed to prevent this from happening again. For example, setting better boundaries or asking for what you need.
• What have you learned from this experience? There is some good within the bad. What you take away from it can be helpful in helping you move past it. For example, maybe you learned how to trust your intuition or how to believe in yourself more.
• What does forgiveness mean to you? What forgiveness looks like and means to you may be very different than what it does to me. If you are stuck in making progress on forgiveness it may be helpful to first understand what it means to you. It could be that what you are expecting is completely different than what you are working on.

Therapy

Some past emotional wounds need extra support. Hiring a counselor is a great way to make progress faster. And when paired with other tools, it can drastically cut down on your time needed.

For example, between sessions with my therapist I would journal. As I uncovered things in my journaling, I would make a list of the ones I wanted to explore more with the counselor. Our sessions were more focused and productive because I worked them together!

Radical Forgiveness

This is a book by Collin Tipping. This is a book that is geared towards the spiritual side of forgiveness.

It is based on the idea that we all come here to learn different lessons. While here events are coordinated by a higher source that allows you to learn. Forgiveness is then based on the idea that the person who hurt you was helping you.

I know this is a very different idea, and one that can be hard to get your mind around. But I encourage you to read the book, or at the very least try some of his worksheets.  

His step-by-step worksheets have been very helpful for me when I am stuck on forgiving. Even when I was convinced nothing could get me passed my emotional block, the ideas in this book helped. And it was one of the start points of my spiritual journey.

Radical Forgiveness by Collin Tipping 

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT or Tapping)

EFT is a tool that uses your meridian points from acupuncture to help you change beliefs, forgive and even uncover feelings.

This is a great one to use in combination with journaling. After you journal, you can use tapping to help move you through the emotions of a situation or why it may have occurred.

For example, if you learned that you sabotaged a relationship because you did not believe you were worthy of love.  Then you can tap on your being worthy.

When I first started healing myself there were tons of things I needed to process and change. I kept an ongoing list from my journaling that needed to be tapped on. This way nothing was forgotten, and I did not have to do hours of tapping at one time!

Check out this article to learn more about Tapping.

Meditation

Meditation for forgiveness can help you in a few ways. First, meditation is calming and helps your mind focus. This will allow everything else you do for forgiveness to be more effective.

Beyond regular meditation there are also some meditation practices that are designed to help you forgive. Two of the most popular ones are below. You can find these as guided meditations on YouTube or other mediation platforms.

Ho’oponopono

Loving Kindness Mediation

The Four Agreements – Don’t Take Things Personally

The Four Agreements is another great book to help you work through forgiveness. While it isn’t a forgiveness book, it does help you to better manage relationships on many levels. And I have found it very helpful in forgiveness work.

Especially the agreement – don’t take things personally. In fact, I would say it is one of the most critical parts in forgiveness.

Short version, when something is done to you, it has nothing to do with you. It is the other person. When you hold on to that as an attack against you then you are taking it personally.

For example, if someone says your hair is ugly, it is their opinion and has nothing to do with you.  

A more complicated example may be that a loved one verbally attacks you. They tell you that you are ungrateful. This is their opinion, and you should not take it personally. They could have recently had a lot of people not say Thank You. It could be they had a really bad day. Maybe the thank you note got lost in the mail.  None of it had to do with you.

When you look at forgiveness from the perspective of not taking it personally then you can release the idea that they are attacking you. What they did had nothing to do with you. It was all their issue.

I know this is another hard concept to process. Yet once you get how exactly true it is in all situations it will permanently change how you look at everything. 

If you need more help working through this book, checkout my book study on it.

Prayer

When you are struggling to make any progress on forgiveness you can turn it over to your higher source. Sometimes you need to accept that no matter how hard you work on forgiveness, you will need help.

You need to release control and let others step in to help you. Ask for help, in whatever form that comes easiest for you.

Forgiveness Tips

Just a few tips to help you along the way and hopefully motivate you to keep going!

Give it Time

Not at all what you want to hear, but sometimes it just takes time. The more damaging the hurt the longer it will take.  You can reduce the time by using the tools above, but you also need to give yourself space to feel the pain. Expecting to instantly forgive someone is not practical.

Don’t pressure yourself to do it “right” or quickly. You will heal in the right amount of time for you. Trust it.

Not a Direct Path

You will make some progress, and then regress a bit. That is completely natural. Don’t think of it as a one-way road. You may have to circle back and re-do a part. But each time you do, you know the path and move forward faster.

It is Worth the Effort

Forgiveness is not always easy, but it is always worth the effort.  When you have finally worked through it the peace you gain is worth the work.

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