Those few words exactly describe the emotional blocking that takes place when there is no forgiveness. Our ability to dance—to move emotionally, to give, to love, to feel alive and free—gets stuck.
All the pain, grief, and hurt get held in this immovable place. We cannot move forward when a part of us is locked in the past.
All around us is the evidence of a lack of forgiveness: broken families, self-hate, guilt and shame leading to depression, huge amounts of anger, bitterness, and closed-heartedness. We learn to live by ignoring this dark place without realizing how deeply limiting it is, how it holds back our joy and laughter. We point the finger and see the other person as the cause of the suffering but we do not see how, by holding onto hurt feelings, we are simply creating more grief for ourselves.
Deb used to work with the elderly. As she recalls: “I worked in a nursing home where I saw numerous residents clinging to incidents from the past: words said in anger, distorted memories of how they had been wronged by children who had disagreed with them and left in anger. So much bitterness. They could not let go, even now, so near to dying. Over the years the hurt and anger had become solid, fixed, and immovable, as if they were surrounded by prison bars.”
How many times have you rerun the tape, gone over the details of who said what to whom, of how it all happened, of the injustice and blame or the guilt and shame? How many times have you done this, and did it ever help you feel healed, more joyful, or happier? How often do you have to repeat this before you see that all of it is going nowhere other than prolonging your unhappiness?
We are not trying to be simplistic. From a rational point of view, it can seem impossible to forgive: You are hurt and want revenge, it is the other person’s fault, so why should you forgive? But if we want to reach closure then we have to confront this desire to hold on to the story, for this simply causes further suffering. We are the ones feeling the pain, and the longer we hold on, the more suffering we cause ourselves.
To forgive includes fully acknowledging our feelings: how angry, upset, betrayed, bitter, or indignant we are; how unfair life is; how let down and sad we feel, and that it is absolutely okay to be this way. We know and feel the pain, but the desire to no longer continue the suffering is stronger; we care enough about ourselves to not want to carry the anger or sadness any longer.